A Feeling of Apartheid in Holland

I had been living in Amsterdam, fabled in my home country as one of those 'safe', 'working' first-world European cities, for almost a year, and had yet to shake off the pervasive feeling of racial tension and cultural segregation that I had carried over from South Africa. The vision of a globalised society, wherein Moroccans, Persians, Eritreans, Scandinavians and Latin-Americans or what-have-you live in the same street, shop at the same stores, and drink at the same bars, presumably in a land of perpetual sunshine is a fantasy so flawed, so objectively failed, that one would have to spend one's days in an ivory tower, locked away from reality, in order to believe it.

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