TMP Online

TMPOnline Editor, Justin Baidoo responds to Rod Liddle’s infamous Spectator blog on Multi-culturalism and claims of Liddle’s racism.

Rod Liddle’s blog post entitled “Benefits of a multi-cultural Britain” attributes most of the high profile social ills (knife and gun crime, violent sexual crimes) to African Caribbean males. Aside from this being factually incorrect, he goes on the next day in response to a post on Diane Abbott’s blog to state that he hates racism and in an attempt to appear non-racist quotes Diane Abbott and Trevor “segregate black boys” Phillips which he portrays that they make similar points to his argument which he says is based on cultural rather than racist values.

Here he is being disingenuous, by deriding and highlighting the only contributions an ethnic group has brought to society as “rap music, goat curry”and laden “us” (read: indigenous whites) with an “alien” culture, it cannot be viewed by the impartial reader that he is giving an honest though brutal critique with problems in a community. He is denigrating the African-Caribbean community and suggesting that London would be better off without them.

Is he entitled to say it? Yes.  But let’s not pretend that it is not racism. You can attack ideas without slandering an entire community, Liddle references to multi-culturalism like many BNP activists often euphemistically describe their racist attacks as an “expose on the benefits of ‘enrichment’ and multi-culturalism” Liddle is neither naive or ignorant, he is forcefully made the point when publishing his post that he believes that London has suffered as a result of the presence of the African-Caribbean community. He is not pandering to the politics of the BNP but rather cheer leading them on, his claims of hating racism is as credible as Nick Griffin’s claims that the British National Party do not “discriminat[e] on grounds of colour”.

Though I am not blind to woefully high numbers of African descendant males involved in violent crime in London (they are not only African-Caribbean, but perhaps Rod couldn’t tell the difference), the answers do not lie in the politics of hate and reactionary anger but in precision and truth. No one is hiding these issues but only honesty will bring us forward not dangerous rhetoric.

If Rod Liddle doesn’t believe that lamenting the presence of a ethnic group and belittling the contributions of generations of Caribbean workers to curry goat isn’t racist then I would suggest he volunteers himself for a diversity course.

It can be frustrating to watch yet another sea of African children being used as window dressing for some other charity drive to guilt-trip the public into diving into their pockets. However last night’s Channel 4’s Dispatches was troubling viewing even for the hardened second generation African immigrant like myself.

Return to Africa’s Witch Children was intriguing follow up to the BAFTA and multi-award winning Saving Africa’s Witch Children. The first programme was harrowing and powerful, it instigated a deluge of international outrage towards the treatment of vulnerable children in Nigeria’s Akwa Ibom State. So much so that the State Government was duly embarrassed into bringing forth a Child Rights Act, which enshrined children’s right to education and criminalising the practice of stigmatising children as a witch. This state law however was 5 years overdue, under the then President Olusegun Obasanjo the federal government in conjunction with UNICEF had passed the Child’s Rights Act 2003 and by 2007 only 15 of Nigeria’s 36 State governments had enacted the Federal law.

It was pleasing to witness the admirable work of CRARN and Stepping Stone Nigeria; especially seeing the director of CRARN Sam Ikpe-Itauma’s struggle not only to provide shelter for the 170 children at his centre but also living with the death threats and alleged attempts made on his life from the hostile church leaders that have physically challenged and intimidated his organisation and partners such as the Nigerian Humanist Movement.

The idea that anyone can be a witch and therefore be bringing bad luck or “curses” upon a community is neither new nor uniquely African. European history has documented the persecution of (mostly) women as witches as far back as 1400s with the infamous witch-hunts. The myth of children witches in Africa is a relatively new and was believed to have been popularised in African communities during 1990s. This was in conjunction however along with Pentecostal or “Charismatic” forms of Christianity and it has grown exponentially and affects across Africa, and even the Diaspora in Europe as shocking demonstrated with Victoria Climbié.

