South African opera star Pretty Yende has accused French immigration authorities of “outrageous racial discrimination” after being detained, strip-searched, and held in a dark room at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.
Yende, an acclaimed soprano, had arrived on Monday to take her starring role in La Sonnambula, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, in Paris, the UK Guardian news site reported.
She said the experience made her worried about her life.
“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me…,” Yende wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
“I am one of the very very lucky ones to be alive to see the day today even with ill-treatment and outrageous racial discrimination and psychological torture and very offensive racial comments in a country that I’ve given so much of my heart and virtue to,” the 36-year-old soprano wrote.
She added: “I’m still shaken thinking that I am one in a million who managed to come out of that situation alive because of one phone call I thought of at the time as I was in shock and traumatided and couldn’t believe what was happening to me.
Yende said she was then left alone in a dark room and told to write down phone numbers of family and friends on a piece of paper.
“I asked, ‘Am I a prisoner?’ He rudely said, ‘Yes,’ and I decided to comply and just do what they say,” she wrote about her exchange with a police officer, who also denied her request to get a charger for her phone.
“They took all my belongings including my cellphone and told me to write down phone numbers of my close family and friends to call with a landline phone they had on the retention cell, they said they were going to take me to a ‘prison hotel’ in the meantime while they looked at me like I was a criminal offender.”
According to AFP, Yende did not say why she was pulled aside for questioning, but a French police source said the singer had arrived from Milan on a South African passport without a visa.
“At no moment were there any incidents,” the source said, adding that Yende had not been asked to remove her clothes.
She was released an hour and a half later with a visa allowing her to enter French territory, an airport source said, adding that Yende was held for “verification” purposes that had nothing to do with the colour of her skin.
PICTURE: Facebook/@Pretty Yende
Compiled by Betha Madhomu
