Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

There were literally hundreds of rebellions and attacks against slave ships up and down the West African coast carried out by organised guerrilla groups much like the Maroons of the Caribbean. As many as 483 of these rebellions are recorded in British, French and Dutch records alone. The average death toll in these skirmishes seems to have been about twenty-five and the historian David Richardson estimates that a million fewer people had to go through the middle passage because of this one form of resistance alone.

It is notable that there were not any major rebellions against transportation to penal colonies, let alone a revolution in the UK, during all the years that Britons were being shipped against their will to Australia and elsewhere.

‘Africans sold their own people’ is the historical version of ‘black on black violence’.

Is an Irishman like Bob Geldof in a position to assert that Africans are eternally shamed? Is the story of Ireland so uniquely pure among the history of nations that it places Geldof in a position to cast this kind of aspersion on an entire continent? No, of course it is not. There was slavery in Celtic Ireland long before the English arrived – this justifies nothing the English did of course; Irish merchants collaborated in selling Irish people to traders as early as the Vikings. Anglophile Irish chiefs collaborated with the English in their conquest of Ireland, and Irish merchants and landowners forcefully stole land from ‘their own people’ in the midst of the worst famine in modern European history.22

The average Irishman would certainly resent being conflated with an Englishman, yet Geldof and others can gloss over centuries of diverse and complicated history with the ‘Africans sold their own people’ cliché.

What this means is that it is completely impossible to write a truly accurate history of the British Empire, and anything written before Operation Legacy was revealed is certainly incomplete. It’s revealing that some ‘historians’ – that is people whose profession is supposed to be guided by evidence – have not taken to reviewing their thoughts about the wonders of the British Empire even after such a revelation.

is it possible to critically and honestly reflect on Britain’s history in an attempt to build a more ethical future?

The implications are clear – some ancestors deserve to be remembered and venerated and others do not. Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople. If we truly cared for peace, would we not remember the victims of British tyranny every 11 November too?

If we go further back in history, it seems that European hatred of Jews in the medieval era informed the development of racial ideas about the ‘other’ in Africa and Asia,6 much as anti-Irish racial thinking informed British attitudes towards other ‘savage’ groups.

Thus the post-war British government preferred to pay to settle German and Italian prisoners of war in Britain than allow ‘too many’ non-white British citizens from the Commonwealth to come here, even though the Commonwealth citizens were paying their own way. The Germans and Italians were seen as ethnically but not racially different thus they could be – and have been – made into white people and thus truly British or American. Despite the Nazis’ genocidal rampage and their attempts to take over the world and the war with Germany, a German was still preferable to a black person in British and American post-war racial ‘logic’.9

By the logic of British capitalism, I had done everything right; a working-class boy that had used his talents to start a company and could now even afford a brand-new car. By the professed logic of the system, I should be rewarded and praised for my entrepreneurial spirit rather than harassed, presumed to be a criminal and spoken to by ‘public servants’ as if I was not a taxpayer.

He literally saves lives for a living and gets paid well for it, but can still be assumed a criminal and treated accordingly.

Britain already has by far the highest number of prisoners per head of population in Western Europe10

Our ‘closest ally’, the United States of America, has almost 1 per cent of its population in prison, by far the highest ratio in the world.

It’s interesting that many black parents have felt sending their children back to far poorer societies would cure their bad behaviour in England, suggesting that the parents see England as part of the problem.

Do yourself a favour – visit any primary school in any ‘hood’ in the UK, black or otherwise, watch the children’s playfulness, their sensitivity, their willingness to learn and then ask yourself in all seriousness how any of these little spirits will become killers within the next decade. In fact, you could equally visit any of the top private schools and ask how some of those children go on to become the political psychopaths who justify wars with all sorts of profound rhetoric, knowing full well the killing is for profit and for strategic advantage. Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.

We recognise that willingness to do violence is an almost universally admired male trait from Wall Street to West Hollywood to Whitehall. Crime does pay and young people can see that as clearly in their ends as they can out there in the big wide world. The problem with our crime is just that the scale is too small.

I’d rather live in a city and a society and a world where less desperation exists: this is as much common-sense self-preservation to me as it is ‘altruism’.

The plain reality is that even in a developed, wealthy country like Britain very few people want to spend their lives working for someone else with very little prospect of a serious improvement in their lives or those of their children, so people have to be conditioned to accept this reality.

Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five I was constantly aware that my fragile masculinity could be challenged at any moment, that a failure to respond correctly could result in my death, or irredeemable embarrassment.

In marked contrast to the wars we can always afford you will frequently hear the same people talk about not having the money for any number of things that affect the lives of poor people, such as adequate fire safety, decent pay for nurses and teachers and winter fuel for the elderly: this is classism.

This remaking of humans to fit social norms is of course what education is about, from ‘tribal’ initiation systems to state schools.

What is happening to the police is that a nineteenth-century institution is being dragged into the twenty-first century. Despite all the later mythology of Dixon, the police never were the police of the whole people but a mechanism set up to protect the affluent from what the Victorians described as the dangerous classes.13

So despite all the lovely comforting stuff we are told, senior police understand very well that the primary function of policing is to protect property.

The reality is most children in the world do not have the luxury of hiding from the brutalities of systemic injustice

Think about that; the British government having its own citizens arrested for protesting a foreign racist settler regime.