Victoria Climbie was tortured to death partly because of witchcraft (source: BBC News Online)

Undoubtedly these myths fester in the bog of ignorance and poverty that many Africans face, in situations not dissimilar to their 15^th Century European counterparts, but it is not only poverty but also the predatory nature of “Christian” preachers and “prophets” that claim that they can deliver these children through abusive measures. Also bearing responsibility are the Nollywood movies that use the spiritualist themes not as tales of fiction but as propaganda portraying “true stories” of cautionary value. The fight of myth busting and the cultural purging of these attitudes are needed but also the fight for ending poverty is required as these children are not only the victims of superstition but of illiteracy and economic underdevelopment.

Judith Amanthis reports on how an innovative artist is pioneering methods of engaging working class communities whilst combating the far-right.

Everyone on the UK left knows why some members of the white ex-industrial working class have voted BNP. None that I know of knocks on doors in Doncaster or Dagenham, says “What can we do to help?” and talks to people. That’s what the BNP does.

Is it useful to engage in inside-left (excuse the pun) debate about whether the BNP is a fascist party? Is an elected Hitler likely in multi-racial 21st century UK? When the government’s far right immigration policy is an attempt to stem the haemorrhage of whiteness and Englishness from the UK working class anyway?

Whichever anti-BNP slogan the left chooses, one young woman is acting creatively. Artist Rachel Horne and her friends are trying to drag her South Yorkshire ex-mining community, and especially her generation, away from the BNP, but also from the British army and the drugs barons. An increasingly coercive and privatised social security system doesn’t help.

Horne, a strike baby, was born in a pit village in 1984. It’s where last month, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Great Strike, she organised an All Day Mining Party called Bring Out The Banners. 3000 people came, the brass band played, so did psychedelic folk bands, and Anne Scargill spoke about miners’ wives leaving their kitchens for police cells and speaking tours. Artists ran banner-making workshops. Photos, videos, miners’ memorabilia, and NUM banners became art and local history exhibition in one.

Horne, like Bob Marley, believes that to make something of the present you need to know where you come from. She first saw NUM banners drooping against the wall of Denaby Main and Cadeby Miners Welfare (the pit her father and generations back had worked down) when she was a teenager. Her immediate reaction was as an artist: their beauty and narrative power astounded her.

Then the banners’ meaning: that unity, watching each other’s backs and helping each other out, won battles for better wages and safer working conditions. Going on strike – losing pay – required collective loyalty. Helping your mate out down the pit lost you pay before nationalisation in 1946 brought in the basic wage. (But the bonus was a continuing incentive to work dangerously.) On all these marches, pickets and police battles, NUM banners were what people could see, what rallied them. None of the miners or their wives was armed. For a tightly-knit community, non-violence is a possible fighting tactic.

Horne’s videos, installations, collages, photos and drawings are about her community’s history. She takes it, distant and not so distant, to her community. She wants to create a new culture, new rituals, to replace (or substantiate) the ones Thatcher destroyed.

In 2006 she organised, in her home village Conisbrough, a day event and light installation called Out Of Darkness, Light to commemorate the 410 lives – men, boys and women – lost to Cadeby Main before its closure in 1986. She’s campaigning to get erased and grassed-over ex-colliery sites marked on UK reference maps. She’s had London art shows in which a lump of coal on a plinth takes centre stage, and got flak for it. She’s contributed to a street art exhibition. In 2007 she invited striking postal workers to a screening of her video Life And Land.

Can art be instrumental? Can it change the world for the better? Is Rachel doing art or is she just organising and talking to people? Who’ll pay her wages? Aren’t there problems with public art? Isn’t art really about making objects? Can a culture be fought for, or changed, or even healed, without a concomitant change in people’s standard of living? What’s she offering her community the BNP isn’t?

Horne is nothing if not controversial. But – she’s no fool – she believes artists like her can learn from her community’s collective creativity. She‘s trying to strengthen her enclave of the UK working class. That’s what other communities in the UK working class are doing: the Tamil diaspora, the Somali diaspora, west African women tube cleaners resisting victimisation for union organising, the list goes on. The stronger all these groups are the weaker the BNP is.

© Judith Amanthis 2009