“Inglan is a bitch.” – Linton Kwesi Johnson
Telford Vice | Cape Town
Even in Bethnal Green, which is among the more unsubtle parts of London’s distinctly unsubtle East End, and even on the side of a parked delivery truck that had been scarred by all manner of graffiti, the words stuck out. “Fuck da Africans”. The hate wasn’t only in the message, but also in the messaging: short, fat, black stabs of paint formed the blockish letters. What visceral anger, what abhorrence, it must have taken to do this like that.
Less than a minute’s walk away at a line of street stalls hundreds of metres long, all of them staffed by Bengalis, you could buy anything from a hairpin to, probably, a helicopter. On your third visit to the Pakistani takeaway nearby, the man behind the counter pops your “three naan for £1” into a bag with a smile before you reach the counter. The Afghan butcher two doors down is only too happy to slice up any cut of meat you like any way you like. The English butcher further along the street offers, in season, whole pheasant; head, feet, feathers and all, staring at you with dull, defeated eyes.
Across the road at the local supermarket, the checkout staff are the most charming people in the world. One of them — matronly, wearing hijab — hands over your change with a warm, “Thanks babes.” Another, a wizened, dreadlocked Jamaican whose name tag reads “Cecily” never let’s you go without delivering a lecture on life: “Now then young man, stay away from the devil of drink …”
As you step outside, a gruff, unkempt old bloke apparently of eastern European origin is barking at a young, overtly English-looking white woman and pointing: “There! There! Your pocket!” She looks down and sees she is about to lose a pair of earphones.
Around the corner, Jamaal, a Tunisian barber, thinks in Arabic and French and tells lurid stories in the most exquisitely fractured English about the boxers, cab drivers and gangster associates who have sat in the same chair where you are now having your hair cut.
Not far from here is St John on Bethnal Green, an Anglican Church where, on Friday evenings, you can hear the Grand Union Orchestra wend their way through wondrous jam sessions. The house band comprises musicians from South Africa — trumpeter and percussionist Claude Deppa, who played with Miriam Makeba — Australia and England. Guest stars include Bangladeshi tabla master Yousuf Ali Khan, Chilean multi-instrumentalist Carlos Fuentes, Somalian oud virtuoso Mohammed Maalow Nuur, Zhu Xiao Meng, an expert on the gu zheng, or Chinese harp, and cellist and singer Kate Shortt, who tells the rich stories of the East End’s Jewish diaspora. And all that for the price of even the smallest cash donation.
You can contribute separately to the church coffers by buying a beer from the rector himself. The Reverend Prebendary Alan Green, on these occasions usually dressed in priestly collar and blue jeans, knows his India Pale Ale from his saison. There can be nothing so deliciously subversive as sitting in a pew holding a pint, with the vicar’s blessing.
Bethnal Green was home for 15 months in 2018 and ’19. London was, on the whole, dirty, cold, expensive and unfriendly. Bethnal Green was dirty, cold and expensive, but far from unfriendly. For a white South African, it was strange to live in a white majority country for the first time. But doing so in an area where the majority are black and brown made it feel something like normal. Not that being born and raised in the bosom of the privileges afforded by white supremacy anywhere, much less in Africa, can be confused, in any way, with normality. Life in Bethnal Green added a fascinating dimension to all that.
“Fuck da Africans”? Here? Really? Yes. Here. Really. We knew this before Azeem Rafiq told us his cricket career had been stolen from him by racism. Rather, by racists lurking in his own dressing room. Because, without racists to fuel it, racism is a fire without flames and will soon die. This, too, we know. And have done for centuries. That Rafiq has himself been implicated for an anti-semitic exchange of text messages does not repudiate his story. This rings the alarm still louder: the disease infects those it afflicts in multiple senses. The victims of racism can also be perpetrators.
So it was shocking and horrifying that the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, to whom Rafiq spoke of his experiences last Tuesday, should have been shocked and horrified to hear there was racism in English cricket. It didn’t help that every member of the committee was achingly pale. Neither did it help that, not for the first time and, sadly, no doubt not the last, it fell to someone who is not white to lay bare to whites the depths of despair caused, intentionally, by a system created by and for whites — particularly white men of means — at the expense of everyone else.
