A.H. Septimius's Blog

‘…The Egyptian civilisation was fundamentally African and the African element was stronger in the Old and Middle Kingdoms…

Many of the most powerful Egyptian dynasties which were based in Upper Egypt – the 1st, 11th, 12th and 18th – were made up of pharaohs whom one can usefully call black.’

Martin Bernal

It was reported on 31st May of 2022 that archaeologists discovered two hundred and fifty coffins and one hundred and fifty statues from the Classical Egyptian period.[1] At the site of a cemetery in Saqqara, the archaeologists uncovered beautiful statues of the Gods Anubis, Amon, Hathor, Bastet, Isis, Min and Nefertum. A sistrum, an ancient musical instrument, was also located as well as a collection of bronze vessels for the rituals connected to the Goddess Isis. A headless statue of the architect that built the Saqqara pyramid was also found, it was announced to the world by Mostafa Waziri, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The department is led by Khaled Al-Anani, Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities. Several treasures were found by the archaeologists, including papyrus with written hieroglyphics, and cosmetics were discovered alongside jewellery such as earrings and necklaces. The items date back to the Late Period we were reliably informed by the Egyptian ministry.[2]

This follows what has been described as ‘a steady stream of archaeological discoveries in recent years.’[1] In April 2022, famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass proclaimed the discovery of a three thousand-year-old ‘lost golden city’, near Luxor.[4] The city itself, dating back to the reign of King Amenhotep III, recalled as ‘one of Egypt’s most powerful pharaohs’[5], was the seat of power for the monarchy of Egyptian pharaohs. As above, a valuable treasure trove was unveiled with the discovery. Lavish jewellery, decorated property, and crafted amulets amount to the ‘‘second most important archaeological discovery since the tomb of Tutankhamun,’’ according to Betsy Brian, professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US.’ [1]

To celebrate the most recent discovery of historical artefacts a spectacular multi-million-pound parade was held in the capital, Cairo. With elaborate pageantry, reminiscent of the pharaonic age, the opulent celebration was dubbed the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade. From 17th Dynasty ruler, Seqenenre Taa II to Twentieth Dynasty ruler Ramses IX, the famed kings of old traversed the procession route. Ramses IX, the monarch to whom the first known peace treaty is ascribed, was also included in the parade. ‘Amenhotep III and his wife Queen Tiye were among the mummies transferred to the new resting place,’ we are informed by the BBC, ‘The lavish spectacle saw 22 mummies – 18 kings and four queens – transported from the neo-classical Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation about 5 km away.’ [1]

According to the US Department of State, ‘Most experts and media sources estimate that approximately 90 per cent of the (Egyptian) population is Sunni Muslim and 10 per cent is Christian.’[1] Can one imagine the justifiable outrage, throughout the Muslim world, if non-Muslims were involved in the movement of historical or sacred figures from one burial ground to another. Given the violence perpetuated globally by certain Muslim groups, one can reasonably conclude that there would be bloodshed in response. Negrodoms response, as usual, a silent shrug on the way to another day of ignominy. 

‘Egyptians have been witnessing a historic procession of their country’s ancient rulers through the capital, Cairo,’[1] we are informed by reporter Wael Hussein. ‘Their country’s ancient rulers,’ is a headline statement which requires assessment. It is useful at this point to trace the history of Egypt’s rulers to clarify what exactly is meant by ‘their country’s ancient rulers.’ A chronology of Egyptian history highlights several issues which it is here necessary to clarify.

circa 7000 BCE – Settlement of Nile Valley begins.circa 3000 BCE – Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt unite. Successive dynasties witness flourishing trade, prosperity, and the development of great cultural traditions. Writing, including hieroglyphics, is used as an instrument of state. Construction of the pyramids – around 2,500 BC – is a formidable engineering achievement.669 BCE – Assyrians from Mesopotamia conquer and rule Egypt.525 BCE – Persian conquest.332 BCE – Alexander the Great, of ancient Macedonia, conquers Egypt, founds Alexandria. A Macedonian dynasty rules until 31 BC.31 BCE – Egypt comes under Roman rule; Queen Cleopatra commits suicide after Octavian’s army defeats her forces.33 CE – Christianity comes to Egypt, and by 4th century has largely displaced Egyptian religion.642 – Arab conquest of Egypt.

Firstly, the rudimentary chronology is simply to display the extent of the time in which Egyptian civilisation was untouched prior to Arab incursions and thus Arab rulers. During that period the people of ancient Egypt built a civilisation that has induced every generation which has discovered its wonder to look back with awe. Lastly, the debate as to the skin tone of the ancient Egyptians is passé, and such neo-imperialistic debates should not concern Negrodom. The intellectual efforts of the era of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ivan Van Sertima, Martin Bernal and others disproved the nonsensical notion, imbued with racism, that the ancient Egyptians were anything other than African. The narrative has shifted, critical thinking has matured, and ownership of classical Egypt is Negrodoms to reconquer.  

When British archaeologist, Howard Carter, discovered the well-preserved tomb of the Egyptian Pharoah Tutankhamen in 1922, he drilled a hole in the corner of the door. With Lord Carnarvon, his daughter and Carter’s assistant waiting with bated breath, Carter describes the moment, ‘‘It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.’’ The medley Carter saw and felt was indubitably African and the extraordinary heaps were majestic glimpses of the apogee of African culture. ‘‘As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘‘Yes, wonderful things.”[1] 

Tutankhamen mask, Egyptian Museum Cairo

Those wonderful things, we now know, are remnants of the greatest period of artistic expression produced by Black civilisation, furthermore, they arguably represent the zenith of human artistic achievement. From the Antiquités égyptiennes Musée du Louvre to the British Museum a celebration of the achievements of the ancient Egyptians are displayed as treasures from a civilisation which is deserving of global appreciation. Yet, the ancient black Egyptians and their contemporary black descendants are virtual strangers.

‘‘Think, my soldiers, from the tops of these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you,’’ Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, informed his soldiers during his conquest of Egypt at the turn of the 18th Century. Napoleon had indeed thought, arriving in Egypt with one hundred and sixty scholars and artists, alongside the thirty-five thousand troops required to fight the resident Ottoman army. ‘While the expedition’s chief aim was martial, it had a secondary purpose: to collect scientific and historical information about Egypt, which many in France believed was an ancient civilisation equivalent to classical Greece and Rome.’[1]

‘Battle of the Pyramids’ by Antoine-Jean Gro, 1810

While classical Greece and Rome are held in the highest regard by their European descendants, classical Egypt which the Europeans considered equivalent is held in ignorant contempt by its African and diasporic descendants. Classical Rome and Greece have been immortalised by Europeans in literature, art, and in modern times through films, by Europeans for Europeans and the wider world ignorant of their historic greatness. A simple search will unearth one hundred and six notable films released during the 1950s & ’60s on the topic of classical Europe.[1] From Julius Caesar, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Caesar and Cleopatra, Quo Vadis and Alexander the Great, a catalogue of memorable films have etched into the minds of generations notions of ancient Rome, Greece and above all, the greatness of European civilisation. The idea of what a Roman looked like has been forged and cemented by these films, the pomp and ceremony of which the ordinary viewer has no other reference, became historical fact by the credits.

Elizabeth Taylor & Rex Harrison in Cleopatra, 1963

It seems we must wait an eternity for the African or the diasporic community to release a single film immortalising the ancient Egyptians, instead of the plantations of Mississippi or the notion of Black Love. While the OBE class and their diasporic allies concentrate their energy on begging Europeans whimperingly for increased ‘Black History’ in predominately white schools, this history is contained to their favourite periods. We hear plenty of appeals for the depression of the Atlantic slave trade, the suffering of the slave period in the Americas and Caribbean, the ignominy of the World Wars for Black soldiers and even the humiliation of the ‘Windrush generation’ to be taught in predominately white schools, lest Europeans forget how much suffering they have caused the race. Yet, not a mumbling word if uttered about the glory that was classical Egypt. Is Black History only Black History when white people are involved in the story? It certainly seems so.

How else, then, can we explain the unforgivable silence from Negrodom vis-à-vis classical Egypt. Where are the streams of contemporary literature from Black scholars, the world over, documenting for the coming generations the glory that was ancient Egypt? Where is the plethora of films, from Black producers, bringing to magical life the greatest black civilisation that there has been? Where is the surfeit of majestic paintings, from Black artists, depicting famous scenes from the days of classical Egyptian yore? I challenge the reader to locate them. What the reader shall locate, once the futile search is complete, is a pitiful list of people of colour who pronounce weekly the need for ‘Black representation’.

‘Television has served as ‘‘a primary source of America’s racial education,’’ says UArizona scholar Stephanie Troutman Robbins,’ reads the headline of one article, falling to say that we have no desire to make our own programming to uplift the race.[1] ‘Why we need to tackle racial inequality in TV and film’[1], states another article following the lead of a report from McKinsey & Company: ‘Black representation in film and TV: The challenges and impact of increasing diversity.’ Needless to say, the report focuses on what black people can do and achieve in a white framework, just as desired. In a New York Times article Nine Black Artists and Cultural Leaders on Seeing and Being Seen, ‘Amy Sherald, Michael R. Jackson and others discuss the challenges and opportunities of cultivating black audiences and dismantling historically white institutions.’ We yearn for the day when there is, if not excellence, at least honesty in the race and these faux revolutionaries can own the fact that white institutions are their only concern.  

Ms Dawn Butler, former UK shadow Women and Equalities Secretary, debasingly lamented the fact that ‘‘At the moment, history is taught to make one group of people feel inferior and another group of people feel superior. And this has to stop. We need to look at history and we need to improve it.”[1] When Ms Butler talks of ‘we’, she speaks not of Black people and their responsibility to document and promote their history, but of the English and the pitiful desire from black sycophants to be included in their historical and contemporary ‘we’. ‘‘You can go through history thinking that the people who were enslaved were not a part of the uprising.’’ Ms Butler, with as an appropriate surname as fate could muster, continued to rave wildly, ‘‘You can go through history and not understand the richness of Africa and the Caribbean.’’[1] What the Butler fails to comprehend is that if you acknowledge your own history and write about it, the need for recognition from others lessens in its intensity.

Is it any wonder that the ‘richness of Africa’ cannot be found in the annals of British or American imperial history, not to the Butler and her colleagues in delusion. As a juxtaposition, her colleague in Parliament former Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, Chris Bryant has written books acknowledging his own history. Two are biographies of the British Parliament and a third ‘A proudly partisan history of the British aristocracy.’[1] Instead of the Butler begging people like Bryant to write about black slaves being gloriously ‘part of the uprising’ in Morant Bay, perhaps she should use her privileged position to write about the glorious history of Ancient Egypt.

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave

The Black Curriculum, a British ‘social enterprise’ state with the usual self-congratulatory zeal, ‘since founding in June 2019, the team have been on a mission to create fully rounded citizens through the education of Black British history, both in and out of schools.’[1] We are informed that they aim ‘to deliver black British history all across the UK.’ The founder and CEO, Lavinya Stennett, ‘is determined to challenge the Eurocentricity of the school curriculum at a nationwide level.’[1] Little wonder then that we are strangers to classical Egypt when our people are lost in a trance, defined by an obsession with the European and how they are viewed through white eyes. The repetitive farce continues with no end in sight and the Black British history (a dubious historical subgenre) is prioritized above actual African (i.e., Black) History.

These are crimes for which none is ever charged, yet each year the crime rate rises. We are told by The Black Curriculum that, ‘We also have a curriculum and develop free and licensable resources for schools to teach students about Black history.’ The Ebony Muse has requested the curriculum and a separate article will follow about its contents and wider connotations. The desire for improvement in Black representation goes unmercifully on, its piteous tentacles traversing every sector, draining independent thought of life, and breathing nefarious life into servile thought.

Returning to classical Egypt, discovered, and excavated by Europeans in the 20th Century, the Arabs have taken over from the Europeans in the discovery and excavation of what is unquestionably Black History. Without a fight, nor even a sabre rattle, history itself has been surrendered to a foreign people with no racial, cultural, or religious link to the ancient Egyptians. ‘Egypt is seeking to promote its ancient heritage to revive its tourism sector, which has been flagging after years of political turbulence and disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic,’[1] The BBC reported gallingly. To be clear, the current occupants of Egypt have appropriated Ancient Egyptian history as their own, with no legitimate connection to the history other than the current occupancy of the country. ‘Its cultural history’, is both inaccurate and accurate. For, in short, the fact that Black people have surrendered classical Egypt as their own to Arabs is accepted not only by the race itself, but as a global fact. None else is to blame, for this is a racial blunder without comparison.

It is perhaps useful, to conclude with the chronology and note with sorrow that as centuries tumbled and old Egypt changed hands, never was a Black finger lifted by any to reclaim Egypt. By all indications, Classical Egypt has also been lost forevermore without a single shot in anger being fired.

969 – Cairo established as (Arab) capital.

1250-1517 – Mameluke (slave soldier) rule, characterised by great prosperity and well-ordered civic institutions.

1517 – Egypt absorbed into the Turkish Ottoman empire.

1798 – Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces invade but are repelled by the British and the Turks in 1801.

1805 – Ottoman Albanian commander Muhammad Ali establishes dynasty that goes on to reign until 1953, although nominally part of the Ottoman Empire.

1859-69 – Suez Canal built, but it and other infrastructure projects near-bankrupt Egypt and lead to gradual British takeover.

1882 – British troops defeat Egyptian army and take control of country.

1914 – Egypt formally becomes a British protectorate.

Independence restored

1922 – Fuad I becomes king and Egypt gains independence, although British influence remains significant until 1950s.

‘To the victor go the spoils’

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‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’

Juvenal

To die nobly is to perish ‘In a grand or impressive manner.’1

Civilisations, throughout the ages, have constructed notions of ‘honourable death’, which has elevated those who die for high ideals, with honour. Although enacted in varying forms, the core ideal was able to transverse continental boundaries and can be found in a diverse range of cultures. Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote, ‘How can man better die than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’ And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest and for the wife who nurses his baby at her breast?’ The Victorian baron, sitting on the imperial Supreme Council of India, perhaps reflected on the demise of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British Raj, as British guns echoed through the sub-continent and Indians perished in their thousands. Rather than sail home in dishonourable retreat, from the Mad Mahdi who arrived with fifty thousand Mahdist troops, Charles Gordon chose to remain and face overwhelming odds. ‘Better a ball in the brain than to flicker out unheeded’, uttered Gordon of Khartoum nobly, before then having his head ignobly dislodged and placed upon a spike by the Muslim conquerors.

During the First Opium War, the Qing Army suffered an embarrassing defeat against a small British force of two thousand men, in which Chinese soldiers ‘gazed around in stupid and motionless amazement’ as British guns rang. When Zhenhai fell and the British guns fell silent, Governor-General Yuqian did what honour and tradition demanded, ending his own life with a dose of poison after unsuccessfully attempting to drown himself in shame. The Historian, Julia Lovell, wrote ‘In death as, in life, Yuqian was the ideal Confucian warrior super-hero: killing himself rather than submitting to his enemies.’ If the act itself is not sufficiently imbued with honour, the lofty principles which manifest in suicide are axiomatically infused with nobility.

