LETTER: Greer's premise

From Mr Douglas Rimmer

Sir: Germaine Greer ("Engr. Inu, do you take me for a fool?", 8 December) writes of being defrauded, she believes, of pounds 20 by a Nigerian youth in London. I, too, have been implored to pay the fares to distant places of people claiming to be stranded in London. However, these supplicants were British, so far as I could judge.

Germaine Greer has also received from Nigeria a letter inviting her to join in a business transaction which, with good reason, she believes to be fraudulent. Although many people have received such letters from Nigeria, I have not. But, like many others, I have been advised by British companies of winning prizes, as a condition of listening to sales promotions for time-share apartments, and these prizes have turned out to be worthless. And, like many others, I have been urged by British workmen to contract repairs to my house which I believe to be unnecessary.

What, then, are we to deduce from Germaine Greer's article - that, in order to denigrate a whole people on the strength of a small number of personal experiences, it is necessary to begin with a wish to denigrate that people?

Yours faithfully,

Douglas Rimmer

Birmingham