This morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 had a representative of Survival International talking about how seven Yanomani Indians in Venezuela have died from a suspected outbreak of swine flu.
I was reminded immediately of the great Norman Lewis, whose article in The Sunday Times in 1969 about massacres, land thefts and genocide in Brazilian Amazonia led to the founding of Survival.
Lewis remained committed throughout his life to the rights of tribal people, and in his writing about them regularly challenged clichés and preconceptions.
In one of his last books, A Voyage By Dhow, he wrote of a swamp-dwelling tribe in Mexico: “The Chontals inherit elaborate social graces from noble forebears, and they are saturated with the sly, defensive humour of the underdog. When I asked the man in charge of this party what the goings-on on his Tarzan T-shirt were all about, he displayed the ruin of his teeth in a stealthy grin and said, “These are the legends of a primitive people.”
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