There is almost nowhere in the world that looks like the Amazon rainforest, and there is almost no one who looks like its most famous son. The man known as Chief Raoni appears at the restaurant door and dispenses with a wheelchair. He wears a headdress of yellow cornbird feathers, with one red parrot plume in the middle.
A wooden plate, the circumference of a tea cup, sits in a gap inside his lower lip. Raoni is one of the vanishingly few Amazonians who still bear one. Maybe the look would pass unnoticed in east London, but we are in dullest Hammersmith.
Although lip plates are a symbol of bravery and oratory, the chief is now a gentle soul. “I come from faraway to look for support, for alliances,” he says. “The reason I travel is so that there aren’t conflicts.”