Similarly, in the ancient Greco-Roman world, suicide could be considered a noble end to one’s life. Shakespeare, immortalising the most famous suicides, placed in the mouth of a Cleopatra forced to bow before Roman power, ‘Rather a ditch in Egypt. Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud lay me stark naked.’ Her Roman lover, Mark Anthony, militarily encircled and politically outmanoeuvred by Octavius Caesar, accepting death as a price for defeat pleaded ‘Let him that loves me strike me dead,’ in Shakespeare’s magus opus. To die at one’s own hand then, instead of that of another, was considered a noble end. To be in control of your own fate, to remain unconquered by enemies, after valiantly resisting their overwhelming force has been an acceptable form of death for millennia. A nobility can evidently be found in varying forms of dying, when accompanied by lofty ideals, high emotion or national honour.

“The Death of Cleopatra,” painted in 1892 by Reginald Arthur

National honour and lofty ideals certainly pervaded the mind of Emperor Menelik II, Ethiopian King of Kings, when he decided that the time had arrived to sound the war drums in 1895. His rases journeyed to the new capital Addis Ababa, the ‘New Flower’, to answer the call. ‘Assemble the army, beat the drum’ Menelik commanded as the Italians, seeking colonial acquisitions, under the leadership of Oreste Baratieri sought to bring the emperor back to Rome in a cage, rekindling the days of yore beneath the Caesars. Baratieri held the province of Tigre, pushing forward from Italian Somaliland, seeking to inflict a fateful blow upon the ancient empire.

Emperor Menelik and Empress Taitu led seventy thousand Ethiopian soldiers toward the invader and on the 1st  March 1896, the famed Battle of Adwa took place. The Italian performance on the battlefield was a disaster, the Ethiopian forces winning a spectacular victory with the emperor’s magnolious coup de main. Barartieri’s telegram to Rome, following the battle, informed the world that European soldiers fled the battlefield, from their African opponents, ‘as if mad’, dispensing with their rifles to ‘avoid emasculation’. When the smoke cleared and the Ethiopian exclamations ceased, over four thousand Italians were dead, two thousand had been taken prisoner, and over seven thousand native Italian imperial servants had been slain.

Yet, the Ethiopian army had paid a heavy price for a stunning victory. The face of Empress Taitu, upon surveying the seven thousand dead imperial soldiers, ‘usually so luminous, was now dark with tears’. Those Ethiopians who perished did so for national honour, the lofty ideal of a free Ethiopia and high emotion was displayed by the indomitable empress at this grand display of honourable death. In an age that considered Africa beneath global standards of humanity, those Ethiopians who fought and died on the battlefield of Adwa showed themselves to be members of an ancient fraternity that transcends national boundaries.

Emperor Menelik II

When the Ethiopian Government declared war on the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), on the 3rd November 2020, there was lofty talk emanating from the prime minister, Mr Ali. “Our defence forces … have been ordered to carry out their mission to save the country,” Mr Ali informed the citizens of the old nation, after an attack by regional Tigray forces on Federal Troops. The incident had resulted in the death of “several martyrs”, forcing Mr Ali to declare that “The final point of the red line has been crossed. Force is being used as the last measure to save the people and the country.”1 High ideals uttered by a man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 ‘‘for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.’’1 Yet, almost two years into the civil conflict, we can conclude that Mr Ali has presided over an unforgivable debacle which has saved neither the people, nor the country.

Two million people, at a minimum, have been displaced from their homes, five hundred thousand have died from either violence or hunger, and the UN has declared that 90% of the population of Tigray is at risk of starvation.1 Hundreds of thousands of unregistered Ethiopians have crossed the border into neighbouring Sudan and Eretria. Sexual violence, a reprehensible mainstay of African culture, has unsurprisingly been weaponised and used with impunity by both sides in the war. According to the UN, ‘About half a million children are estimated to be lacking food in Tigray, including more than 115,000 severely malnourished.’1 According to Human Rights Watch (HRW) 2.3 million Ethiopians are ‘in need of assistance.’1

In Africa, high ideals are unveiled as repugnant lies overnight and even death is deprived of honour.

Abiy Ahmed Ali with smiling cronies

This article does not intend to examine the full extent of the civil conflict, or its political origins, which are covered extensively elsewhere. For the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to list the chapter headings of the UN Joint Investigation into Alleged Violations of International Human Rights, Humanitarian and Refugee Law Committed by all Parties to the Conflict in the Tigray Region of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.1 Any not well acquainted with the conflict, seeking clarity, can surely receive it from the content page alone, introducing the reader to a perverse world of base savagery, human suffering and violations of a plethora of international laws:

Attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and other protected persons and objects (7 pages)Unlawful or extra-judicial killings and executions (3 pages)Torture and other forms of ill-treatment (4 pages)Arbitrary detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances (4 pages)Sexual and gender-based violence (7 pages)Refugees (4 Pages)Forced displacement of the civilian population (4 pages)Internally displaced persons (3 Pages)Restrictions on freedom of movement (4 pages)Freedom of expression and access to information (4 pages)Pillage, looting and destruction of property (3)Denial of access to human relief (4 pages)Economic, cultural and social rights (5 pages)Children (3 pages)Older persons and persons with disabilities (2 pages)

The list reads as chapters for an academic book, investigating warfare in the ancient world, the historical work encompassing the campaigns Babylon, Mesopotamia, Persian, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome, which occurred before the birth of Christ. One would expect to find pages enlivened by early civilisations, despotic emperors, ancient cities, chariots upon the battlefield, the famous marching phalanx, horseman wielding bronze swords, sandaled soldiers thrusting spears and populations at the mercy of lawless armies. Alas, instead of the battlefields of Hellas or Asia Minor, the reader of the report, will find themself transported from the cotemporary world to Africa, where time itself is defied and the blundering generals conduct warfare as if lodged in a sadistic trance somewhere between 3BC and the Battle of Actium. With disdain for life a prerequisite to become an African leader, it is little wonder that the UN, in using an alphabetical sequence for the chapters of the report, was forced to use fifty-three percent of the alphabet when listing the chapters of woe.

Returning to Mr Ali, the responsibility for the list above lies solely with the prime minister. Conducting the war as a deranged imposter in Menelik’s old clothes, believing himself an Ethiopian monarch of old, presiding over life and death across all Ethiopia, Mr Ali is fully immersed in age of African bloodletting. A year into the war, with a regional political party, exposing the fragility of the federal governments armed forces, the TPFL were advancing on the capital itself. Authorities in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa pronounced an edict from the deranged emperor. ‘‘All residents must be organised by blocks and neighbourhoods to protect peace and security in their home area in coordination with security forces, who will coordinate activities with community police and law enforcers,”1 commanded an imperial servant. Mr Ali, feeling his throne threatened demanded that ordinary people, ‘‘all sections of society’’ with or without military training or experience, take up arms and died happily for their emperor.

Perhaps haunted by the ghost of an emperor that majestically defeated Italian forces at Battle of Adwa, Mr Ali, residing in The Menelik Palace, summoned the divine right of monarchs to demand the entire population die for royal folly. None was to be exempt. The quasi-imperial servant returned hurriedly to present another farcical edict, “There will be recruitment and organising of the city’s youth to work in coordination with security forces to protect peace and security in their area,”1 it was grotesquely announced. The deranged emperor, with his power at stake, summoned his inner emperor, and from his throne forced children to the frontlines of a civil war to preserve his own position. The call for Vladimir Putin to face a trail for war crimes echo across the globe. Yet, the Russian President has summoned no ‘youths’ to his army, such an act would be unthinkable to even Europe’s bête noire. What is unacceptable globally is accepted gleefully in Africa.

‘Many children were killed or injured in the hostilities or subjected to sexual violence.’ The report states, concluding that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that these are violations and abuses of international human rights law, some of which directly attributable to the parties to the conflict.’1 The investigation into the conflict, compiled in the report, concluded three months before Mr Ali summoned mothers from their homes and children from their cots to fight his war. What then can be reasonably believed now that Mr Ali has been unveiled as deranged?

While men, women and children perish upon the battlefield, those who attempt to flee are subjected to sexual violence and for those who remain the spectre of famine stalks the land and death by starvation awaits. The World Food Programme announced that 9.4 million Ethiopians face hunger and ‘‘more than 80 percent (7.8 million) of them are behind battle lines.”1 Yet, Mr Ali, undeterred by the suffering of his imperial subjects, stated “we won’t give in until we bury the enemy,” with a monarchical flick of the wrist. With another piece of anachronistic theatre, he announced that he would be leading the embattled army of sandaled soldiers, housewives and children from the battlefield itself. “Those who want to be among the Ethiopian children who will be hailed by history,’’ Mr Ali stated raved, ‘‘rise up for your country today. Let’s meet at the battlefront.”1

It takes a special kind of insanity to force children to fight in a war in the twenty-first century, advertise that fact and believe that somehow posterity will hail the shameless Ethiopian civil conflict as a great historical occurrence. ‘‘Never, till now, I think’’, Thomas Carlyle mused in the nineteenth century, ‘‘did the sun look down on such a jumble of human nonsense.’’ The jumble of nonsense the African sun is forced to down upon, two centuries later, surpasses any annus horribilis the nineteenth century could conjure. One can only wonder with shame what Victorian commentators would make of a prime minister upon a battlefield, schoolgirls embellishing a national army, and soldiers of the army engaging in mass acts of rape on the national population.

The United Nations and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report investigated the preferred crime of sexual violence on the populace. The Ebony Muse has highlighted this nefarious proclivity continually, the Ethiopian conflict has again brought to light the use of sexual violence against black women, children and men. ‘Nearly half of the survivors that the JIT interviewed were survivors of gang rape.’1 The report accuses both sides of Gender Based Violence (GBV), including the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Those fleeing have been left at the mercy of armed soldiers, and citizens made soldiers by the deranged emperor, in a land where the enforcement of the law is a distant memory. ‘The evidence collated by the UN shows some to have been deliberately infected with HIV. Many are pregnant.’1 This topic needs no embellishment, the conclusion reached in the report will suffice, ‘Victims reported being subjected to rape, including the penetration of the vagina with foreign objects. Given the stigma and trauma attached to sexual violence, the JIT believes that the prevalence of rape was likely much higher than that documented by the JIT. Based on the information available to it, there are reasonable grounds to believe that violations of international human rights and humanitarian law related to sexual violence, including rape, have been committed by all parties to the conflict and require further investigation. Some of these may further constitute war crimes and, in view of their widespread and systematic nature, crimes against humanity.’1

If all sides are complicit, then Mr Ali must take ultimate responsibility as prime minister. The deranged emperor has presided over this pitiful war, as only a blundering general could, leading to one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. After almost two years, an estimated half a million Ethiopians have died, 850,00, 6.8 million are in need of humanitarian assistance,1 4.4 million are facing water shortages, and drought now stalks the land threatening an untold number with death from starvation.

The historical tradition of honourable death does not in any way exult the fate of those starve to death, die of thirst or rape. If to die nobly if to die impressively, it is clear that nobility has long deserted old Ethiopia, for each death in this war has been enshrouded in ignominy. Mr Ali was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the olive branch held out to Eritrea, the old province from which Batatieri made his move, a nation that has played a role in the repulsive acts of war.1 Each of Mr Ali’s political decisions must now be viewed through enlightened lenses. Could it be that that the deranged emperor made peace with Eretria knowing well he would use their malevolent army to murder, abuse and rape his own population and in return received a noble peace prize? The award has not been so debased since it was scandalously handed to militarist Obama. Like Charles I of England, the deranged emperor debased his office with an invitation to foreign forces with malefic intent; unlike England, Ethiopia has no Cromwell to relieve the country, or continent, of tyranny with a swift single stroke. And thus, we would do well to survey the field of black leaders and ask uneasily who will guard us from this mass of blundering generals. For it seems to Negrodom that ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here’.

Abiy Ahmed Ali The ‘Deranged Emperor’

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Lovell, J. (2011). The Opium War . London : Picador .

Pakenham, T. (1991). The Scramble For Africa 1876-1912. London: Abacus.

Rights, U. O. (2021). Report of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC)/Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Joint Investigation into Alleged Violations of International Human Rights Humanitarian and Refugee Law Committed by all Parties.

Shakespeare, W. (1611). The Tempest .

Shakespeare, W. (2008). Anthony and Cleopatra . New York: Oxford University Press.

Sow, N. (2021, Nov). How to address the sexual violence epidemic in Ethiopia? Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/11/12/how-to-address-the-sexual-violence-epidemic-in-ethiopia

The Guardian view on Ethiopia’s war: a glimpse of hope. (2022, April 1). Retrieved from Theguardian.com: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/01/the-guardian-view-on-ethiopias-war-there-must-be-hope

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2019. (2019). Retrieved from Nobel Prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2019/press-release/

US, EU warn of influx of Eritrean troops in Ethiopia’s Tigray. (2021, August 25). Retrieved from aljazeera.com: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/25/us-eu-influx-eritrea-troops-ethiopia-tigray

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‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

Oscar Wilde

There is a class of people that have positioned themselves atop the mass of black people in the United Kingdom. They are, self-proclaimed, ‘people of colour’, (seemingly anyone with at least one parent who is not fully white). This is the first requirement of entry for a place in the class. They are detached from the majority of other ‘people of colour’ by their upbringing, education, social status, wealth, outlook and rank. These differences are not considered disqualifying qualities for the role, but qualifying characteristics. Attainment of at least one of these is the second requirement. Having a prestigious platform and using it to disseminate assimilationist opinions on racial issues is the third requirement. When merged, the three prerequisites become authentication marks for members of a unified class.

Chuka Umunna, a ‘person of colour’ (one African parent), qualifies with the position of a politician (prestige), coupled with his education, wealth, outlook and rank (qualifying characteristics). His misuse of his prestigious platform concerning racial issues has been documented by The Ebony Muse.[1]  Mrs Afua Hirsh, ‘a mixed-race, black girl’[2] (in her own confusing words) eligible under the dubious ‘people of colour’ classification, has the prestige of being a writer in the vaunted left-wing media outlet The Guardian. As an Oxford Graduate, former barrister and author, Mrs Hirsh ‘with an African name and a middle-class upbringing’[3] is the darling of this class. Her misuse of her prestigious platform has also been well documented.[4] Gina Miller, born to the Singh’s, ‘parents of Indian descent’[5], in the South American Island of Guyana, was named ‘UK’s most influential black person in 2017.’[6] ‘I’m a woman, a woman of colour’[7], Miller stated in The Times, and who can doubt her eligibility with such a wonderfully liberal racial classification system evidently in existence. As ‘founding partner of wealth manager SCM Direct’[8] and anti-Brexit campaigner, she qualifies with both her colour and prestige. When her boarding school education is merged with the fact that she is ‘the daughter of a top QC and the former Attorney General of Guyana’[9], Miller begins to resemble a patrician of the baleful class. Kamala Harris, a ‘person of colour’ (one Caribbean & one Indian parent), and politician, merges this with her upbringing, education, wealth and outlook to qualify for what is starting to resemble a trans-Atlantic class. As ever, sportsmen and women hold a place of particular prominence in communities bereft of true political power and therefore hold a place in this malefic class. People such as MBE Raheem Sterling, ‘the England football star who took on the racists’[10] and MBE Lewis Hamilton, ‘who led Formula 1’s pre-race demonstrations promoting equality last year’[11] meet each pitiful criterion for entry.

