Thought Picnic: Black Lives Should Matter Always

Are we that quick to be noticed?

Sitting at home and catching up with the news has caused me no end in distress as a black man in the UK and observing the world at large.

In these Coronavirus pandemic times, first, I read of the indication that Black, Asian and ethnic minority [BAME] people are 54% more likely to be fined for the contravention of Coronavirus laws than whites, considering we hardly make up to 15% of England and Wales population. [Guardian: BAME People Fined] [GOV.UK: Ethnic Population Distribution]

Law enforcement would contend that the distribution of fines is proportional, I would beg to differ. One can only wonder what proportionality means to them in the face of the numbers, yet, one must endeavour to keep an open mind. Whether it is over-enthusiasm or an unfortunate predilection to attract to and intimidate the BAME by the police, something does have to shift, because it does not augur well for community relations.

This is not to forget that BAME are also disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus with poorer outcomes that the government has instituted an enquiry to determine why. It is as if there is no respite in going about our business or being afflicted. The little triumphs in the overturning of some of the convictions and fines are almost worthy of celebration when they should never have happened, in the first place.

Flushing out no guns

I have once had an encounter, where on visiting a public toilet there was a SWAT raid, apparently, the coincidental presence of 4 black men in a large facility that could have 10 standing at the urinals and 4 water closet cubicles. Someone had called the police to report that one of us was in possession of a gun.

The ordeal in the early 1990s was as unsettling as it could be, we were bundled out, searched, questioned and had our details taken down. They found nothing and offered no apology. Despite their elaborate and extraordinary intervention is what amounted to a ruse, I could not obtain a record from the police at that place or after two visits to the police station as to how I was roughed up.

They basically got away ultra vires exercising untrammelled authority without accountability or consequence, we, being left hard done by. I have probably only had one encounter with the police out of maybe 5 in the UK and the Netherlands, where it has been courteous and satisfactory. Thankfully, the only thing harmed has been my pride and a knock on my self-esteem.

Being Black in America

Crossing the pond, when I first saw a video of a woman choking her dog by the collar, it was without the sound on. It was bad enough. My Twitter timeline was lit up with outrage and indignation about being ‘Black in America’. When I then returned to watch the video with the sound on, it was a woman who had been called out to put her dog on a leash as she was required to do taking umbrage to being spoken to by a black man. [BBC News: White woman called police on black man in dog row]

She then called the police on the African American feigning being violently attacked, the good fortune of it all was it being caught on video along with the police not attending the event at the time might just have let the man live another day, safe in America. What kind of providence allowed for both their surnames to be Cooper? Quite uncanny.

Black Lives Must Matter Always

As if this was not bad enough, a black man was apprehended under the influence and found sitting on the bonnet of his car. To a man inebriated, one would expect some consideration as to their incapacity and irrationality. When he was asked to step away from his car, he resisted. He was overpowered and handcuffed only for one of the policemen to kneel on his neck whilst he was in medical distress and he died. [BBC News: FBI to investigate death of black man in Minnesota after arrest]

It is like being Black in America puts you high in the list of threatened and endangered species, from those who cannot countenance the presence of black in any space to the point to a sighting of a black person is tantamount to violation of every law of humanity, a threat to existence and the need to exterminate their person. Touching on the topic of police brutality and use of excessive force leading to the violent deaths of black people, that is a plaque on America for which a remedy is yet to be found.

Things ought not to be this way, it is why movements as Black Lives Matter exist because there is a discussion we all must have about our common and diverse humanity regardless of race, the need for consideration, courtesy, respect, humility, fairness, and justice is paramount.

Thought Picnic: Gosh! I have a black face

Is it …?

Maybe there isn’t much to read into this but I do remember about 15 years ago planning to visit a young family and I found myself asking whether their two boys have ever seen or met anyone of my race.

I just had the feeling that they having lived in a somewhat expatriate community in the United States and then moving back to Suffolk they might not have been exposed. Those silly assumptions fed my imagination with pictures of two kids under 5 hiding behind daddy’s legs and stealthily coming round to poke me to see if I will react before scurrying back to the protection of daddy.

