Aboubakar Soumahoro: From Shining Shoes To A Seat In Italy's Parliament

Aboubakar Soumahoro: From Shining Shoes To A Seat In Italy's Parliament

YEET PROFILES

By  Paola Bapelle   YEET MAGAZINE | Updated 0439 GMT (1239 HKT) October 14,2022

Aboubakar Soumahoro, the second black to be elected  in the Italian parliament.

Summary

In Italy, the right and the extreme right have won the elections. But among the new entrants to the Chamber of Deputies, Aboubakar Soumahoro, from the Ivory Coast, has only had Italian nationality for ten years. He is now the only black member of parliament.

There is more to Soumahoro's story.

He juggles with Italian, French last night he dreamed in Bambara one of the many languages ​​of Côte d'Ivoire but Aboubakar Soumahoro does not want to indulge right away. He first feels the weight of the responsibility of becoming a deputy.

"It's not my story but it's the story of all the damned of the era of the digital economy, of digital capitalism. These are the precarious, the exploited, the homeless, anyone who is discriminated against. I am the expression of a collective journey."

The defender of migrants and exploited workers turned MP.

Aboubakar Soumahoro has been playing as a team for almost twenty years. Today, he is 42 and has just sat for the first time this Thursday in a parliament dominated by the alliance of the rights. Graduated with a master's degree in sociology, trade unionist first, defenders of the "bracciante", those who work with their arms, he created several committees for these immigrants exploited in the fields of tomatoes and other vegetables in Italy. He lived it in his flesh when he arrived at the age of 19.

“You are plunged directly into the difficulties of life, into exploitation, into discrimination; all kinds of difficulties from the point of view of work. I was homeless, I found myself in Italy and I slept in the fields, in the street. And at the same time I struggled to get out of this mire of exploitation."

It wasn't really the Italy he imagined before leaving the Ivory Coast, the dreamy shoe shiner.

"Every shoe I shined on the days when I was not going to school, I saw in the reflection of these shoes a dream. The dream was to say to myself: 'Here, one day I would like to go to this country, Italy'. For me, it was Alice in Wonderland, it was the dream. I had a mad love for Italy and fashion magazines. I had an album in which I I framed photos of Italian fashion, of clothes that I had cut out with scissors from magazines. And at the same time I also had a love for the language of Baudelaire, for Aimé Césaire, for Fanon and the damned of the earth."

Changing mentalities to counter racism in Italy

Although he says he is concerned about the possible setbacks by the future Meloni government on civil rights in particular, Aboubakar Soumahoro wants to lead a legislative fight on what he knows by heart: exploitation through work, discrimination in a country where the difference is not really well accepted.

"Italy is not a racist country but there is the phenomenon of racism in Italy. Yet it does not matter whether one is white, black, red, gay, lesbian, Muslim, Christian, non-believer, in a secular state, we should have plurality within public and political debate and within Parliament itself. But I realize that in Italy we are not in the normality."

Because there is only one black deputy in the Italian parliament. This parliament which arises just behind us and in front of which he chained himself a few months ago to obtain an appointment with Mario Draghi and defend the exploited workers.

"We find ourselves exactly where I chained myself the last time in front of parliament. Today, I hear the police say to me: 'His Excellency, honorable deputy'. These are the same police officers who yesterday were monitoring our demonstrations."

Aboubakar Soumahoro will not forget anyone, he says. Neither these police officers, nor the rich who must not cry according to these words but especially not the invisible ones those for whom and by whom he was elected. He, the migrant, will defend the right to migrate, the right to work in dignity without ever forgetting the words of his mother.

" I come from a large family. The advice our mother always gave us was to never turn your back on people who expressed a need. It was with this baggage that I left. My strength is is what our mother told us  : 'Poverty is not only material poverty, it is also cultural and spiritual poverty'."

And that's what he teaches his son who every time he went to demonstrate said of his father: " Dad, he's going to free him! "

References

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• Policy
• World
• Political parties
• Europe
• Italy