Black Solidarity
16 May 2006
Evening Standard At the state opening of Parliament in 1987, my fellow newly elected MP, the late Bernie Grant, caused a sensation by turning up in elaborate African robes - even though he came from Guyana, where all the men wear trousers. But like me, he took black solidarity for granted.
That was why I was taken aback by the fuss here over a recent piece I wrote about Nigeria in a Jamaican newspaper. Although I was anxious not to cause offence, I mentioned Nigeria's pervasive corruption and the tragedy of the Niger Delta, ravaged by pollution. The article enraged many Nigerians - partly because it touched on the raw nerve of African and Caribbean relations in this country. For London's black community has changed. When I came of age politically, in the 1970s, it was predominantly Caribbean, with a small number of West Africans.
Now Africans have overtaken the Caribbeans in numbers. And in my constituency in Hackney I have people from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Somalia and the Congo. As a child growing up in the tight-knit Jamaican community, I was taught as an article of faith that people from Jamaica were better than any other country in the Caribbean (whom my parents referred to as "small islanders") and that Caribbean people were infinitely superior to Africans, who lived in mud huts and did not know how to comb their hair. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, African children were being taught how superior they were to Caribbean people, who had been stupid enough to get sold into slavery and were all thieves anyway.
On the cold grey streets of London these two sets of prejudices collided. In the first generation they were partially suppressed: our numbers were too tiny and our situation too perilous for division. And today, on the street, young people in Hackney share a common black youth culture wherever their parents came from. But in recent years some of the silly myths and antagonism have resurfaced. Yet I have always believed that more things unite black people from the Caribbean and Africa than divide us. Many things, from a liking for hot pepper to our colonial history, reveal us to be one people. I am not going to stop writing about Nigeria: if black people cannot honestly discuss corruption in Africa, who can?
But the rise of the British National Party should remind black people in London of the need for unity - whether their roots are in Africa or the Caribbean.
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