My makeup is permanent

That is what I think prepared me for an episode yesterday at Upminster station where I was waiting to board a train into London. The waiting room has a heater on timer so I always go in there to get some warmth considering it was raining cats and dogs with blustering wind to boot.

There, I saw a man probably in his late twenties and his son, maybe not even 3 years old yet, sat in his buggy. I switched on the heater and as I stood by taking in the warmth, I looked at the boy and this conversation between them ensued.

Son: Look, he’s got a black face.

Father: He’s a man.

The appropriateness of that conversation can be left to conjecture as I smiled pretending not to be shocked by it all.

In 2012?

The boy had just been picked up from spending a week’s holiday with his grandparents and Upminster for all intents and purposes is not entirely out in the sticks and completely beyond civilisation. If the boy lived anywhere in London and from whatever baggage they had, they were not travelling far; one can only wonder how and why the boy could not have noticed and realised that black faces are not all that rare.

Kids have a way of learning fast and learning well from their environments. I would hate to think that influences around the boy had negatively coloured his quite impressionable young mind. It is not like we are in the 1960s when the sight of a person of colour was so much a curiosity as to be cause for amusement, surprise and fear.

Really?

All the knowledge the father could impart to the child was that I am a man. It made me wonder if I had a red face or a green face, dare I say a yellow face or a blue face and by the time I have a grey face, I might well be a weather vane.

If anything, for the sake of the well-being of that child, they all need to get out a bit more and if they have been saying silly things, that child will be growing up in a society that will be radically different from what he has been hearing or been fed and maybe next time, I will roll up my sleeves and pull up the leg of my trousers just to show that I not only have a black face and it is not a paint job either.

Enough animosity between black and white Africans

The whites of Africa

I could imagine the unspoken unease created by the blog I wrote [1] a few weeks ago highlighting the reality of white Africans and the fact that whilst colour remains a predominant quality of differentiation it is not the only prerequisite to being African.

Obviously, to go on and aver that white Africans could be more African than certain of the darker pigmentation with an African heritage was a truth that many might not accept but the truth and the facts are beyond dispute.

The death of Eugene Terreblanche [2] of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) in South Africa brings to the fore the concerns about whites and their true place in Africa.

A voice regardless

There is no doubt that Mr. Terreblanche represented a throwback to the unpalatable realities of colonialism and apartheid; but naturally every incumbent sense of privilege and power always fights to retain influence, the morality of that undertaking is subject to debate and reason usually by the unaffected than by the impacted.

Time and history however made the cause and purpose of the AWB irrelevant as an instrument of insurgency but never as a political pressure group for the rights of the people it portended to uphold – in South Africa of today they need to and deserve to have a voice.

It is unfortunate as we read that the murder of Mr. Terreblanche was as a result of what we might call a business dispute; workers had not been paid wages for a period of time for whatever reasons and they decided to settle the dispute by hacking him to death.

Just not on

It is no way to settle disputes and for those who feel they have been dispossessed, disadvantaged, displaced, denied or misrepresented, there should be structures in place for them to seek justice and fairness without resorting to atrocious crimes – that is brought about politically by the work of visionary and principled leadership.

That act is as heinous as it is barbaric and is comparable to other violent deaths of white inhabitants of Africa and dare I say, Dian Fossey [3], one might be tempted to view these “chop to death” acts as really beyond the pale, of an other world and most probably perpetrated by Africans.

The real issue boils down to the kind of war-mongering rhetoric that people in leadership are supposed to be wiser to curtail and condemn in entirety.

Unfortunately, the language of the Neanderthal flows like poetry from leaders all around, in Sudan, it was President Omar al-Bashir [4] threatening to “cut off their fingers and crush them under our shoes” just three weeks ago. You can find no civility in that as a response to the call for free, fair and just elections for a transitional democracy.

We are beyond liberation talk

South Africa is a new pluralistic democracy, it does have a liberation history but that is history, there are elements of history that might need righting for these times but that is to learn the lessons of the past for a better today and future.