Did the committee think cricket was exempt from racism? Did they think the UK itself was free of this evil? Did they think it was all in the past, so why don’t we all just move on? All of the above? It’s possible, even probable.
UK society is shot through with denial of the fact that it is built on racism. That Britain was central to the Atlantic slave trade is lost in the afterglow of praise for its decision to scrap slavery — which was only achieved on the back of an agreement to pay enslavers millions in compensation. When slavery died, colonialism lived on in rude health. But the British cling, despite all the truth that has been exposed of the murderous ugliness of their history, to notions of empire.
They have elected a racist buffoon, Boris Johnson, to lead them. He has cast himself as the modern version of a drunk, bankrupt, racist buffoon from another age, Winston Churchill. In the streets near the bad mother of all parliaments, neo-fascists have pledged to stop Churchill’s statue from being torn off its plinth by those who are fed up with him being lauded as a hero.
Maybe all this is to be expected from people who are so xenophobic they voted to leave the European Union, perhaps the most successful gathering of cultures in world history. Do they understand how Orwellian they sound when they bleat, “We must end freedom of movement!”? Do they not get the sick irony of being displeased about people turning up unannounced on their shores when the British themselves did exactly that for hundreds of years? And conquered as they went. And then asked people from those countries to come and help rebuild Britain after a war? Only to tell them, decades of hard work and taxes later, that their presence was “illegal”? As Jamaican poet Linton Kwezi Johnson has been saying since 1980, “Inglan is a bitch.”
So there was something offensively funny about many UK newspapers splashing Rafiq and his story across their front pages on Wednesday. Because the press is part of the problem. With the exceptions of The Guardian, The Observer and The Mirror, the major papers are right-wing platforms that either dog-whistle or blatantly tub-thump for the glorious days of empire and colonialism. They were powerful enablers of the Brexit vote and Johnson’s election, and they continue to prop up the dangerous and damaging fallacy that grotesquely flawed Britain is somehow “Great”.
At what? Certainly at exporting inequality. Another of their racist buffoons, unfortunately a clever, efficient specimen, Cecil John Rhodes, was a past master of land expropriation and voter suppression. No amount of his ill-gotten money given to educating the descendants of the millions he subjugated can serve as adequate atonement for his crimes.
It’s difficult to think of something African that Britain has touched that hasn’t turned into pain. In South Africa, as in many other places, when the empire was finally done with us, it up and left and we had to deal with the awfulness over which it had presided. Like the 1913 Land Act, which forced blacks off essentially unowned land they had lived on for hundreds of years and into the gold mines to earn the money they were told they needed to pay to continue living there.
The legislation was passed by South Africa’s white-dominated parliament, but it needed royal assent to become law. That meant King George V had to agree. George was the grandson of Victoria and the father of Edward VIII, who abdicated and left the throne to George VI — Elizabeth II’s father. Leaving aside the illegitimacy of the British queen’s authority, how do we take seriously the idea that she isn’t as irredeemably racist as her forebears? And that her loyal, loving subjects wouldn’t want it any other way?
So forgive us out here in the colonies if we scoff at the disingenuous surprise that there is racism in English cricket. There is racism in every facet of UK society, which wouldn’t have prospered without it. Between them, the Dutch and British colonists brought racism to our region and enforced it as the highest authority — the only authority — of the land. It has infected, as it had to and continues to do, cricket and everything else in this country at every level.
The game in South Africa has made a valiant attempt to confront those wrongs in the form of CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-Building project. Thirty-five days of often harrowing hearings involving accusers and accused alike will inform a report, which will include recommendations, that is to be submitted by the end of the month. That will be the start of fixing the future. But only the start.
Welcome, England, to the real world — which you have shaped in important and terrible ways. You gave us cricket, but at what cost? We’re still counting, and will be for years.
Here’s hoping it was one of your own who, on seeing the profanity on the side of that delivery truck in Bethnal Green, blotted out one word and replaced it: “Fuck da racists.”
Bulletproof Truth 