Gina Singh Miller

Crucially, each member aspires to what is considered the highest honour within the class, white recognition manifested in receiving an appointment to the Order of the British Empire from the Queen. The OBE class have a shared political and social outlook. With unwavering uniformity, they are firm believers in the greatness of metropolitan England, considering its burgeoning diversity the source of her pre-eminence. Those who challenge the idea of an increasingly diverse England being the foundation of contemporary British greatness are the unrivalled bête noire of the OBE class. For the class, the idea that their own entry into English society was a catalyst to a, hitherto absent, elevated form of benevolent pre-eminence is a founding and enduring notion. The class is of the compassionate left ideologically, the safe space in British politics in which the class can articulate its tenets without the threat of reason. They subscribe to the British left’s principles of European unity, the global post-war bilateral order, ever-increasing aid to African nations, inflated social welfare systems, large scale immigration and a plethora of other left-wing staples. They are, in essence, little more than liberals of colour.

The members of the OBE class, as stated above, hold elevated vocational status and thus have access to their white liberal counterparts, who have a similar outlook and provide access to areas within the corridors of power. The platforms provided reinforce their position as members of a class that speak for black masses. In an age of mass media, members of the OBE class utilize the power of popular platforms to disseminate the ideas, beliefs, and grievances of the class. They are in the vanguard of contemporary debates on domestic race relations, issuing regular lamentations at what they consider painfully slow progress toward their aims. From the class emanate a cascade of outraged statements, articles, interviews, posts, and videos whenever there is a viral act of racism. Their indignant voices are used to shame their white counterparts into using their own power to initiate change and to pressurise conservatives into partaking. They, unlike the black masses, are able to articulate tangible examples of the impact of racism, a plethora of articles and books have been published to ensure the world is aware. The rapacious members of the class have thus monetized their sorrow, coupling their scholarly enterprise with a lucrative circuit of speaking events before hundreds of misguided listeners.

MBE Lewis Hamilton

As a class, race-based slights from other English nationals, regarding their status as truly English, is considered a casus belli like no other. No questions will be brooked by the class, from their white counterparts, about how their status as ‘people of colour’ impacts their Englishness. The class believe that its ‘true’ legacy and contribution to England has been suppressed by the British right (bête noire) and work zealously to promote what they deem a true reflection of the enduring impact on British society by ‘people of colour’. Everything from dark-skinned soldiers garrisoning Ancient Roman fortresses in Britain, to barefooted soldiers hauled forcibly from Africa to the firing line of European wars, is used to bolster their claim to have contributed to English greatness. Even moping the floors of hospitals and driving buses through London is now highlighted as part of a wider claim to participation in progress toward national greatness. The OBE haut bourgeoise, eager to weave themselves into the tapestry of English History, extoll the contribution of ‘people of colour’ to the British Empire, an entity which they also decry as the source of their long mournful list of sorrows.

The role played by the British Empire in forging the identity of the OBE class is considered the defining historical interaction in the annals of the black race and the class. All triumphs and failures have their source in the British Empire, a peculiar outlook that allows the class to accept Orders of the British Empire while hailing the removal of statues honouring historical figures of Imperial Britain. The ideological contradictions and racial equivocations which characterize the class are epitomised by David Olusoga. After receiving the ‘exhilarating and humbling news’, the historian declared himself ‘pleased’[1] to accept the Order of The British Empire from the Queen. ‘Is the acceptance of an honour linked to the empire a betrayal of those ancestors and that history?’[2] Olusoga pondered disgracefully, knowing well by any historical standard, to accept such an honour is at best ignoble. During Olusoga’s apparent ‘soul-searching’, he reached the conclusion that members of the OBE class are soulless and concluded that ‘What convinced me that the right thing was to accept the honour was thinking about one of the tangible downsides of declining it.’[3] Prestige is seductive.

Barack Obama & David Olusoga

The class excel in finding imaginary success in the dishonourable subjugation of Africa, his book Black and British: A Forgotten History is at best a distasteful attempt to glorify an oppressed people subjected to both servitude and racism solely to embellish his class. The Ebony Muse has highlighted the revisionist history of the class before, its betrayal of historical facts, and the raison d’état which is behind the redrafting of the black experience in imperial history.[1]

The class seek to enhance their own position within the country with an attempt to present their ancestors as integral contributors to Britain. Adroitly weaving their own ambitions with a movement in the United States, which has engulfed the United Kingdom. The class accepts imperial honours while calling for an all-encompassing revision of British history, in which their contribution is further recognised. While the masses march for the hope of inhabiting a society in which their colour is not a contributing factor toward their oppression, the class which already live bereft of crippling racism engage in a war of attrition for prestige with their wealthy white counterparts. They condemn white England when a report is released or BLM march, all the while quietly accepting honours and accumulating wealth due to their membership of the class.

Born in Lagos, to a Nigerian father and a British mother; Olusoga’s credentials as a member of the class, when coupled with that below, are unquestionable. He is a historian and member of the board of the Scott Trust. A single African parent and detachment from the black masses via rank, wealth, upbringing, education, social status, and outlook, Olusoga meets all requirements. The Guardian reported that: ‘Olusoga, a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which publishes the Guardian, has written extensively on the development of empire and the history of black people in Britain, including their involvement in the British military. He picked up his medal from the palace in January, when the Queen handed out her new year honours. He was cited for his services to history and community integration.’[2] Beneath the elaborate blandishment, the key phrase is ‘community integration’, better known as assimilation.

It is beneficial to societal harmony, when governing a country with migrants, to integrate those on the fringes of society into the dominant culture. It is a prudent political strategy for any government. The prominent members of the migrant communities, who are already usually partially integrated, are then faced with the choice of encouraging the masses to integrate completely with the dominant culture or retreat into their own migrant culture. Migrant communities with strong cultures are able to resist fully assimilating and thus retain essential cultural aspects which breathe continued life into generations. The OBE class, with a history based upon Olusoga’s dubious works, has no strong culture to withstand the strength of the dominant British culture and there is no will to do so. Assimilation grants the members a lofty position atop the mass of blacks and allows the retention of their privilege, prestige and qualifying characteristics. Therefore, the class have a vested interest in the continued assimilation of ‘people of colour’.

OBE David Olusoga

The weaving of this revisionist history is, we now see, central to the rising stock of the class. ‘We must teach black history’, Olusoga states unashamedly in The Guardian, knowing well that his revisionism will be at the forefront of the ‘black history’ being taught and that it is the class who will most benefit from this re-education of the masses. Olusoga observes that ‘this great wave of demonstrations (BLM) has achieved something comparable when it comes to race and racism. It has created, or perhaps uncovered, a previously unknown willingness on the part of millions to at least try to better understand the issues and engage in a process of self-education.’[1] Those who marched simply in the name of justice and looked for answers were met by a class waiting for such a moment. In such moments of societal rage and racial tensions one can truly earn their commendations from the Queen for ‘community integration’; up stepped the sinister class. With their lofty positions in British society already secure, they were able to speak from upon high about the tragedies befalling ‘people of colour’, articulate its impact to their white colleagues, and lead the charge back toward the beaten track of integration.  

Waiting in the wings with their stratagems, the class has reignited the beggarly calls for a diversified English History curriculum. Olusoga claims that ‘our (English) education system has, for decades, rejected pleas and requests made by two generations of black British people for black history to be made a core part of the national curriculum.’

The primary reasons the class are determined to see ‘black history’ as a core part of the curriculum are twofold. Firstly, the revisionist history that would be used to educate the masses would promote a glorification of the role of ‘black British people’ within the British Empire (mentioned above as what the class consider the defining historical interaction). This would allow for, in the estimation of the class, a shift in the perception by other racial groups in England (primarily white) that ‘people of colour’ should be held in higher national esteem. Again, we return to the dogged pursuit of the class to increase its prestige. In simple terms, if black British people as a whole gain prestige through a revision of the curriculum, the class which sits atop the masses will themselves be the greatest beneficiaries, particularly as they will be writing the history.

Secondly, the educational reform would progress the assimilation programme which the class are wedded to both ideologically and emotionally. As Olusoga claims, the reform would cover ‘a national blind spot, a gap in our collective knowledge that affects us all – black and white.’[1] We return to the greatest loathing of the class, its casus belli; questions over their status as truly English. There is a belief within the class that if the white population is properly educated, in revisionist history, that they will be so overwhelmed by the integral role played by the forebears of black British people that racism will dissipate. There is also a hope that they will be riven with guilt when made fully aware of the oppressive nature of the British Empire and the horrors suffered by ‘people of colour’. The war efforts of the First and Second World Wars are treasured moments of English history, which continue to encapsulate the national identity, and are still celebrated with reverence and ceremony. The class have identified these periods as the most effective way of endearing ‘people of colour’ to the white populous. In short, if generations of white children are taught that white and black fought side by side in the trenches for imperial England then the discrimination of the previous generations will be absent in those of the future.

This is a class with all-pervasive stratagems for ‘community integration’ and the subsequent prestige that will be conferred upon them. Why then, one must wonder, do the OBE class make no mention of establishing an institution of their own? Surely, with such esteemed academics within the class, the OBE class could pool their publishing profits and existing wealth and establish an educational institution. If there was truly a desire to take the lead in uplifting a race via intellectual and cultural independence, the obvious solution would be to build numerous institutions in which black British people would be able to progress free of oppression. However, as always, the aim is not liberation but assimilation, and the motivation is self-serving not benevolent.

Another series of defeats for the Labour Party, in the 2021 By-Elections, has further reinforced the fact that a detached and delusional left-wing elite have been presiding ineptly over masses in regions once considered party heartlands. The Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood said, ‘A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party. They mean well, of course, but their politics – obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism – have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday.’[1] In describing the white liberal friends of the OBE class, Mahmood has also defined our own haut bourgeois of colour. They are little more than poor imitations of their white liberal colleagues.

To chart a course alone, where vaunted ‘blackness’ is the sole qualifying characteristic and those with influence wielded it in its name alone, is beyond the OBE class. Those who sit atop the mass of ‘black British people’, speaking and acting on their behalf, have no ambition to be independent in any arena. England has granted the OBE class rank, wealth, prestige and a platform; the war of attrition to attain a more secure place in British society is their sole aim. ‘The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life,’ Olusoga mused while attempting to justify his galling lack of substance. ‘The only options on the table therefore are to accept or decline,’ he concludes, providing a timely reminder that historically our elites have never had enough honour to decline base offerings from Europeans.

‘I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon than such a Roman,[1] Shakespeare’s Marcus Brutus pronounces, separating himself from the dishonourable beings around him which also bore the name ‘Roman’. In our direful age, with the loathsome OBE class and its ‘black British’ members the acknowledged leaders of the masses, the words of Brutus are poignant. The masses alas, who hope simply to be stopped and searched less, to not be overlooked at work because of their colour and to have their children learn in schools free of racism are caught in the centre of a larger game. The OBE class have grander ambitions and play for higher stakes, the distant masses being disposable pawns in their war of attrition. While the mass of blacks remain in the gutter, the OBE class look to the lofty stars and howl aimlessly at the moon.  

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://ahseptimius.wordpress.com/2020/08/26/the-blundering-generals-leading-negrodom-to-death-part-ii-chuka-umunna/

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://ahseptimius.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/the-blundering-generals-leading-negrodom-to-death-part-one-afua-hirsch/

Benson, A. (2021, Feb 26). Lewis Hamilton pledges to ‘keep pushing’ in fight against racism. Retrieved from bbc.com: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/56207491

Burden, E. (2019, March 2). Gina Miller: ‘Many people think I must have slept my way to the top’. Retrieved from thetimes.com: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gina-miller-many-people-think-i-must-have-slept-my-way-to-the-top-dnkwxrp8j

Carrick, A. (2020, July 10). ‘I was mistaken for a cleaner’, says Gina Miller. Retrieved from cityam.com : https://www.cityam.com/i-was-mistaken-for-a-cleaner-says-gina-miller/

Gayle, D. (2019, April 2). Word ’empire’ made accepting OBE difficult, says David Olusoga. Retrieved from theguardian.com : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/02/word-empire-made-accepting-obe-difficult-says-david-olusoga

HIRSCH, A. (n.d.). About. Retrieved from http://www.afuahirsch.com: https://www.afuahirsch.com/about/

Labour’s Khalid Mahmood says party has become ‘London-centric’. (2021, May 8). Retrieved from theguardian.com: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/08/labours-khalid-mahmood-says-party-has-become-london-centric

Mance, H. (2019, May 30). Raheem Sterling: the England football star who took on the racists. Retrieved from ft.com: https://www.ft.com/content/4822b158-819c-11e9-9935-ad75bb96c849

Miller, G. (n.d.). Gina Miller: My Battle Against Brexit. Retrieved from law.ac.uk: https://www.law.ac.uk/resources/blog/gina-miller-my-battle-against-brexit/

Olusoga, D. (2019, Jan 6). I dislike the link to empire, but it felt wrong to turn down an OBE. Retrieved from theguardian.com: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/06/i-dislike-the-link-to-empire-but-it-felt-wrong-to-reject-an-obe

Olusoga, D. (2020, June 15). Britain can no longer ignore its darkest chapters – we must teach black history. Retrieved from theguardian.com: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/15/britain-can-no-longer-ignore-its-darkest-chapters-we-must-teach-black-history

Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/full.html

Siddique, H. (2019, Sep 24). Gina Miller: the woman who took on the UK government and won – twice. Retrieved from theguardian.com: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/24/gina-miller-the-woman-who-took-on-the-uk-government-and-won-twice

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‘The best in a race is not reflected through or by the action of its apes, but by its ability to create of and for itself.’

Marcus Garvey

Given the global sway of American culture and the fact that the diasporic black communities look to the African American as paragons, it is appropriate to examine the philosophy of an organisation recognised as representative of black political thought. Already we have seen the impact of BLM on diasporic communities in Europe, building upon their growing influence on the citizenry of the United States. The Guardian writer Ellen Jones, salivating over the organisation, stated ‘It’s a movement that some analysts say is the biggest in US history. Between 15 and 26 million people participated in demonstrations following the death of George Floyd in May this year – and between then and August there were 7,750 demonstrations in all 50 states and Washington DC. Internationally, there have been protests in 60 countries and on every continent except Antarctica, with politicians from Boris Johnson to Justin Trudeau insisting that they, too, think “Black Lives Matter”.’[1]

Lofty achievements followed by high praise. Yet, outside of high numbers, famous names and a catchy phrase, is this a legitimate race-based organisation?

