The dangers of Mistaken Identity.

Have you ever been the subject of mistaken identity? I imagine every single human being has been mistaken for someone else at some time or the other as so many of us have common features. However, most of us have been fortunate in that these incidents only cause us a minor inconvenience at worse or a good laugh.

Here I am with my big afro.

I have long concluded that I have a common face for hardly a week passes without some stranger who I have never seen before in my life, saying to me "Where do I know you from” or worse "Hey Joan, didn't I  jst glimpse you in .....last week"  (a place I have never been or visited recently) or even calling me by some other name. 

However, my most dangerous experience of being mistaken for someone else occurred in Germany many years ago. This was during the period when that country was split into distinct parts, communist East Germany and West Germany.

I had been traveling in the west and although this was long before 9/11 which brought in escalated security checks at airports, I noticed that every domestic airport I went to, I was body searched before I took off and after I landed.

I started to wonder if it could be because at the time I had a wonderful body, why every German security person wanted to touch me up!

However, at the third domestic airport, I was disabused of this by a German-speaking friend who told me she overheard an officer saying, "She looks just like Angela Davis."

Regrettably, I had never seen Angela in the flesh but I certainly knew who she was. However, I never saw a resemblance between myself and the person I had seen on tv and in the newspapers apart from the fact that we each had large afro hairstyles. She, however, seemed much fairer than I and even appeared to have freckles.

I guess to most white people though, all black women with afros would look alike!

For the benefit of those who do not know who that famous and extremely brilliant lady is, she is currently a law professor at a leading university in California but in the late sixties and seventies,  during the civil rights struggle, she was a force to be reckoned with.

At that time, she and numerous other black people in the USA, did not see any sanity in Marin Luther King Jr's strategy of peaceful resistance which only caused unarmed marchers to be attacked and mauled by vicious dogs, beaten with  batons by police or even murdered by armed white terrorists and members of the security forces.

Angela and others of her ilk, therefore decided that it was better to go down fighting. In other words, death before dishonor.

At that time, the USSR was the other superpower and as the USA practiced apartheid at home and supported it in every form abroad, the USSR took the opportunity to project itself as the savior of the oppressed by giving practical support to civil rights and black liberation struggles all over the world.

 It wasn’t surprising therefore that Angela and many who struggled against these ills during that era converted to communism.

To put a stop to her activism in the USA, law enforces in California charged her with purchasing the weapons which were used in an assault on the Marin County courthouse in which four persons were killed. However, once tried, she was exonerated so by mid 80's when I was traveling in Germany, I assumed she was no longer considered a dangerous person as she had long returned to teaching.

I, therefore, found it quite amazing that the Germans still had her on a "watch list" and mistook me for her. In retrospect though, I now suspect it was because she had been a vocal and dedicated communist, they weren't taking any chances. And I guess the fact that I had traveled to East Germany and had my passport stamped didn't help.

So although that experience reminded me of the possible complications and dangers that can arise when one is mistaken for another, I have been very lucky.  For we all have seen reports of how, before DNA evidence was accepted by the courts, hundreds and possibly thousands of people were incarcerated because they were mistaken for someone else and worse many were even put to death!

Yes, there are lots of people all over the world who bear more than a passing resemblance to others but thank heavens it has caused no harm for the vast majority of us.

I can't help wondering though how life was for anyone who was mistaken for an Osama Bin Laden when he was considered the most dangerous man on the planet and how dangerous it must be for anyone in the USA, who is unfortunate enough to bear even the slightest resemblance to Kim Jong-un!