The Czech gypsies by Ivan Sever

The Czech gypsies by Ivan Sever (Feb 1999)

There is a joke making the rounds in contemporary Czech Republic. "Q: What's ultimate bad luck? A: When a hitchhiking band of gypsies gets picked up by a busload of skinheads."

Say it to an average American, this 'joke' will not seem particularly funny. But to the people of Eastern Europe the joke captures the essence of the so called "Roma question," a problem they have been grappling with for some time. To the Romany people (as the Gypsies prefer to be called) this 'joke' succinctly expresses their fatalistic existence in an impoverished, hostile environment that inevitably leads to violent confrontations. The right wing skinheads on the other hand are tolerated by the new-found democracy, as they openly express the racism, hatred and violence felt by many non-gypsies. And for the majority of Czechs, the joke accurately conveys their mixed feelings ranging from indifference and non-involvement, to a smug satisfaction with the hostility of the skinheads towards these undesirable outsiders.

Publicly, the majority of Czechs (43%) in a recent poll said they condemned racism. But the second largest group (36%) said they didn't really care. (6% answered they actively supported racism, with only 3% actively opposing it.) At first glance, attitudes like these in a nation that was itself oppressed and persecuted for centuries are hard to understand. But if you think about it, turning against people who are worse off than you are begins to make sense.

Following the Nazis' systematic annihilation of the Romanies during WWII, the forced assimilation of the remaining Romany population by the Communists created new problems. For instance when the Czechoslovak government outlawed 'migratory lifestyle' in 1958, it quickly found it needed to provide the Romanies with free housing in a very tight real estate market. Naturally, both Romanies and the "gadje" (non-gypsies) resented these handouts, each group for for its own reasons. Instead of acceptance, the results were confrontations and outbursts of violence from both sides. This and other similar heavy-handed policies ended up only deepening the cultural, economic, and social rift between the groups.

The problems are far from being over. Since the fall of Communism in 1989 there were dozens of racially motivated murders in the Czech Republic. In a country that prides itself on having the most progressive economy of all the post-Communist nations, where its unemployment of the general population stands at 3%, unemployment among the Czech Romany citizens is a staggering 70%.

Historically, there has always been a special group of Romanies - the musicians. Getting rewarded for their gift to entertain, the singers and dancers were always among the richest Romanies. And during their steady contact with the non-Romany world, they kept advancing the romanticized view of the simple but carefree lifestyle of a Gypsy. Vera Bila and her group Kale represent a modern day version of a band of traveling musicians. In their albums Kale Kalore and especially Rom Pop, the group successfully blends elements of several different cultures. Like a Henri Rousseau painting, Vera Bila & Kale's style is at the same time deceptively simple but sophisticated, exotic yet homey, Central European yet Latin American. The Felliniesque singer and her four guitar-strumming accompanists can easily invoke sounds of Brazilian pop stars Gal Costa, Maria Bethania or Djavan, as well as echoes of Django Reinhardt, the great Roma jazz guitarist, and the Gipsy Kings. Since 1994, they have achieved a reasonable degree of success in Western Europe, especially France, but being an openly ethnic group they are virtually unknown in their own homeland.