Indeed the history of absurd treaties with chiefs that crept to dispossession in time, wars fought with superior weapons, enslavement, segregation, collusion with kith and kin to defraud and emasculate others as well as land grabs still have their scars but we cannot today repeat the same mistakes with the hope that two wrongs will make things right without us all suffering all the more for it. (Zimbabwe)

The rallying cry of South Africans must be brotherhood for all races in a common cause of their country just as it should be for all nations in Africa regardless of their diversity.

To resort to the congregational call of the face-painted leopard-skin wearing caricature that thumps to the song and dance of the weapon for the annihilation of another man as a voice of unity just draws a big dividing gulf between the diversities of Africa and it is hardly traditional nor cultural.

Separate from the atrocious

Those who offer platitudes in sentiment justifying the baying for blood and thereby inciting the blood-thirsty ignoramus to commit crimes must be held legally accountable as both are accessories to crime and instigators to unwarranted violence, the protagonists must never be allowed to escape their responsibility by absolving themselves from acts of others they have encouraged.

We cannot continue to embrace the plunder of life and property with mediaeval propensity when we could better seize the age of enlightenment that came with the renaissance.

All murders must exact the full weight of the law without prejudice, also all leaders must exercise themselves with restraint; that is no great price to pay for the inclusiveness of South Africans all and Africans in all their nations – no more songs of bringing machine guns [5] or killing the Boer [6] – in these times, it is expedient to depart from the barbaric sophisms that once allowed Africans to be labelled as savages.

History! My foot! It is deplorable and inexcusable, let us seize the day and look to the future fostering consensus, harmony and friendship whilst outlawing everything that excites primitive passions for shedding blood.

Sources

[1] White and African and belonging too [akin.blog-city.com]

[2] BBC News - Terreblanche killing reopens South Africa race wounds

[3] Dian Fossey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] BBC News - Sudan's Omar al-Bashir 'will expel poll observers'

[5] Umshini wami - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[6] The Daily Maverick: Kill the Boer: a brief history

White and African and belonging too

My Economist

This morning, I picked up a tweet from the Economist, somehow, I seem to go through the weekly newspaper online long before I have physically flipped the pages of my print edition.

Suffice it to say, I am usually behind on catching up with the topics covered, it had to have been a case of prescience that I took out a two-year subscription in January 2009 to end somewhere in May 2011 without realizing I would experience a brief famine of opportunity and means not long afterwards.

The tweet - @TheEconomist: The short sad life of whites in Africa http://econ.st/9Aj5GZ - To which I added the comment - A story that also must be heard and seen.

Africans – black & white

Considering how Black Africans have “suffered” at one time under whites, one might tend to not consider the plight of presumably white Africans – but without too much controversy, it is arguable that independent sovereign black Africans are suffering badly under their own African leaders.

This is not to stir up any controversy but to assert the fact that there are white Africans who have claim and affinity to Africa than some of us who are African by reason of race, birth, custom or residence.

Putting aside the squabbles of land and resources, in a world where documentary evidence might well count for eligibility and entitlement, some whites in some African lands might be able to verifiably trace their lineage back many more generations than our black oral histories can muster – I fortunately, had a great grandmother into my 20s, she had a narrative that allowed a plot back of 6 generations from mine.

More African than I

The other day, some 15 years ago in an office in Kingston-upon-Thames, South-West of London, I heard my name called with a Yoruba perfect accent, the “N” is a bit nasalised but rarely emulated by non-Nigerians.

I turned around and was startled to see the lovely white girl who had a deeper Nigerian accent than I could ever attempt to jest with who was born in Nigeria, spoke Yoruba fluently – she said proudly, she was Nigerian by birth just as I would have said I was English – beyond the many white schoolmates I had in primary school who were Nigerian it was nice to recognise the kinship across races.

Then again, I remember another instance where a white colleague said he was more African than the 4 other black Britons of Nigerian heritage – I promptly concurred whilst the others took umbrage, considering hardly any of them could speak an African language nor had they experienced much of anything Nigerian in their lives.

