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Racism and prejudice are cages – a prison sentence alienating those who hold these attitudes from the beautiful diversity of the world – and I pity people with those afflictions.
The obsession with America that black activists have in Europe concerned me. Most main strands focus on the insertion of black people into a neo-liberal system, but this brand of capitalism was constructed on the very subjugation of black communities. Capitalism, as they say, is by nature racist; it reduced African-Americans to commodities, and so, too, African-American culture, swallowing radical traditions into an American Dream
In a recent article by Belgian-Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe for the blog ‘Africa’s a Country’, she states that, to her knowledge, there were no black newscasters and few black journalists in the country. Her children were never taught by a black teacher and she never even saw a black bank clerk. Education only makes sense if you can see where hard work might lead, a future you can imagine yourself taking part in.
Belgian-Congolese vocalist Marie Daulne, the tour de force behind the musical project Zap Mama and the first person to use the term ‘Afropean’ to describe their creativity.
As detailed in Adam Hochschild’s brilliant King Leopold’s Ghost, Stanley was born into poverty in England
Jamaican-born dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, a long-time friend of Caryl’s and perhaps the most coherent voice of a Brixtonized black Britain that neither I nor Caryl ever really belonged to.
Theatre of Black Women, through which authors and playwrights like Bernardine Evaristo, Patricia St Hilaire and Paulette Randall came to prominence.
I’m grateful for a new zeitgeist of intersectional black thought that is often led by feminism and queerness; to be black and strong is no longer reduced to notions of hyper-masculinity, and I found Jessica the personification of this female energy that was moving and shaking the black European community behind the scenes. I
the knowledge of how the information the books contained had a history of being put into practice and action and used as a source of empowerment. They contained stories, but they also embodied stories, and to pass through the space was invigorating.
For most black people in Europe, the battle against prejudice is for life, which is why you have to pace yourself to run a marathon instead of exerting all your energy in a sprint if you want to survive – you can’t be throwing beer bottles at police and telling them to go fuck themselves simply for the fun of it.
David Bowie was pictured making Nazi salutes and claimed Hitler was ‘the first rock star’, among a series of other dubious remarks in his Thin White Duke guise, they created a space for racism in popular culture.
If Antifa had confused hedonism with anti-racism, at least dancing, chanting and getting pissed against racism was better than doing those same things in the name of it. It
there was virtue in a group of people fighting racism who weren’t operating from a defensive position.
I was interested less in Haile Selassie as an embodiment of God and more in his actual reign as a political leader throughout the tumultuous twentieth century and the potential he embodied but perhaps ultimately failed to live up to. His father, Ras Makonnen, built Harare’s first hospital and state school and instilled in his son a strong belief in education, which made him a great reformer.
Two decades before Rosa Parks brought North America’s segregated bus journeys to international attention, this was what Langston Hughes experienced in Russia: On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, ‘Negrochanski tovarish – Negro comrade – take my seat!’ On the streets queuing up for newspapers, or cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in the line would say, ‘Let the Negro comrade go forward’ … of all the big cities in the world I’ve ever been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers.
The case Hughes mentioned would have been of particular interest to the Soviet Union, being an early instance of the type of empowering collaboration between Communist ideology and black resistance movements that defined much of the civil-rights and decolonial processes of the twentieth century. The Scottsboro’ Boys were nine African-American teenagers wrongly convicted of raping two white American women after a fight broke out between them and a group of racist white men trying to throw them off a train because of their skin colour.
His eldest son, James, rose to fame as a child in one of Soviet Russia’s most famous movies, The Circus (1936), about a white circus performer forced to flee America after giving birth to a mixed-race child. The movie ends happily, with the young woman finding a home in the racially tolerant Soviet society where all races were supposedly considered equal. It was, in many ways, the perfect Communist propaganda movie which had originally been sought in the unfinished movie Hughes wrote about.
Pushkin was proud of his African heritage, and the noble lineage was indeed something to speak about, inspiring an unfinished semi-biographical novel called Saint Peter the Great’s Negro, which, when it was
Through this lineage, members of aristocracy
devastating situation always reminded me of the 2003 Armenian film Vodka Lemon, one
minimalist white villa called E-1027 built in the 20s by Irish designer Eileen Gray and later developed by Le Corbusier,
When you look at footage of this crowning moment in the French capital, when the victory of the Allies in the Second World War was officially proclaimed, you won’t see a single non-white soldier celebrating in the most symbolic record of French resistance, despite the fact that two thirds of those soldiers had brown skin. Why? Because of a great bleaching, or blanchissement, of the Free French Forces. General
in 1952 Fanon would find himself fighting against the very culture he had so desperately tried to take part in. France had a national hero on its hands, and its rejection of him because of his race, and the mistreatment of its colonies, particularly Algeria, had transformed Fanon into an enemy by the time he wrote his decolonial opus The Wretched of the Earth. A psychiatrist by trade, he had by now decided that ‘violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’.
During my five-month trip I had met only a handful of fellow black backpackers, and Ibrahim was the only one I met who had been born and raised in Africa, and to see the world through his eyes was liberating.