The organisation’s website states that BLM was ‘‘founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer.’[1] For seven years since the tragic incident, BLM has worked to ‘‘eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.’’ This certainly not a new agenda, particularly in the field of African American race politics; a sphere with a long history of resistance-based groups. Seemingly a traditional race-based organisation with a noble agenda and an optimistic program of upliftment for the descendants of Africa alone, historical staples of similar movements which rose and fell.

Yet, in the very next segment, those race-based pretensions are revealed as a grand fabrication. For BLM states, clearly and unequivocally, ‘We are a collective of liberators who believe in an inclusive and spacious movement. We also believe that in order to win and bring as many people with us along the way, we must move beyond the narrow nationalism that is all too prevalent in Black communities. We must ensure we are building a movement that brings all of us to the front.’ Not only in this a sharp diversion from the modus operandi of race-based organisations, the statement stands as a spectacular condemnation of black-centred movements. The most influential, race-based, organisation of the age is pursuing an agenda that endeavours to ‘move beyond’ what it describes as ‘narrow nationalism’ which is apparently ‘too prevalent in black communities’.

For those who have been awaiting the moment a serious organisation rises to resolve the plethora of issues that beset the black race globally, the endless déjà vu returns. Given that BLM speaks boldly of inclusivity and being an organisation that seeks to ‘bring as many people with us’, one can assume that the narrow nationalism they condemn is an ideology which seeks to assist black people alone. Horizons have clearly been broadened by this ‘collection of liberators’ that have yet to liberate a single person. As the protests, across North America, have shown a broad range of people have been involved in elevating the organisation. If the protests were about the callous manner in which black lives are taken, it has become clear that members of all races are united in their desire for a more just America. A noble endeavour, not one which should concern the best of Negrodom, however.

More Pan-liberal than Pan-African, more national reformers than global liberators; aside from the crime of false advertising, more serious charges emerge. There is a clear shift away from the traditional raison d’être of a race-based organisation: focusing on the issues of a particular race. The shift is toward what is described as a more ‘‘inclusive and spacious movement’’ which ‘‘centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.’’ Who, one reasonably asks, has been marginalised? ‘‘Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum,’’ BLM confirms.[1]

This brings us to the founders of BLM; Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Negrodom is informed that ‘‘BLM was formed in 2013 when Oakland-based organiser Alicia Garza felt moved to respond to the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman had the year before shot dead an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida, and Garza posted an impassioned message on Facebook. Patrisse Cullors shared the post with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and an inspired Tometi built the BlackLivesMatter.com website, choosing yellow and black as its signature colours. And with that a movement was born.’’[1] A message on Facebook, a hashtag posted, special colours chosen, and a website created; such is the horrifying ease with which it is possible to assume power over black masses.  

Marcus Garvey once wrote, of African American leaders of race-based organisations, that ‘‘Some Negro leaders have advanced the belief that in another few years the white people will make up their minds to assimilate their black populations; thereby sinking all racial prejudice in the welcoming of the black race into the social companionship of whites’’. Much time has passed since those words were uttered, in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Much has improved, yet racial prejudice remains, as does the belief of ‘‘Negro Leaders’’. It seems all that has altered is the shift from ‘‘some Negro leaders’’, to all. We can but wonder when Negrodom last produced a leader who said anything other than ‘keep whining and pining, white people will see how unjust they are soon’. From the US to the UK, we hear the same unabashed beggary slip from the mouths of those who have gained inglorious prominence. It is never truly about the black race, but about the body politic of the adopted country they call home.

Our Black Lives Matter triumvirate is no different. Tometi states, “In the US, we’ve overvalued punishment and invested heavily in apparatuses that criminalise our communities … But you could always say: ‘No, we can actually invest in caring for our community.’ That care can look like more resources for education, more resources for mental health programmes and so on.” This writer shall say it plainly, for the distinction has been lost and the decades tumble in ignominy. If you wish to promote liberal policies to create a more equal society in the West, join a left-wing political party; if you wish to liberate Negrodom, build a race-based organisation dedicated to self-determination. The two are mutually exclusive, as our prominent people are either too weak, misguided or corrupt to distinguish between the two.

They must be, for history has shown that we are incapable of dovetailing the two without becoming seduced by the allure of the dominant culture. Those who begin a journey of liberating the black man oft find that after a few steps they prefer the road which leads to reforming the white man. What begins in earnest ends in ignominy. We have now had a long enough history in both the Democratic and Labour parties to allow the veil to slip completely. There is no true interest in self-determination but in collective improvement. They talk boldly of reform, but what exactly is to be reformed Negrodom or the West?

BLM ‘activist’ Chi Ossé, confirmed his ‘‘bid to serve as a Gen Z member of the New York city council, and call on a young, multiracial coalition of progressives across the country to step forward as well.’’[1] More suited to the Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ hats, than the kente cloth now so popular, the faux revolutionaries all want the same direful aim, to improve the West while issuing bold statements about a Negrodom they refuse to serve. Reaching the delusional zenith attained throughout Negrodom, Ossé claims ‘‘We have invested far too much in this country, both willingly and unwillingly, to not finish the job. We built this ship. It is our right to sail it, and our duty to point it in the right direction.’’[2] Never, in the history of mankind, has there been a case of victims so enthralled with their abuser and so perverted by the abuse that they received that they consider it their duty to improve their abuser.

The desire to forge our own path has long ceased to exist, those who now rise to prominence are a testament to that fact. The trusted lines are read from the old script, deploring the fate of black people and urging change. Fame arrives, the script is no more, and we discover that this change is to national institutions. The faux revolutionaries become members of the same institutions they once condemned, for ‘change from within’ will inevitably occur. While little alters, the fame acquired by the individual grants them a lifestyle that they could not have acquired without the revolutionary act.

Black Lives Matter UK gained legal status and renamed itself Black Liberation Movement UK, knowing well they shall not liberate a single person.[1] A list of those to receive a share of the £1.2 million, in donations, being handed out to ‘Black interest groups’ by BLM has been named. It is a who’s who of inconsequential charities, support groups and labour unions. An examination of the saddening list brings the reader to the conclusion set forth in this article, there is not a single serious organisation dedicated to the uplift of the race alone.[2] United Family and Friends Campaign, the organisation to receive the largest donation (£45,000) state the following on their website: ‘Established in 1997 initially as a network of black families, over recent years the group has expanded and now includes the families and friends of people from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds.’[3] How familiar this sounds, what begins with aiding only Negrodom ends with ‘varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds’. AZ Mag, recipients of £7,500, is a ‘arts and culture initiative for LGBTQ+ people of colour. Independent Workers of Great Britain, receiving £15,00, is a trade union that does not even bother to mention black people on its ‘who we are page’. The Ebony Muse encourages each person to examine the list, for there are recipients (Sistah Space) that carry out good national work, none however carry out revolutionary work. 

In the United Kingdom, The Joint Committee on Human Rights published another report into the investigation of the state of black grievances in England on 11th November 2020. A long mournful list of some of the reports commissioned which ‘‘have investigated and found, structural racial inequalities’’ is presented to the readers. The Macpherson Report (1999), The Angiolini Review (2017), The McGregor-Smith Review (2017), The Lammy Review (2017), Race Disparity Audit (2017), and the Windrush Lessons Learned Review (2020). Over two decades worth of the assimilational merry-go-round, with no end in sight. The BLM answer to this conundrum is the grand strategy of protests, marches, and risible funding of grassroots organisations with little power and no revolutionary aims.

‘‘The professional Negro leader and the class who are agitating for social equality feel that it is too much work for them to settle down and build up a civilization of their own. They feel it is easier to seize on to the civilization of the white man and under the guise of constitutional rights fight for those things that the white man has created. Natural reason suggests that the white man will not yield them, hence such leaders are but fools for their pains.’’ Wrote Marcus Garvey, a revolutionary who died eighty-one years ago. His remarks are as pertinent now as they were in the interwar years. There is much discussion surrounding the funders of BLM and the questions this raises about the sincerity of the leadership. There is no need to follow the trail of money to unveil BLM as a farce. What we have is an organisation that seeks to make war on internal institutions rather than create their own, encouraging an outpouring of anecdotes of how white people have made us feel. In search of white sympathy and the social benefits which may be proffered by the guilt-ridden, an unending list of dishonourable faux revolutionaries have stepped forth.

Otegha Uwagba, another revolutionary with products to sell declares, ‘‘I’ve spent my entire life treading around white people’s feelings’’.[1] “I just wanted to communicate the burden of whiteness, the mental and emotional trauma,” Uwagba says pitifully. Perhaps the profits from her book ‘Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods’ will heal her trauma; as Frederick the Great said of Empress Maria Theresa, ‘‘she wept, but she took.’’ The comedian John Boyega, after a magnum opus at the London protests, has declared that he is petrified white people will no longer hire him.[2] Tineka Smith, another selling a book, has revealed that ‘‘Black Lives Matter changed my life, and my interracial marriage, for the better.’’[3] Mrs Hirsch, darling of the faux revolutionary class, also with a book on sale, wrote teary-eyed that ‘‘the graves of the enslaved are still being desecrated.’’[4] Mrs Hirsch, as a preposterous agony aunt, publishes regular malefic answers in The Guardian addressing the sorrows of the newspapers black readers. None ever write to her, she soldiers on manfully nonetheless, creating her own set of sorrows to address.[5]  Lewis Hamilton, selling little but his soul, has revealed that ‘‘Watching George Floyd brought up so much suppressed emotion.’’. What Hamilton failed to confirm was that it was in-fact his blackness that, suppressed for thirty-five years, had suddenly made an appearance. Just in time, for Hamilton was named the United Kingdoms ‘most influential black person’ of 2020.

The disgracefully named ‘Powerlist’, topped comically by a sportsman and including the befuddled Mrs Hirsh, is released each year with abominable fanfare. Not a single person on the list is the head, or even a member, of an organisation with the sole aim of enhancing the global standing of black people. We are to celebrate sportsmen, musicians, journalists, editors, and television historians as our most powerful people, all the while knowing they have no standing in the corridors of power. The ‘Powerlist’ is little more than an annual reminder of the sorrowful state of the black race. Alongside this cabal of entertainers is a group more lamentable than any other, completing the top ten. Dame Donna Kinnair, Prof Kevin Fenton, Jacqueline McKenzie, Richard Iferenta are all laden with fabulous titles. Two directors, a partner, and a chief executive; each a paragon of the assimilation project, all in organisations that do nothing to aid Negrodom.

The black Dames and OBE’s, in accepting base honours, indulge in the old quid pro quo of servility in exchange for acceptance (four of the seven on the ‘Powerlist’ Judging Panel have received either OBE’s or MBE’s).[1] However, the intelligentsia is an essential element of any revolution which occurs. They are often in the vanguard, leading the way forward for those less educated. Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, ensured hundreds of teachers, scholars and civil servants within the Turkish intelligentsia were jailed in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt. In 2020 many of those arrested were jailed for life.[2] Such is the threat a serious intellectual class can pose. What we have instead, across all Negrodom, is a class of faux revolutionaries imbued with inertia.

‘There lives not three good men unhanged in England’, Falstaff lamented in Henry IV, ‘A bad world, I say.’ David Olusoga, a questionable historian and member of the repugnant power ten, spoke of the ‘‘exhilarating and humbling’’ moment when he was offered an OBE.[4]  After naming other black sycophants who have accepted an OBE, Olusogoa in a long article in which he pretends to have contemplated declining the Oder of The British Empire declared, ‘I dislike the link to empire, but it felt wrong to turn down an OBE.’ There live unhanged a plethora of faux revolutionaries, the hangman has long taken leave of his duty, perhaps in search of a single good man or woman throughout all Negrodom.

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‘These are days of shaking and this shaking is universal.’

Jeremiah Whittaker

The great virus of the 21st Century has brought immense suffering to societies across the globe, sparing no country the destructive consequences of its arrival. For those interested in politics, it has been an interesting period in which to observe the responses of governments to the virus. The author writes just a week after a dramatic diplomatic row, between the European Union and Great Britain, over the delivery of vaccines with each polity striving to secure future wellbeing of their threatened populations.

So enraged was the EU at the mere prospect of British advantage that European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen invoked Article 16. Attempting to erect a vaccine border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the commission president took dramatic action which caused a political furore and threatened the Good Friday Agreement. Nigel Dodds, DUP raconteur, accused the EU of a ‘‘hostile nationalistic approach’’, declaring with glee ‘‘The EU has behaved atrociously.’’[1] Former Prime Minister Tony Blair described the approach as ‘‘very foolish’’[2] and British Press engaged in characteristic nationalistic triumphalism once the EU relented. ‘‘No, EU can’t have our jabs!’’ Roared the Daily Mail, “Wait your turn!” the Daily Express demanded, ‘‘Vaccine Victory’’ proclaimed the Sunday People, ‘‘Boris Toasts Another Big Brexit Bonus’’ proclaimed the Sunday Express.[3]

After swift condemnation and a retreat from the European Union, von der Leyen delivered a warning to the pharmaceutical company and the hostile country at the centre of the vaccine delivery dispute. ‘‘The EU and others helped with money to build research capacities and production facilities. Europe invested billions to help develop the world’s first Covid-19 vaccines. To create a truly global common good. And now, the companies must deliver. They must honour their obligations.’’[1] Far from being cowered by British hubris, ‘‘Europe is determined to contribute. But it also means business.”

According to Statista, ‘‘As of February 3, 2021, there were 1,053 drugs and vaccines in development targeting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).[1] None are being prepared by African companies, examined by African regulators, nor sponsored by African governments. If Europe means business, it is as ever clear that Africa does not. ‘‘Coronavirus vaccines offer the world hope – unless you live in Africa’’, Guardian author Kenan Malik stated without a hint of irony, clarifying by confirming that ‘‘All the people who have received a jab in Africa could fit comfortably on the top deck of a London bus.’’[2] What makes this deplorable statistic unforgivably contemptible is that all twenty-five are from a single country, Guinea. This leaves fifty-three countries without a single vaccinated person in February 2021. Yet, only in May 2020, the faux-revolutionary Afua Hirsh published another of her unceasing pleas for white recognition in the Guardian titled ‘Why are Africa’s coronavirus successes being overlooked?’[3] With the entire continent now awaiting a vaccine it cannot afford, nor manufacture, her words must ring hollow to the billion people in Africa and millions more in the Caribbean.

The revelation that power is at the heart of Coronavirus responses has seriously complicated matters for a continent of nations which relies on the financial and moral goodwill of the remaining continents. A ‘global race’ is underway to produce, utilise and export vaccines and Africa can do little but sit and wait for those involved to hand down surplus produce to countries that cannot afford to manufacture their own or pay for those made abroad. Guardian Health Editor, Sarah Boseley informs us that, ‘‘Pfizer offered to sell the vaccine to South Africa at a 50% discounted price of $10 a shot, but was told the cost was still prohibitive.’’[1] The cry of racism was inevitably raised, as it was revealed that the discounted price was twice as much as European nations were being quoted. Three western vaccines have been approved, not a single African vaccine is even in production. As von der Leyen stated clearly, the EU have paid into a system and thus shall reap the benefits. Africa does not have a comparative system and has not paid into the European one, thus shall not. This is simply one of many consequences of inept governance. What beggary can solve in normality, it is unable to amid a global health and financial crisis.