In 1974, the dictatorship that had governed Portugal collapsed under pressure from the Carnation Revolution, and the new leftist government stopped the military actions of the previous regime in Portugal’s African colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique.

The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead – Martin Luther King might be the best example of this – is one of the keys ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.

This was not justice or the end of apartheid, but rather its morphing from a system that was unapologetically racial to one that is now unapologetically economic and by inference, given South Africa’s history, still racial.

In addition to playing such a significant role in the ending of apartheid, Cuba has managed to avoid the ravages that drug trafficking wrought on the rest of the region. The murder rate in Cuba is four times lower than the average for Latin America, or to put it another way, the murder rate in many US cities is ten times worse than the murder rate in Cuba. The same is true in relation to nearby Jamaica, and South Africa frequently ranks in the top ten for murder rate in the world. The kinds of massacres of workers that occurred at Sharpeville and Marikana simply have not occurred in post-1959 Cuba, and even the most ardent anti-Cuba ideologues could not try and pretend that the kind of police brutality that is so common in South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil and even the USA exists on anything like that scale in Cuba. The extreme inequality and particular history that makes Latin America the most violent region of the world is due in no small part to a long history of the United States supporting dictators in the region, and this is part of why so many of the people there look to Cuba as a source of hope and pride – it is the one nation that stood up to Uncle Sam and won out.

There is one area of achievement which even Cuba’s critics have not been able to dismiss: healthcare. While you will often hear people grudgingly admit that Cuba ‘has good healthcare’, the scale of their programme and how many other countries they support is rarely properly appreciated,

In addition, Cuba has offered free – that is, the cost is borne by the Cuban people – medical scholarships to thousands of students from across the world on the condition that they return and serve the poor in their own countries.

It’s much easier to focus on the demonisation or demagoguery of an individual than actually discuss the outcomes of a political process.

Make no mistake about it; in 1945, even after using their colonial troops to defeat the Nazis, both Britain and France had every intention of holding onto their white-supremacist empires.

It is one of history’s great ironies that the most extreme incarnation of white supremacy, the Nazis, did more to undermine white dominance, damage Western prestige and make space for ‘third world’ freedom struggles than any other force in the previous three centuries.

she asserted that the ‘Nation of Islam was essentially the same as the KKK, but black.’ This has become a rather clichéd argument among some white conservatives, and it essentially equates black people who are living under apartheid saying not nice things about white people with a tradition of actual violent terrorism. The message is clear: white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives.

We know Colin Powell is also of Jamaican origin, but we don’t claim him.

I often work in prisons where, as you can imagine, a large section of those I work with are young black men. Some of the work we do is around creative writing and the young men write raps invariably filled with boasts about how many niggers they will shank and shoot. I don’t judge them, how could I? I used to carry knives and I even used to rap quite like that even though I knew better, I simply ask them what they would think if I rapped about killing honkies. I remind them that my white family are poor, that we come from Scotland, that Glasgow is often more violent than London and that twenty million plus Russians alone died in the ‘white on white violence’ of the Second World War.

While the scholars of yesteryear (Hall, Gilroy etc.) and even our parents’ music (lovers rock and rare groove) were arguably of far greater quality than that produced by today’s generation they did not, unfortunately, have the Internet.

Another brilliant black American, Ta-Nehisi Coates, followed his idol – the great James Baldwin – in romanticising Paris in his book Between the World and Me, which no doubt surprised black and brown Parisians no end. The Paris of the 1960s was no racial paradise, with the 1961 massacre of some forty-plus Parisian-Algerians during Algeria’s war for independence and the clear segregation of that era. Nor is the Paris of today anything close to a racial utopia. It’s strange that anyone could visit Paris and fail to notice the visible racial segregation of the African and Caribbean ‘French’ population ghettoised in ‘Bronx’-style housing projects.

Black Brits emigrated into a society with an already established white underclass and were mostly dumped in areas where that underclass already lived; black Americans and the indigenous peoples were the foundation of the US underclass.

Yes, there was no formal segregation on British soil, but the post-war governments spent tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to bring European migrant workers and refugees to Britain while working extremely hard to limit the number of non-white British citizens from the Commonwealth that could come to Britain, even though that was their legal right and even though they – unlike the European refugees arriving at the same time – were paying for themselves. Additionally, Westminster encouraged the white dominions to keep their whites only immigration restrictions even though the entire Commonwealth had fought the Nazis together. The reason for this was without a shadow of a doubt about ruling-class racism and nothing else.12

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century – who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? – you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white.

On the shelf before me I saw Chinese and Japanese classics, like The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Tale of Genji and The Water Margin.

I’ve always wondered how the people of that land might have reacted when they realised that their king was not so divine after all; that their land could be conquered by foreign barbarians and that the universe offered them no pre-ordained special treatment as a result of their monarch’s relationship with the divine.

I am no fan of Barack Obama and recognise that he was in essence – beyond the Kenyan dad, the beautiful black family, the singing of Al Green and the fist bumps – not substantially different from other US presidents, in that he continued America’s wars, arms industry, deportation procedures, drone programme and general global aggression,

It is notable that white-supremacist groups cheered the election of Obama in 2008,

‘to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.’

I expected Clinton to win and continue the mundane, run-of-the-mill, ‘democratic’ white supremacy and classism

But maybe I’m just trying to see the best.