“From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came”. In 1951 the famous Afro-American writer James Baldwin stayed for a few months in Loèche-les-Bains in the Valais; here he experienced a sort of estrangement, the sensation of being “the black”, as the curious and wary children of the village used to call him. Seventy years on, the words of James Baldwin still resound with troubling actuality.