While on the vaccine analysis maps Africa lays bare, the world is awash the colour of recovery. China, India and Russia have led the way in challenging Anglo-American domination, with vaccines already produced or manufactured nationally being sold internationally.[2] The nations beneath the tier of the great powers, the ‘middle-income nations’ are also striving to ensure they have access to a vaccine. Emergency approval has been given to the Chinese vaccine, made by Sinopharm, by Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey has already purchased the vaccine. The Guardian reported that ‘‘Seven countries have now given emergency authorisation to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine or the Serum Institute version: the UK, India, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico and Morocco. The Carlos Slim Foundation in Mexico is licensed by AstraZeneca to supply 150m doses to Latin America. These countries could take delivery right away.’’[3]

Those who have the infrastructure to manufacture vaccines have been able to gain an advantage, national facilities in Korea, Thailand and Australia are being used to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine. With ambitions to join the top-tier of nations and the worlds eighth-largest economy, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro wrote to Indian Prime minister, Narendra Modi to ensure the two million doses the nation has ordered arrives with haste. The doses will supplement the ten million does of the Russian vaccine, Sputnik.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been consistently voicing their concern for the 1.3 billion Africans residing in the continent since the virus began. An alliance of charitable societies has merged to ensure that those who are unable to produce or purchase the initial vaccine for themselves are not left without any means of survival. According to the WHO, ‘The global initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO), Gavi the Vaccine Alliance and The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) aims to start shipping nearly 90 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the continent in February, in what will be Africa’s largest-ever mass vaccination campaign.’[1] It is no surprise to any who has followed the affairs of the African continent that it is Western entities which will be leading this historic campaign.

Fifty-four governments are unable to afford more than twenty-five vials of the vaccine, while healthcare workers protest[1], hospitals run out of oxygen[2], and the beggarly governments benefit from debt suspension initiatives from the World Bank.[3] Observers of the maladroit state of African governance are forced to continually ask, what exactly are African politicians doing in office? One has to wonder whether there has ever been a political class imbued with such ineptitude and lethargy, this history graduate certainly struggles to find a comparison. Cyril Ramaphosa, President of a South Africa that cannot afford the vaccine, confirmed that ‘‘arrangements had been made with the African Export Import Bank (Afreximbank) to support member states who want access to the vaccines.’’[4] Members of the African Union will be eligible to ‘‘access about $5 billion either to buy more vaccines or pay for delivery of vaccines committed on their behalf by Afreximbank.’’.

Let us be clear, the GAVI Vaccine being bestowed upon Africa is a bargain vaccine being given to the poorest countries in the world, lest they impact the recovery of the affluent nations. Those without the means to purchase, manufacture, or approve the leading vaccines are being given a vaccine approved by the WHO regulatory body. Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, said “Africa has watched other regions start COVID-19 vaccination campaigns from the side-lines for too long. This planned roll-out is a critical first step to ensuring the continent gets equitable access to vaccines,”.[5] Whoever does not feel shame at this point never shall. Nor is this the first time, as regular observers know, that an external philanthropic Western organisation has been forced to safeguard the African population from a virus that African governments can do little to control.[6] When Africa is sick, the West cures her. When Africa is beggarly the West loans her money. When Africa cannot repay its loans, the west provides debt relief packages for her. This inglorious sequence of affairs, repeating itself with such shameful frequency, has acquired a sense of odious permanency. The inglorious sequence has become the very nourishment sustaining a putrefying ruling class. In these days of shaking, Africa as ever remains in a languorous state, sleepwalking through the inexorable sequence which bounds her to the base of the world.

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‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’

Benjamin Disraeli

 

 

To beg is to ‘Ask for (something) earnestly or humbly’, as defined in the Oxford Dictionary.

The social unrest in America, following the murder of George Floyd, highlighted the fact that the African American community have not yet received the social justice they have asked for on many an occasion. At its simplest, the protests are a manifestation of the anger within that community at not being granted what they have asked for. As former basketball player and social commentator Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stated, ‘Hope that America was finally committed to racial equity,’ was badly damaged and therefore the there was a need to ask for that commitment to be honoured. To beg. This earnest request manifested in protests throughout the country, producing spectacular images of intrepidity, acknowledgement from certain quarters of officialdom and a re-emergence of hope that what was asked for would again be forthcoming. George Floyd was murdered on 25th May, by the 23rd August when another black man, Jacob Blake, was shot callously by a police officer it was again clear that after asking earnestly for almost three months the request for ‘racial equity’ had not yet been granted. And so, what else, but to return to asking for this elusive racial equity

[image error]‘Hope in the black community took a big hit this week. The small sun set quickly. The dying ember had been extinguished’, Abdul-Jabbar said after the shooting. Abdul-Jabbar is important, as this article shall focus upon the next act of the never-ending play of Beg, Hope and Denial. The former Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers player goes on to write glowingly of the decision taken by the Milwaukee Bucks to boycott game five of the NBA playoffs. For it led to NBA and WNBA teams boycotting games and other sports which soon followed suit. There were also boycotts in Major League Soccer, Major League Baseball, and tennis, raising global awareness of the injustices suffered by African Americans. We had our stage.

‘When we take the court and represent Milwaukee and Wisconsin, we are expected to play at a high level, give maximum effort and hold each other accountable. We hold ourselves to that standard, and in this moment, we are demanding the same from our lawmakers and law enforcement.’ Read the statement from the Milwaukee Bucks, ‘We are calling for justice for Jacob Blake and demand the officers be held accountable. For this to occur, it is imperative for the Wisconsin State Legislature to reconvene after months of inaction and take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.’ In the heady days of social unrest, begging has been transformed into demanding. Yet, has it really?

A demand is ‘An insistent and peremptory request, made as of right.’

The Milwaukee Bucks, a franchise formed in 1968, are certainly not renowned for demanding that the Wisconsin State Legislature convene to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform; not insistent then. The justice sought is called for in a manner which implies a need for immediate rectification; however, the boycott was not intrinsically linked with the resumption of games by the players; not peremptory then.

Nonetheless, with twenty-four-hour news and social media such actions reverberate across the digital world, heightening expectations and embellishing deeds in the minds of populations which consume media. With such high-profile figures, within billion-dollar industries, taking a stand the possibility of tangible change seemed tantalisingly real. Never before has such a public act of defiance been perpetuated by sports figures known across the world, in the name of justice for the African-American community. Not since the 1968 Olympics, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos, rose their fists in protest had sport entered the realm of politics, so spectacularly, focussing the attention on a racial issue. ‘And just like that, the ember of hope was flickering to life again,’ Abdul-Jabbar gushed before the world in his article for The Guardian.

And just like that, Act 1,000,000, Scene 1 of the never-ending play was ready for the stage.

With the scene set, the National Basketball Association management and the players held a meeting to discuss the fate of the season. With the NBA season seemingly upon the bring of collapse, the notion that high-profile sports stars can turn the tide of history began to gain touching credence. Perhaps the brave players of the NBA would sit out the entire season; instead of ‘no peace, no justice’, could it become ‘no peace, no sport’.? With players such as Lebron James, of the LA Lakers, a ‘trailblazer and powerful spokesman for racial justice, for so many years’ the possibilities seemed limitless. The posturing reached heights unseen, forcing the audience to believe that they witness something truly meaningful. We had our star actors.

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In tennis, former world number one, Naomi Osaka, spoke from her heart and informed the world that ‘Watching the continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police is honestly making me sick to my stomach. I’m exhausted of having a new hashtag pop up every few days and I’m extremely tired of having this same conversation over and over again. When will it ever be enough?” Surely, with the giants of the sports world unified, enough was finally enough. ‘This week American athletes demanded better. And rekindled our hope in America,’ Abdul-Jabbar stated, encapsulating the heightened feelings the enthralled audience. ‘I know people get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as Black people in America,’, the self-proclaimed ‘King James’ admitted, ‘Black men, Black women, Black kids, we are terrified.’ Seldom do those who are ‘terrified’ for their lives demand, they often beg those who are threatening their lives to stop.

Nonetheless, we must allow for artistic license in the theatre; the play moved on with haste, and in the intoxicating heat of the moment begging had apparently been swapped for demanding by those who postured on the world stage. Not for years had we seen a more spectacular rendition. The audience were convinced; the posturing had reached its apogee.

To posture is to ‘Behave in a way that is intended to impress or mislead.’

On the third day, we had reached the inevitable final scene. It was time for surrender.

It was reported that the race warriors in the NBA consulted, on their wartime stratagem, with former President Barack Obama, that favoured son of the farcical play. ‘When asked he was happy to provide advice on Wednesday night to a small group of NBA players seeking to leverage their immense platforms for good after their brave and inspiring strike in the wake of Jacob Blake’s shooting,’ his office reported. With Barry entering the stage, dramatically convening a council of war, we knew surrender would be both swift and abject. The first act had taken place on the 26th, it was announced on the 28th that on Saturday 29th the NBA playoffs would resume. If theatre enthusiasts were disappointed with the brevity of the show, they needed only to look to tennis to know that the NBA routine was actually a marathon performance in comparison. ‘Before I am an athlete, I am a black woman. And as a black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand that need immediate attention, rather than watching me play tennis,’ said Osaka on the 27th August. After a single day, Ms Osaka returned to playing, securing a 6-2, 7-6 victory over Elise Mertens on the 28th August. ‘I honestly haven’t been able to get that much sleep yesterday, so I was glad to win today,’ Osaka stated after her victory. Who can blame her for tiredness, after such a masterful performance in that favourite old play Beg, Hope and Denial; it was some show.

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The NBA returned to the stage, terms of surrender were presented to the audience as a ‘deal that includes increased access to voting in the U.S. presidential election’. Just when you thought you had seen every rendition, a new director appears and breathes comic life into that old play. In its review of the play, Reuters reported that, ‘As part of the agreement, the NBA and its players will establish a coalition that will focus on access to voting for the Nov. 3 general election, promoting civic engagement, and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.’ Reuters, in fact, does not do justice to the final scene. For NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver released the full terms of surrender www.cbssports.com with a statement, live on stage. The players have agreed to return to play in exchange for the establishment of a ‘social justice coalition’, the conversion of stadiums into ‘voting facilities’ and adverts ‘promoting greater civic engagement in national and local elections and raising awareness around voter access and opportunity.’ The statisticians in the audience break the silence; at least the numbers of voters will rise. They are silenced by those in the crowd who wait for something, anything, they can call a victory. The grand showpiece, of the deal which halted a revolution, an ‘NBA Foundation focused on economic empowerment in the Black community.’

A collective gasp of wonderment comes from the astonished audience, upon the edge of their seats in the ancient theatre, gripped by sight of brave warriors forced to accept abject terms of surrender. The great stand has fallen, and the grand hope amounted naught. They watch, teary-eyed, as the battle-hardened warriors ride home, remembering fondly their favourite scene; the warriors are welcomed home as heroes, terms of surrender are transformed into glorious victories and the populous dance with joy. Pitiful surrender is written into the play, even with new embellishments and elevated posturing the inevitable end cannot be escaped. The audience cannot help but be engrossed by the old tale. The applause for our actors, comes to a crescendo, reaching new heights of adoration; the inevitable encore will soon arrive. Our fearless actors will soon return.

Beyoncé, another famed actor from our beloved play, embellished with spurious royalty, informed black people that ‘We have to vote like our life depends on it, because it does’, and this latest performance, it is clear that our actors are convinced that the route to ‘racial equity’ is through American democratic processes. With ‘12.7 percent of the total population’ ,in America, it is difficult to understand what has prompted this latest comical twist in the plot. Yet when actors have the stage, such questions are but part of the ever-evolving plot. The audience must sit in anticipation, awaiting the next scene of our never-ending play. Fear not, the next farce will have the old ingredients; lies, damned lies and statistics.

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Bibliography

Abdul-Jabbar, K. (2020, August 28). Hope is a dying ember for black people in the US. Athletes have rekindled it. Retrieved from The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/28/kareem-abdul-jabbar-athlete-protests-nba-mlb-jacob-blake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhMR6XKUKuc (Director). (2020). Skip & Shannon react to LeBron’s flipped decision to cancel the NBA season | NBA | UNDISPUTED [Motion Picture].

Kaskey-Blomain, M. (2020, August 28). NBA playoffs will resume Saturday; players agree to form social justice coalition with coaches and owners. Retrieved from CBS SPORTS: https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/nba-playoffs-will-resume-saturday-players-agree-to-form-social-justice-coalition-with-coaches-and-owners/

McMenamin, D. (2020, August 25). LeBron James says Black community ‘terrified’ of police conduct. Retrieved from ESPN: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29735483/lebron-james-says-black-community-terrified-result-police-conduct

Naomi Osaka pulls out of Western & Southern semi in protest at racial injustice. (2020, August 27). Retrieved from The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/26/naomi-osaka-beats-kontaveit-in-three-and-reaches-western-southern-semi

Naomi Osaka reaches Western & Southern Open final after speaking out on racism. (2020, August 28). Retrieved from Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2020-08-28/naomi-osaka-reaches-western-southern-open-racial-injustice

Naomi Osaka takes U-Turn, decides to plays with Western & Southern Open after withdrawing to protest racism. (2020, August 28). Retrieved from The Statesman : https://www.thestatesman.com/sports/naomi-osaka-takes-u-turn-decides-plays-western-southern-open-withdrawing-protest-racial-injustice-1502920511.html

NBA to resume games after player protest, turn stadiums into voting sites. (2020, August 29). Retrieved from Reuters: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-basketball-nba-protests/nba-to-resume-games-after-player-protest-turn-stadiums-into-voting-sites-idUKKBN25O2JD

Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Spanish to English Translator. (n.d.). Retrieved from Lexico Powered by Oxford: https://www.lexico.com/definition/beg

Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Spanish to English Translator. (n.d.). Retrieved from Lexico: https://www.lexico.com/definition/demand

Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Spanish to English Translator. (n.d.). Retrieved from Lexico: https://www.lexico.com/definition/posture

Profile: Black/African Americans. (n.d.). Retrieved from US Department of Health and Humanities Services Office of Minority Health : https://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=61#:~:text=Profile%3A%20Black%2FAfrican%20Americans&text=Overview%20(Demographics)%3A%20In%20July,following%20the%20Hispanic%2FLatino%20population.

release, O. (2020, August 26). Milwaukee Bucks players’ statement following boycott of Game 5. Retrieved from NBA: https://www.nba.com/article/2020/08/26/milwaukee-bucks-players-statement-following-boycott-game-5

Robinson, I. (2020, August 29). Obama Advised NBA Players to Push for Social Justice Initiatives and Get Back in The Game. Retrieved from The Root: https://www.theroot.com/obama-advised-nba-players-to-get-back-in-the-game-and-p-1844891416?utm_source=theroot_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2020-08-30

Savage, M. (2020, June 29). Beyoncé’s BET speech: ‘Vote like our life depends on it’. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53217846

Scheiber, N. (2020, August 29). N.B.A. Protest Shows Who Calls the Shots in a Superstar Economy. Retrieved from The New York Times : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/business/economy/nba-players-strike-labor.html

 

‘Thou knowest in the state of innocence Adam fell;

What should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy?’