Well, he was born in Kenya, he had lived in at least 3 African countries, visited 9 in addition to that, spoke Swahili, managed a bit of passable Yoruba and Hausa and bantered with corrupt African terms that made me almost too colonial to appreciate – I was beaten on that track, he was more African, period.

Loving Africa by choice

Going back to the Economist story, it is not the first time that the presumed Messianic white person has tried to do something in Africa and come to grieve at the hands of the natives – to excite passions flippantly – just as Dian Fossey comes to mind, she chose to make Africa home in the course of her research.

Another in the commendable class is Susan Wenger who became the custodian of the animist grottos of Osun in Nigeria, being one who for all intents and purposes has helped maintain those customs against the onslaught of religions that portend to declare our traditions inherently evil.

They belong as we do

We have to accept that we have ordinary white Africans who are just like you and I, who have every right to freedoms, justice, due process and consideration, just as we who proclaim for those of the black race in Africa.

They should not only be looked at in terms of colonialism, land-grabs or foils for feigned liberation struggles masking rotten leadership and corrupt – they also belong in Africa and like everyone would fight for their little piece of Africa than gives them a history and heritage.

In the end, it does not matter what colour you are or if you are in a minority, if you have a claim to be African, as anyone elsewhere might well have a claim to be who they aver they are, then you are welcome as an African brother and fellow citizen of our amazing global village.

Sources

Dian Fossey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Susan Wenger, Adunni Orisa, Dies at 83

Susan Wenger, Adunni Orisa, Dies at 83 - Worldnews.com - Videos

Between Smith and Mugabe - no difference

The bastion of white rule

The death of Ian Smith the last minority rule white leader of Rhodesia that then became Zimbabwe is a milestone in the history of that country.

It so happens that it is the regime of Ian Smith that appears to give Robert Mugabe the perverse legitimacy that allows him to be revered as a freedom-fighter, a part of history that is invalidated but current events in Zimbabwe.

I would not go into the history of Rhodesian independence or the liberation struggle, which is well documented in other places.

We know that Ian Smith never believed in black majority rule, but the state of affairs in Zimbabwe today leaves us almost in acquiescence with that view.

White achievement and black squander

In his words, “We have never had such chaos and corruption in our country, what Zimbabweans are looking for is a bit of ordinary honesty and straightforwardness.” And that was in 2000.

Whilst many would see his time as one of the worst in racial oppression, he also said, “We had the highest standard of health and education and housing for our black people than any other country on the African continent; that was what Rhodesians did. I wonder if we shouldn't be given credit for doing that.”

I do not see Robert Mugabe - The Grand Despot of Africa - being able to boast in that manner and really there are very few African leaders that have measured up to the quality of leadership, organisation and governance of the worst of the people they replaced.

In the end, the Zimbabwean state apparatus has nothing good to say about Ian Smith and we have the Information minister saying he was a man who brought untold suffering to millions of Zimbabweans and bidding him “Good riddance”. As if the situation is any different now.

Smith and Mugabe no different

I cannot see how this is not also a prophecy that would read as contemporaneous at the demise of Robert Mugabe, because death somehow has a way of getting at men who believe themselves immortal and so, I view this other statement as poignant - Zimbabwe will remember Smith (Mugabe) for his unrepentant racist attitude and the killing of thousands of innocent people – This came from the state television.

There probably are more similarities between Smith and Mugabe including their dislike of meddling Britain and their radical racist rhetoric; apart from the war that pitched them against each other for independence, they have both lead their country into isolation but I do wonder if life was not better for the blacks in one regime than the other.

No words said against Ian Smith today seem to sound any different from what we should all expect to be said of Robert Mugabe when he departs this mortal coil – they both destroyed their fatherland in the pursuit of a vision that was both evil and unsustainable.

I wait for the day when this chapter of developing history would be closed forever and the people of either Rhodesia or Zimbabwe shall be free to determine for themselves the real course of what should be a prosperous future.