“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me,” the soprano, who is black, wrote on her Instagram account a day after arriving for a string of performances in Paris. Yende, 36, said she was “traumatised” after being “stripped and searched like a criminal offender” at the airport. 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. Yende, who was born in the small South African town of Piet Retief, has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the past decade, starring in operas from Vienna and Berlin to Barcelona and Los Angeles.

Source: The Local June 23, 2021 06:22 UTC