Sir Jack Falstaff – Henry IV, Part 1 

 

It is a strange thing indeed to live in an age where people openly acknowledge the death of ancient notions of honour; that they reside ‘in the days of villainy’. To acknowledge your epoch as an age bereft of uplifting principles is to admit that your society has failed to emerge victorious from the eternal struggle for societal justice. In such an age social injustice pervades society, inequality is woven into governmental institutions, state bodies oppress selected groups and those charged with their protection are as morally bankrupt as the establishment they represent. The impact of this moral bankruptcy on the populous as a whole is evident, as the moral fabric of a nation begins to disintegrate, societal harmony is greatly impacted. This polarisation of society between left and right, rich and poor, and native and immigrant creates a climate in which minorities face greater threats than in times of relative harmony.

This pattern can be seen in modernity by the instant upsurge of race related hate crimes which followed the Brexit vote, its subsequent nationalist result and the increase of nationalist movements across Europe. The political leaders and the turmoil they have brought forth in the United States, Latin America and Africa bear further evidence of the morally bankrupt age and their political beneficiaries.

What becomes of the men and women chosen to represent minorities in such an age? Do they, as Jack Falstaff, become men of the times and push the bounds of the neglectful moral framework of the age? Are they able to withstand the iniquitous deluge, retain ethical principles, and tower above their immoral contemporaries? Or do they retire to the shadows in disgust, live disinterested lives and look upon the days of villainy from an honourable distance?

Like Shakespeare’s Jack Falstaff, Chuka Umunna has decided to be a man of the age. Once proclaimed ‘the next Obama’, formerly ‘the next labour leader’, then hailed as ‘the inbetweener’, Umunna is able to navigate through the days of villainy with perverse ease. A political lothario, he has awoken from a myriad of regretful drunken stupors in strange beds, turning to face repellent bedfellows almost nightly.

[image error]BRISTOL, ENGLAND – APRIL 23: Sarah Wollaston MP, Chuka Umunna MP, Anna Soubry MP and Heidi Allen MP at the launch of The Independent Group European election campaign.

From the beds of Stella Creasy to Anna Soubry to Jo Swinson the inbetweener has willingly begun mornings with a plethora of political walks of shame. Yet, it is clear that no shame is felt by the unrepentant Umunna. With Negrodom in a perilous state he long decided that Brexit is the foremost political issue in the world. For the weekly slaughter of black adolescents, continued socio-economic peril and cultural degradation of the black community could not compare to the necessity of a ‘people’s vote’ on the final Brexit deal.

As a result, he joined a cabal of disaffected and maligned politicians in creating a new political party, Change UK; he was the only member who was not white. We heard not of one change this party intended to initiate which would have been directed at the black community to which Umunna owes his allegiance.

[image error]Chuka Umunna & former Liberal Democrats Leader Jo Swinson

Not content with abandoning one party, he crossed the floor once more to join the mendacious Liberal Democrats, sensing that the delusional Jo Swinson would provide him a route back to power. She did not. We hear nothing from Umunna now, now that power is not on offer, and now that the Black community requires leadership. He has, in fact, never spoken or acted in the defence of the black community in Britain. With no political gain in aiding the black community, the quasi-Machiavelli has seemingly concluded that he will concern himself with matters of greater political gain.

‘Part of the reason that I joined the Labour party, that my family supported the party’, says Umunna, ‘was because it was an anti-racist party. I think the failure to deal with the racism that is anti-Semitism is particular, and clearly is a problem.’ Again, the question must be posed, what of the black community of which he is supposed to be a member? Not a word from Umunna. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Labour Party has a racism issue. A leaked report has documented the ‘hierarchy of racism’ within the party and the racist insults which its black members are subjected to. Umunna, a member of the Labour Party for nine years, never said a single word on the matter, neither during nor after his membership. Is Umunna the first black man in history to resign from a post because of racism that was not aimed at his own racial group? And while racism was being aimed at the racial group of which his is a member.

[image error]Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Chuka Umunna , during a protest against anti-Semitism in the Labour party in Parliament Square, London, as Jewish community leaders have launched a scathing attack on Jeremy Corbyn, claiming he has sided with anti-Semites “again and again”.

It is as if being black, or mixed-raced, is now little more than an exotic footnote. It comes with no obligations, sense of duty, revolutionary inclinations or unifying principles. One is simply black, or mixed- raced, tout court. He or she inevitably has tales of childhood poverty, absent fathers, club nights and societal oppression to regale the non-black population with. These hallmarks of authenticity are no longer unifying bonds which bound an oppressed community and produced leaders which sought to liberate the bedraggled masses. They are now little more than anecdotes used to strike awe in the viewer at the magnificence of the individual’s journey. However, this journey seldom ends in a place of benefit to the black community as a whole.

[image error]Chuka Umunna & Wife Alice Sullivan

Although his Nigerian father arrived in the United Kingdom with ‘very little money’ and he ‘started off washing cars’, Umunna tells us proudly that ‘I was the first black shadow cabinet member in Britain ever appointed in 2011.’ Other than the members of the Umunna family, one has to consider how many black people this historic appointment aided. Was there a single black person in Britain who received a tangible benefit from living in a country with a black shadow cabinet member?  If so, one would have to scour the length and breadth of the country to locate them. We are forced to conclude then that, as is always the case, this appointment did more for the ego of Umunna than the black community. He alone is not guilty of the contemptible crime of vanity, yet his acceptance of the title of ‘black’ and his subsequent inaction in the name of blackness make him and any like him guilty enough for condemnation. If the Black British community cannot look to black politicians, born and raised in South London, of the compassionate left, to address their social problems, who exactly can they look to in government?

‘There’s institutional racism in many institutions in our county,’ says Umunna ‘and if you simply leave the field, as it were, instead of try and argue and see change through in an organisation, then I’m not sure you always make progress.’ This is an astonishing statement from a man who has never even bothered to look upon, let alone set foot upon the field in defence of Negrodom. Considering that his track record on black issues is shamefully nonexistent, and the continued impact of institutional racism on the black community, Umunna’s assertion is unbelievably galling.

He is a general who speaks boldly of wars he has valiantly fought, only in his mind, all the while those beneath his charge perish in the actual field of war. Umunna sees a bloody war ongoing in his native South London and thinks only of the corridors of power in Brussels and Westminster as he marches in the opposite direction. Ignoring the wails of mothers who no longer have sons, ‘food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better’, he consoles himself while witnessing the police cordons surrounding another dead black boy lying on the street. ‘Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men,’ he whispers as he saunters into the Lib Dem HQ, knowing well he shall not utter a word of the death he has seen to his bourgeois friends lest they remember that he resembles the murderous black youth of London.

After being dubbed a ‘spear chucker’ by the very nationals whose country he wishes to heroically save, Umunna boldly stated that ‘I don’t think anyone should give any quarter.’ The words ring so hollow as to be farcical, for by now the black community knows well that Umunna has no interest in the battles waged against it. ‘There are very few black politicians and the difference between me and the politicians whose shoulder I stand on is that I come from a middle-class background’, Chuka said candidly. Alas, such are the consequences of the days of villainy, where dishonest parvenus stand aloofly on the shoulders of the oppressed masses they are honour bound to represent. After all, ‘Thou knowest in the state of innocence Adam fell’; what should treacherous Chuka Ummuna do in the days of villainy?

[image error]Sir Jack Falstaff – BBC Adaptation

 

Bibliography

BLUNDY, R. (2015, June 24). Chuka Umunna targeted by racist online trolls after saying Ukip supporters ‘can’t use computers’. Retrieved from Evening Standard: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/chuka-umunna-targeted-by-racist-online-trolls-after-saying-ukip-supporters-cant-use-computers-9560799.html

Gayle, D. (2020, August 13). Hierarchy of racism’ fears threaten Starmer’s hopes of Labour unity. Retrieved from The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/13/hierarchy-of-racism-fears-threaten-starmers-hopes-of-labour-unity

Hasan, M. (2015, May 12). Huffington Post. Retrieved from Huffington Post: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03/16/budget-2013-chuka-umunna-_n_2893235.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFcx4hgj8dIfCj4Z_sCk2zlgsBh_4Urv9K9PZ-Q76FLvPU4XDzrBxXDFAO3R9RBd0nR-FdkoKVdyNCfXxT21UaO7F

Shakespeare, W. (2008). The Oxford Shakespeare Henry IV Part One . New York: Oxford University Press.

Ummuna, C. (2018, June). The Inbetweener. (T. Lewis, Interviewer)

 

 

‘Nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman;

it is, at once, the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things.’

  Frances Burney

 

 

In the historic relationship between the European and African, which has encompassed centuries, continents and oceans, it has been widely recognised that the African and Africa itself suffered what would today be known as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The arrival of European traders in Africa, in the fifteenth century, was the beginning of a period of plunder, war, conquest, enslavement, trade, annexation and nefarious racial dominance which would last officially for five centuries. The well documented fate of Africa, both mournful and engrossing, led to the enslavement, torture, mutilation, rape and death of millions; with regions such as the Belgian Congo able to boast up to fifteen million dead Africans alone. From Africa, engulfing the Caribbean colonies, to the Americas and Europe the treatment of Africans and their descendants bore a striking similarity, reaching oppressive and repressive heights.

Amidst the conquest, murder and enslavement, driven by Social Darwinism and enacted by zealous believers in racial superiority, was the ever-present act of rape. An act in which one person unmistakably enforces their dominance upon another. That dominance, while nominally sexual, can also accentuate other forms of domination which induces the person to carry out such an act. In a society in which white men and women stood unmistakably atop each hierarchy, and black men and women cowed at the bottom, supremacy was a fact of the age woven into the fabric of international civilisation. The black woman then, in an age in which women were automatically considered inferior to men, featured even lower than their male counterparts and was therefore at the mercy of a dominant race bereft of any form of protection.

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‘For white men, black women were ‘forbidden fruit’; sexual relations between black and white could create ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure; from which white women were excluded’, claims one historian, failing to mention that there is no power or pleasure for those who are raped. However, the exclusion of white women from this degrading interaction is important in understanding the elevation of the white women and the debasement of the black women. If white women were lofty, beautiful, pure, genteel, virtuous, respectable, pious, modest, chaste and sexually obtainable through marriage; the black woman was the opposite. Base, beastly, exotic, impure, uncivilised, wild, ungodly, cunning, desirable, salacious and sexually obtainable at any time, whether willing or not. The black woman was a mere object of revulsion and attraction, available for sampling by any who desired.

‘By the late eighteenth century, it was commonly accepted that black women were ‘hot constitution’d ladies’, very free in their favours, ‘so great was their inclination to white men.’  This ‘inclination’, as discussed above, amounted to the powerless being forced to cede their bodies to the powerful lest they feel the full force of the dominant race. It was noted above that Europeans arrived in the fifteenth century; the reader can reach their own conclusions about the acts which took place over three centuries of sexual conquest for Europeans to hold at such an opinion of black women.

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This mindset has continued into the twenty-first century with the UN Peacekeepers continuing the sordid tradition by raping African women, men and children to such an extent that the UN was forced to issue a ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’. This author has written about the extent to which this scandal has impacted African society, with cases of sexual assault and rape in The Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Mozambique, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The Associated Press unveiled that between 2004 and 2016, almost 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse were made against UN peacekeepers. African governments, far from ousting the rapists, are complicit in the degradation of African women with their inaction despite the harm being done to their citizens.

African governments have gone further in their complicity, however. The treatment of women in Africa, by African men, has become so openly reprehensible that the governments have no moral right or desire to condemn the UN. African governments themselves have replaced the European institutions in the vanguard of abuse toward the black woman. All across Africa women live in constant fear of abuse from men who are encouraged by society to consider them worthless beings. This repulsive notion is disseminated to the populous from officialdom who by their continued actions embolden the rest of society to emulate their physical dominance over women. This is having devastating impact throughout the continent.

In Zimbabwe three women, who are activists for the opposition, have accused government agents of kidnapping them and subjecting them to rape and torture. Joanna Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova were on-route to a peaceful protest on the 13th May when they were stopped at a police checkpoint. Almost forty-eight hours later they were dumped in a marketplace sixty miles from where they were taken. The leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change’s youth section were pictured in hospital following the episode. The MDC have been subjected to repression, for decades, by both Mugabe and his successor, Mnangagwa. In seeking to repress the opposition, throughout years of tyrannical rule, the virtue of women has been weaponised.

[image error] The women gave detailed accounts of their treatment while being held. After being kidnapped, the three were subjected to an ordeal which included continuous beatings, sexual assaults with firearms, and being forced to drink each other’s urine. The state, far from condemning the acts and taking action against the perpetrators, simply dismissed the claims as a fantasy and arrested the women. Instead of receiving justice, the women are instead facing up to ten years in prison for ‘making false statements prejudicial to the state’. This is the way women are being treated by their governments in Africa. An Africa with governments which kowtow pitifully before a world full of external aggressors, yet who only seem to find strength when oppressing their women.

The ‘UN experts’, have condemned the heinous actions of the Zimbabwean Government and called for the Government to ‘urgently prosecute and punish the perpetrators of this outrageous crime, and to immediately enforce a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ for abductions and torture throughout the country’. Presumably, these are the same experts who investigated the thousands of cases of abuse by their own UN ‘peacekeepers’ in Africa and are therefore exceedingly well versed in such matters. The farcical nature of the UN reproving the Zimbabwean Government for acts they both continue to commit reveals the scale of the problem facing the women of Africa. If their own governments sanction and perpetuate abuse and the overseer of global Human rights does the same, where can women go for assistance?

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If history has taught black women that they are not safe in the presence of white men, modernity has reinforced the fact that neither are they safe in the presence of black men.

In Nigeria, a spike of rape cases has given rise to the #wearetired movement. Africa News reported that ‘Barakat Bello was raped and killed in her home; Vera Uwa Omozuwa was killed in her church in Benin City, southern Nigeria and a 12-year-old girl was raped by 11 men in Jigawa, northern Nigeria’. These high-profile cases took place in the months of May and June alone, sparking outrage in the country. The twenty-two year-old university student, Omozuwa, was ‘brutally raped and bludgeoned to death’. Another young life pitilessly taken in a society which does not value its female population. These gruesome incidents led to protests, an online petition and complaints about the inadequate Nigerian legal system. It is the inadequate men of Africa, who preside over and construct the society which so abuses women who must shoulder the entirety of the blame.

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Thirty-six year old, Wanda Ebe, was raped by her doctor after undergoing survey when a twenty-one student at university. When asked, by the interviewer why she did not report the crime, Ms Ebe responded that ‘I did not even know that rape cases were to be reported to the police.” This is society in Africa; the society we have created for our women, where they do not even know that the worst crimes are criminal. So powerful and overarching is the notion that men are able to do whatever they wish to black women free of reprisals, that women themselves have been indoctrinated and live their lives believing that they are not beings of value. Globally, authorities report that women are reluctant to report the heinous crime of rape, for a plethora of understandable reasons. However, nowhere, other than in Africa are women unaware that rape even warrants reporting. The response of Ms Ebe lays bare the fact that the voices of women are so unheard, they no longer know when they are obliged to speak out. This is the result of unabashed tyranny, so detestable that it has demolished the dignity of women.

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It would be difficult to comprehend how country with a population of 195 million, in 2017, had zero convictions for rape. Further, it would also be incomprehensible that 2,279 reported cases manifested in zero convictions in a country. Unless that country was in Africa and the women were black. It becomes completely comprehensible when these two elements are added to an initially confusing conundrum.

 

Lesotho’s Prime Minister Thomas Thabane, is to be charged with the murder of his former wife Lipolelo Thabane, who was shot dead in June 2017. The former first lady was shot in a car by a gunman, while the couple were going through divorce proceedings which had become increasing acrimonious. The Prime Minister is accused of arranging the murder alongside his current wife, Maesaiah Thabane, who he married two months after the death of Lipolelo. The Guardian reported that ‘Lipolelo Thabane, 58, was shot several times at close range as she sat in a car near her home, two days before husband’s inauguration in 2017. She had reportedly refused a divorce and won a court battle to retain her privileges as first lady until any formal separation.’

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What would, in any accountable society, be seen as cause for an immediate resignation and subsequent imprisonment is something entirely different Africa. The president failed to appear in court, his Private Secretary casually claiming that ‘He is not attending court, he has gone for a medical check-up in South Africa’. Such is gravity with which the murder of black women are treated by officialdom that in response to this criminality the Deputy Commissioner of Police said ‘We shall wait until he becomes available and we shall arrange that he comes here and appears before the court of law and be formally charged.’ It is absolutely extraordinary, unheard of any society, for prosecuting authorities to wait patiently until those arraigned on charges are conveniently available. Yet, why exert yourself in pursuit of justice for black women? Based upon the evidence, who actually cares?

Returning to Zimbabwe, in 2019. comedian Samantha Kureya, after being critical of the government in her comedy skits, was kidnapped, stripped, sexual assaulted and forced to drink sewage. Three hours later, she was found discarded ‘in the bush’. From North to South, East to West, Zimbabwe to Nigeria the notion that black women are worthless seems nefariously ingrained into the minds of men.

Unfortunately, this outlook has journeyed across the world with the diasporic community, subjecting black women across the world to an identical fate. In Jamaica, Nevia Sinclair, after going to bed, was murdered after her ex-boyfriend entered the family home, picked up a kitchen knife and murdered the Secretary of the National Works Agency. In an age where the descendants of Africa look increasingly for notions which unify them, the contempt for women within the race seems to be the foremost unifier. As discussed above, the belief that black women are beings of sexual pleasure to be conquered and commanded is an old notion which black men continue to breathe life into, ensuring its damaging continuance.

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Neville Sinclair, father of the deceased, is Senior Justice of The Peace. Nothing could be more farcical that the Senior Justice of The Peace awaking from his bed to find his daughter savagely murdered within his home. The reader should remember that Lipolelo Thabane was wife of the Prime Minister. Joanna Mamombe, one of the abused Zimbabwean trio, was a member of Parliament. ‘They were pouring water on us. They beat us if we stopped. They made us drink each other’s urine. They were fondling Cecilia,’ the MP told reporters from her hospital bed. No rank, no wealth, not even modernity can spare the black woman from the fate of her ancestors, to be used and then disposed of like an animal. For men have so little respect for them that they are not safe in society and must live in constant fear of suffering the fate of the women who feature in this article. If those of prominence are treated so contemptuously, what hope then is there for the unknown woman from the city, township or village?

Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) Corporal Doran McKenzie, a soldier with over a decade of military experience, returned to his home and murdered his partner, Suianne Easy. The body of Ms Easy was reportedly ‘riddled with chop and bullet wounds’ after being viciously murdered, before the corporal turned the gun on himself. A confidante of the killer, in an interview, stated that ‘Satan was there with him last night’ in a forlorn attempt to explain the horrific actions.

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What was in the corporal is that which is permitted and prevalent in men when interacting with black women. An innate belief that they are superior to a highly sexualised being, who is little more than an object to abuse and dispose of once pleasure has been obtained. If nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman, men both black and white have ensured that it was unmercifully tarnished long ago. Once embellished with beauty, what was brittle has been destroyed and as a result the black woman is at once considered by men as a disposable being, to be used and murdered for pleasure’s sake.

 

 

Bibliography

‘Satan Was In Him’ – Killer Soldier Opened Up To Confidante About Stormy Relationship. (2020, January 13). Retrieved from The Gleamer: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20200113/satan-was-him-killer-soldier-opened-confidante-about-stormy?qt-article_image_video=0

britannica. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/: https://www.britannica.com/place/western-Africa/The-beginnings-of-European-activity

Burke, J. (2020, Feb 24). Lesotho PM requests immunity from charge of murdering wife. Retrieved from The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/24/lesotho-pm-thomas-thabane-surprise-court-appearance-over-wife-murder

Bush, B. (1981). White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’; Some Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean. Taylor & Francis .

Gerdziunas, B. (2017, October 17). Retrieved from independent.co.uk: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/belgiums-genocidal-colonial-legacy-haunts-the-country-s-future-a7984191.html

Killed In Her Sleep – St Bess Woman Murdered By Estranged Boyfriend. (2020, January 14). Retrieved from The Gleamer : http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20200114/update-killed-her-sleep-st-bess-woman-murdered-estranged-boyfriend

Lesotho PM fails to appear in court for wife’s murder charge. (2020, Febuary 21). Retrieved from Aljazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/lesotho-pm-fails-court-wife-murder-charge-200221094952941.html

Michael, D. I. (2020, July 28). Why Nigeria must decisively end rape menace | View. Retrieved from Africa News: https://www.africanews.com/2020/07/28/why-nigeria-must-decisively-end-rape-menace-view/

Orjinmo, N. (2020, June 5). #WeAreTired: Nigerian women speak out over wave of violence. Retrieved from BBC NEWS: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-52889965

The Ebony Muse. (2018, Feb 18). Retrieved from WordPress.com: https://ahseptimius.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/black-women-children-and-men-are-being-raped-by-un-peacekeepers-who-cares/

Zimbabwe accuses MDC activists of made up state torture claims. (2020, June 4). Retrieved from The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/zimbabwe-accuses-mdc-activists-of-made-up-state-torture-claims

Zimbabwe: UN experts demand an immediate end to abductions and torture. (2020, June 10). Retrieved from Relief Web: https://reliefweb.int/report/zimbabwe/zimbabwe-un-experts-demand-immediate-end-abductions-and-torture

Zimbabwean comedian Gonyeti ‘abducted and beaten’ in Harare. (2019, August 22). Retrieved from BBC NEWS: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-49433387

 

 

‘Ethiopia thou land of our fathers,

Thou land where the gods love to be,

As storm cloud at night suddenly gathers,

Our armies come rushing to thee’.

 

 

Hailemariam Desalegn, former Prime Minister of Ethiopia, resigned last month, after six years in power. Desalegn had struggled to repress, or appease, the wave of protests over the government’s which has engulf parts of the country since 2015. The unrest was initiated by an urban development plan for the capital, Addis Ababa. As so often, in revolution, the original issue is conjoined with a plethora of other government misdemeanours, and thus jailed politicians, human rights abuses, election rigging, and the lack of media outlets free of government control became grievances which drove the uprising.

The towns of Jimma, Woliso and Legetafo had their roads blocked with boulders by protestors. Banks, schools and markets were closed. Universities have been shut and transport networks disrupted in other areas. People have been displaced from their homes. The ethnic groups which have felt underrepresented, and often oppressed, have risen and ethnic clashes have taken place alongside an uprising with a broadening political agenda. ‘All of the underlying grievances about a lack of political space, a lack of ability to express dissent, came to the forefront,’ according to Felix Horne, researcher at Human Rights Watch.

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The ethnic federalism, with semi-autonomous regions, was constituted in order to ‘placate the ethnic liberation movements that helped it to power’. Over twenty years later, unsurprisingly, few are placated. The Amhara’s, ethnic group from which the monarchical House of Negus had emanated, claim they have ben alienated since the rise of democracy and desire greater representation. However, much of the disturbance has taken place in the Oromia region, home to the Oromo ethnic group which accounts for 34% of 100 million Ethiopian citizens. While the Tigrayan ethnic group account for only 6% of the population, it was they who toppled the Marxist government under Meles Zenawi. Thus, they have remained conspicuous in the corridors of power ever since; represented by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) who are one of four members of a ruling coalition. This is a fact which perturbs the Amhara’s and the Oromos who both outnumber them. The Somali Regional State, capitalizing on the chaos, winks and shrugs whilst its local militia, the Liyu, spread terror and death with equal malevolence. Last year, ethnic violence rose to such heights that the government was forced to send troops to quell a situation which concluded with ‘several’ dead Ethiopians. This, regretfully, was not an isolated incident and similar deathly occurrences have been reported.

If you hoped Africa had moved beyond such tiresome travails, you are now mournfully informed that she has not.

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‘If you hear the protesters on the street’, Horne tells us, they are chanting, ‘self-rule for our region, shared rule for Ethiopia’. The regions which were divided based upon ethnic lines, have inevitably become ethnically driven. As the centre crumbles, the edges grow stronger. The Somali Regional State grows covetous and looks threateningly at its regional neighbour’s resources and land. Within Oromia, the largest region, politicians have been propagating ethnic nationalism. The regional politicians have become so emboldened that they have drafted a bill demanding that the Federal Government changes the name of the capital, the language spoken, and the administration. The Qeerroo, an underground movement ‘orchestrating unrest’ in what is being called the Ormoro Movement have assisted in bringing ‘one of the most autocratic governments to its knees’. What is evident to all, save those who hold power in Africa, is that ethnically driven separation, begets further ethnically driven separation.

The government pardoned two thousand political prisoners, as the discontent escalated, and have also been forced to release opposition politician Bekele Gerba after demonstrators organised strikes, blocked roads and staged demonstrations. Secretary General of the Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), Gerba was arrested in December 2015 after mass protests broke out in the Oromia region over accusations that farmers were being forced to sell land with little, if any, compensation offered. Gerba credits the Qeerroo with securing his release.

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Desalegn said at a press conference, ‘the notorious prison cell that was traditionally called Maekelawi will be closed down and turned into a museum.’ This was not enough to save his job, and days after releasing Gerba, he resigned with the intention of his exit being a catalyst for Ethiopian unification. ‘I see my resignation as vital in the bid to carry out reforms that would lead to sustainable peace and democracy.’ If his decision was based upon misguided principles, it certainly wasn’t based upon political reality. His resignation letter was accepted by a ruling party which has had to manage this political crisis, which resignation did not abate, without its prime minister.

The ruling party has just declared another six-month state of emergency, in the knowledge that this uprising shows no sign of stopping.

It is clear then, even to the most ardent Pan-Africanist; contemporary Ethiopia is, at best, a mess.

It is a strange thing, indeed, that in an age when black inhabitants of western nations feel no shame in asking a white majority to portray them as kings in their film productions, those same people evidently feel shame at the mere memory of their allegiance to an actual black monarch. Even more shame is incurred then, with the reality that a monarch no longer reigns and in his place a civilian government presides over a bedraggled populous. As bonds with the ancestral home have receded, hastened by assimilation, old vows of loyalty have been hastily put aside. People no longer consider it en vogue to proclaim loyalty to Ethiopia. Support of the Ethiopian cause, whatever that may be, is no longer a prerequisite to membership of Negrodom. It is evidently no longer de rigueur to be au courant with the goings on in Ethiopia.

And why would it be? How can one, in sound mind, pledge loyalty to poverty-stricken Ethiopia when affluent America asks for your loyalty? What could be foolhardier than a black man born and raised in liberty loving England believing himself, in some way, connected to black paupers three and a half thousand miles away in repressed Ethiopia? What could be more absurd that to subscribe to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with its perverse black imagery, when true Christianity was given directly from the slave masters mouth and the saints and god himself resemble him? What insanity would drive a black man to even contemplate holding in higher esteem the barren lands of Ethiopia when he knows of the lavish cities of France? Which black person is so ungrateful that they could dare withdraw allegiance to benevolent Europe which has clothed, fed, and freed them and switch to regressive Ethiopia which could not and did not do the same?

As brooding storm clouds of discontent gather over Old Ethiopia, bringing with them death, far from armies rushing to her side, it is clear Negrodom no longer cares even to speak the name of the land of their fathers. This intellectual, emotional and political abandonment of Ethiopia is akin to gross dereliction of duty in the midst of war. The punishment for which, history shows, is generally to be court-martialed and sentenced to death. Oh, how we yearn for the past.

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Not long ago, instead of millions of deserters, Negrodom had millions of men, women and children cherished Old Ethiopia and comprehended her significance. In the nineteenth century the black academics, who would influence their predecessors, such as Edward Blyden, J. E. Casely, Fredrick Douglas, and Dr. J. Robert Love all expounded notions of Ethiopian loyalty and African liberation in literature. Alongside the cry of ‘Africa for the Africans’, was the reminder that Ethiopia held a special place in both the history and future of the black race. In a twentieth century South African church, god was referred to as ‘father of Ethiopia’ and Africa’s oppressed blacks as ‘the downtrodden children of Ethiopia’.  The millions of African descendants who had been forcefully converted to Christianity, and their progeny who embraced the spurious word, in North America particularly, took much solace in the following passage: ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands unto God’. So abiding was the belief in the passage, and of Ethiopia’s pre-eminence, that at the Sixth International Convention of Negro Peoples of the World, held in Jamaica in 1929, Marcus Garvey asked a delegate ‘You don’t believe there is a literal interpretation to Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to god?’ The delegate answered unequivocally, ‘I do’.

Academics felt both an emotional and intellectual connection to Ethiopia, to such an extent that Professor William Leo Hansberry spent afternoons exploring pictures of ancient Abyssinia. The literary-religious tradition, propagated by English-speaking blacks in the western world, which came to be known as Ethiopianism produced literary, religious and political affirmations of diasporic affiliation with Africa. The classic Ethiopia Unbound, written by J. E. Casely Hayford, is often hailed as the apogee of literary Ethiopianism. All Negrodom was aghast at the Italian invasion. In Harlem, during the Second Ethiopian-Italian war, the Provisional Committee for the Defence of Ethiopia (PCDE) was formed and included numerous African-American race-based organisations.

The relationship was not one way. As African descendants acknowledged Ethiopia as a place with which they had strong ties, so Ethiopia acknowledged its own significance on the diasporic community. In 1922 a message was received, by a convention held by descendants of Africa, from the Ethiopian monarch inviting blacks in the west, with vocational skills, back home.  In 1966 His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I visited Jamaica, drawing an estimated crowd of a hundred thousand Jamaicans on his arrival. It was, above all, a mutual acknowledgement of the historical importance and contemporary significance of Ethiopia from westernized blacks.

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Yet, today Negrodom is as silent as the grave on the troubles of Old Ethiopia. Whilst the senseless cries of ‘wakanda forever!’ echo across the Western world, professions of loyalty to Ethiopia are mute, if existent. In a recent article on the mindless excitement surrounding frivolity, and specifically the Black Panther Movie, political analyst, Nanjala Nyabola wrote: ‘The news of a fictional country resisting colonialism has spread faster and further than the real news of ongoing political turmoil in the only real country in Africa that managed to do so’. This is a repulsive scandal and a source of immense shame, for all Negrodom. Those who do not feel it should be aware that they have induced others, with better sense, to feel ashamed on their behalf.

Let us be clear, this is not a mythical nation, nor one newly created in the age of decolonisation. This is the Ethiopia found in the early Greek and Egyptian sources, already spoken of as an established nation, by Herodotus the ‘father of history’. This is Ethiopia, the first Christian nation, a religion to which millions of black people in the west wholeheartedly subscribe. This is Ethiopia, sole survivor of the Scramble for Africa, the single free nation of a continent brutally ravished and then conquered by Europe. This is the beacon of hope which fought Fascist Italy single-handedly, whose people asphyxiated upon the ancient plains of Ethiopia as gas bombs fell from the skies. This is Ethiopia, which the staid Emperor Selassie aiding in raising to international importance for oppressed Africans and their descendants across the globe. This is the Ethiopia which black people from New York to London, and from Paris to Jamaica, once felt an everlasting allegiance. This is the realm of the House of Negus, whose ancient line stretches back to biblical figures, which governed Ethiopia in its glorious apogee as well as its nadir. This is the Ethiopia which ousted monarchy and instilled a government, based on the much-vaunted egalitarian principles of Communism, as did Castro coeur de lion.

Yet, how many descendants of Africa outside Ethiopia, save a handful of Rastafarians, now feel a special allegiance to Ethiopia?

The quietude is so deafening, if you listen closely, one can almost hear the shame.

 

(reuters.com, 2018) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-et...

(Kestler-D’Amours, 2018) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/0...

(economist.com, 2017) https://www.economist.com/news/middle...

(reuters.com, 2018)

(reuters.com, 2018)

(economist.com, 2017)

(Kestler-D’Amours, 2018)

(economist.com, 2017)

(Gardner, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/13/freedom-oromo-activists-qeerroo-ethiopia-standstill

(theguardian.com, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...

(Gardner, 2018)

(Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, 1986) 69

(Martin, 1986) 77

(Martin, 1986) 84

(Martin, 1986)87

(Moses,The Politics of Ethiopianism: W.E.B Du Bois and Literary Black Nationalism, 1975)

(Martin, 1986)255

(Martin, 1986)138

(Nyabola, 2018) https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...

 

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‘Had my council properly advised me, had they opposed me at times, France would have ruled supreme.’

Napoleon Bonaparte

 

With the release and excessive laudation of Marvel’s Black Panther, and Afua Hirsch’s much publicised book ‘Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging’, new battles are taking place with increasing aggression and heightened passion.  As the days pass and the stakes continue to rise it becomes easier to chart the course, and reveal the instigators of this quasi-war. We see more clearly who it is that seeks to make war upon ‘everyday racism that plagues British society’. It becomes evident who, in fact, deems the release of a comic book movie an ‘Afrocentric epic’ which is ‘both a celebration of blackness and perfectly timed political commentary’, with the ability to render some of the warring party’s concerns but a distant memory.

These scholars, journalists, and academics lead the way as they have attained a position of prominence within society which grants them a stage upon which to perform, speak and thus lead. They do indeed perform and speak; but, where exactly are they leading the black race? Who are they?  What are the credentials which have granted them a position of prominence? Are they qualified to lead? Do the masses wish them to lead? These are questions all those who class themselves as black and ‘of colour’ need to ask themselves. For whether they know or not, approve or disapprove, they are being led by men and women who have no mandate, dubious motives, and little sense; but who lead them nonetheless. After decades of talented race leaders, many of whom fell upon honourable swords, what we are left with now is educated liberals with dusky skin, warped notions, and limited vision.

It is the age of the blundering generals.

After a stinging experience with white women on national television, Afua Hirsch opined ‘It’s fascinating when white people, who invariably have no personal experience of the frequent othering and subtle prejudice that comes from being born or raised in a country that does not recognise your unconditional right to its identity, tell you what you have and have not experienced.’ For those who are unaware, Hirsch is a mixed-raced woman whose father is Jewish and mother Ghanaian (her husband too is Ghanaian as we are repeatedly informed). She grew up in white ‘middle-class’ Wimbledon, attended private schools, went to Oxford University and completed the PPE course (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) which those who seek to govern this country ensure they take.

In an article, the course was described as ‘the Oxford degree that runs Britain’. ‘Oxford PPE is more than a factory for politicians and the people who judge them for a living. It also gives many of these public figures a shared outlook: confident, internationalist, intellectually flexible, and above all sure that small groups of supposedly well-educated, rational people, such as themselves, can and should improve Britain and the wider world.’ Little wonder then, she has undergone a ‘lifelong search for identity’ which has culminated, at age 36, in Brit(ish): little more than a memoir of racial befuddlement.

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‘A country that does not recognize your unconditional right to its identity’, Hirsch calls England, in a fit of infantile ire at love unrequited. The Ebony Muse has indeed mused over what it is that those who have asked for legal equality, and received it, mean when they deny this equality exists (https://goo.gl/ebG7Pa). In what ways does the state not recognise mixed-raced people’s right to be deemed British? As loathsome as is this history of the British government and its nefarious attitude toward its black subjects, it is 2018; black and white are legal beneath the law. The Ebony Muse has no love for the British Government. Yet, it has for honesty and intellectual integrity.

When a census was conducted in 2011, a plethora of racial categories were included to encompass an increasingly diverse populous as the table below shows. Yet, as a former barrister Hirsch knows the law intimately; it is not legal classifications of which she speaks. The complaint, beneath the deceptive rhetoric, is that parts of the population, which does not include officialdom, do not recognise her new right to their historic identity. In short, some white English people still recognise that she has a racial heritage beyond British shores; oh, the horror!

It is clear that now the war for legal equality has been won, the war for lover’s parity has begun.

Hirsh bemoans the fact that she is asked ‘the question’ one which evidently plagues her entire being, ‘where are you really from?’ As if blackness is something to be ashamed of, something ugly to hide behind glorious white Britishness, a thing to be left in the past in the face of an elevated status. Well, The Ebony Muse encourages all those with a single drop of African blood to dismiss those mortified by their blackness; and when the apparent dreaded question is asked, respond with unshakeable pride ‘Africa!’

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‘The high priestess’ of the Church of Anti-Racism, as she has been dubbed, after a career as a barrister worked as a correspondent for The Guardian (who themselves have questions to answer about the black agenda being set in their pages). ‘I seek white acceptance’ she announces in an interview which reads as a Fanonian case study ‘And I think that is a huge problem for us: in many subtle ways, people of colour in this country are given the idea that success is achieving white acceptance. And so it’s something that people aspire to – to be recognised by mainstream institutions, to behave.’ As a fortnightly correspondent for The Guardian, author of a race-related book, and having made television appearances (not to mention her place in the bosom of bourgeois PPE society) Hirsch has been able to position herself as one of Britain’s foremost thinkers and speakers on race in Britain; a weighty title to bear.

Yet, it is clear, she is not fit to lead. She speaks of ‘people of colour’ and their travails as a ‘huge problem for us’. When exactly did she abandon the middle-class, Oxbridge, PPE set and decide she was part of a black ‘us’? And who exactly accepted her entrance? Or leadership? Her book reads like a sorrowful diary of a racially confused, mixed-race girl, in a white affluent world; with undertones of racial longing and overtones of disappointment that white people recognised that she was, well, not white. This is not an apprenticeship for leadership of any black community. It is little more than a well-baked recipe for disaster.

We have seen the outcome before. People disillusioned with the fact that their own ‘elevated blackness’ is not worthy of a place in the white world attempt to rule over the lowly blacks who will accept them. They often do more damage, on what is little more than a personal crusade, than oppressive officialdom itself. What does the black community want with a woman who self-admittedly seeks white acceptance? What can she bring to the struggle, save a cornucopia of dubious tales, and self-loathing manifested in powder-puff academia?

A critic, in the degraded Evening Standard, remarked ‘Do black people have it harder than other minorities? Probably, yes, but there is no clear discussion of this in her book nor of why black Africans have tended to do better in Britain than black Caribbean’s who, conversely, are more successful in the US.’ Herein lies the grand paradox. What is being sought is not an intellectual, political, or economic solution to the problems ‘people of colour’ face today. Instead what we have is a very public show of one person’s fractured and mendacious relationship with their limited blackness and an unashamed attempt to apply those experiences to a formula to improve Britain (not the black race).

For someone who took the country’s leading course, in one of its historic academic powerhouses, her lack of intellectual ideas on the problems of race is truly scandalous. It is worthless to reel off a plethora of racist anecdotes that you and your ‘BME elite’ friends have suffered, say that is not right, and move on to the next money-spinning article or book. All one has done is told a melange of meaningless stories, exhumed your own inner demons, proposed no solution to the great race questions, taken our money from your book sales and sailed off back to bourgeois dolour.

This is not only a general who blunders, but one who leaves the field of battle, laden with the wealth of the dying, having fired not a single shot in anger.

“The message I’m trying to get across is there’s not a healthy space to explore our history and why we are the society we are,” she claims. Hirsh has so many conflicting identities that she says ‘we’ with unthinking freedom, about such varying groups, that without her zealous repetition you would forget she is a ‘woman of colour’. It is ‘we’ for the black community, ‘we’ for the mixed raced community, ‘we’ for the of colour community, ‘we’ for the British community; presumably its ‘we’ for the Jewish community too, ‘we’ for the Oxbridge set, ‘we’ for the middle-class group of which she is a member, and ‘we’ for the BME experiment of which she is certainly a zealous high-priestess. In historical academia, they talk of ‘fluid identity’ for people who adapt to new cultural surroundings, acquire new identities, and merge these new identities with existing cultural facets. Hirsch epitomises this fluidity; her identity meandering wildly, bursting dams, criss-crossing continents, conjoining more powerful streams, in a disorientated frenzy to escape its source.

“A lot of British people,” she argues, “don’t fully accept that you can look like me and be British. That’s the issue.” This is axiomatically the central issue behind her misguided crusade. White people do not accept me. It always comes down to the same issue for the fraudulent contemporary revolutionaries. They attempt to reside in the white world as a fully fledged and accepted member; the white world does not accept them to the extent they hoped, and they tiptoe over to the masses purporting to lead the black race and solve its problems. The issue is not black suffering, poverty, mis-education, and mis-direction. It is not a lack of competent leaders, independent political movements, intellectual foresight, scholarly unity, nor academic creativity or independence. It is not the erosion of family values, the adoption of British culture, the alarming death of novel academic thought, the end of radicalism, the disunity of constituent parts, the utter failure of its leaders, or the nefarious nature of the British state.

What it all comes down to, in the end, is the old pathetic cry of ‘I tried to fit in and they won’t accept me’, and then inevitably ‘we must change society for all (by the way: including the group I happen to physically resemble). This is not the war cry of a people seeking freedom, but the wailing of a confused blunderer so eager to be accepted into the bosom of whiteness she is blinded by her own self-seeking desperation. She bewails “the failure of Britishness to be an identity that we all accept encompasses someone like me” with the same revulsion with which she lamented her blackness in youth, adolescence and adulthood. This is a dangerous general. One who veils her reforms for the improvement of the British state as a programme of racial awakening for oppressed ‘people of colour’.

Like her classmates: BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate; Robert Peston, the host of ITV political show Peston on Sunday, Oxford PPE graduate; Paul Johnson, British civil servant and economist, currently serving as Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; former prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron; Former Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls; former Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander; former Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Sir Ed Davey; former Ukip MP, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless; Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News; and Times and the Sun proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, PPE at Oxford; she is part of a political/media British elite which has no interest in the improvement of the black community, but have a stake in the improvement of the British state. It should never be forgotten that Hirsh talks first of the ills that ‘plagues British society’, not the black community.

She is no race leader, but an Oxbridge, domestic reformer; tout court.

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‘It’s hard to talk about the personal in a public setting at the best of times.’ Hirsch says disingenuously (all she does is talk about the personal) ‘when the content relates to the experience – since childhood – of white people delegitimising your voice, then having to defend that before a group of white people who attempt to delegitimise your voice, is doubly painful and draining.’ So, why bother talking? One may reasonably ask. The answer is that which is always the case with these racial parvenus. Personal glory (or wealth, her book is £16.99), dubious motives (more domestic reformer than race leader) and racial confusion (no need for an insert at this stage).

‘At the same time,’ Hirsch says while positioning herself as Britain’s foremost speaker on race, ‘I don’t want to feed into the idea that I am the black voice. If there’s an issue of race, you have to come to me: I’m the black police.” Hirsch sounds as fraudulent as Tiberius, refusing Augustus’ crown on the Senate floor, while all Rome knew that there was nothing he desired more. The Senate did not have to ask many more times before an unequivocal no became a foreboding yes. And the tyrannical blundering began. Perhaps Hirsch, like so many others from the repugnant black left who are culpable, will look back, as did Napoleon, and say: ‘had true people of colour properly advised me, had black people chastised me at times, Negrodom would have ruled supreme.’

Matters little, it shall be too late, blundering generals do not win wars.

 

 

(Amazon, n.d.) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brit-ish-Race-Identity-Belonging/dp/1911214284

(Rose, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/03/marvel-black-panther-chadwick-boseman-michael-b-jordan

(Anyangwe, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/01/black-panther-africa-colour-daniel-kaluuya-lupita-nyongo

(Hirsch, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/white-people-tv-racism-afua-hirsch

(Beckett, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

(Amazon, n.d.) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brit-ish-Race-Identity-Belonging/dp/1911214284quote from David Olusoga

(Statistics, 2015) https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/articles/2011censusanalysisethnicityandreligionofthenonukbornpopulationinenglandandwales/2015-06-18

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview

(Goodhart, 2018) https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/british-on-race-identity-and-belonging-by-afua-hirsch-review-a3737946.html

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview

(Goodhart, 2018) https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/british-on-race-identity-and-belonging-by-afua-hirsch-review-a3737946.html

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview

(Beckett, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview

(Hirsch, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/white-people-tv-racism-afua-hirsch

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview