By the mid-1980s my obsession was getting Nelson Mandela out of prison and the liberation from apartheid of the South African people. I blended these themes together and wrote Playing the Right Tune, which is about a group of young musicians who are making meaningful music that reflects their lives. The problem is they don’t have money. Their manager applies for a grant, which is approved on the grounds that the band helps promote the organisation that gives them the money. This begins to tear the band apart.
The cast was all very young, I was quite young and the audience was young, but it set me on my way. It was put on at the Theatre Royal and then went to the Riverside, Hammersmith. I didn’t realise the significance at the time, but people would come to me later and say it got them into theatre and writing. At the time I thought it was just another gig.
My next play took me to another level. This time I was approached by Charlie Hanson, who had directed Welcome Home Jacko and was now achieving great things in TV and theatre, most notably producing the TV sitcom No Problem. Once again I was given the freedom to write on a subject of my choosing. It was 1987, unemployment was high, yet I noticed even the unemployed were being exploited, so I wrote Job Rocking, set in a job centre of the future.
We called it a ‘dub opera’. The story tells of a new manager at the job centre who has previously run a well-known burger joint and has made the business a success. Now his plan is to run the job centre the way he ran the burger shop. It was an obvious dig at Thatcherite working practices, yet so much of what I put into that play became a reality for job centres and other government or council offices that should be run for the benefit of the people but which have become profit-driven: computerisation, monetisation, absurd targets and a management completely disconnected from their workers and clients.
In that same year I worked with the Union Dance Company on a piece called Delirium. Strictly speaking it was dance rather than a play, but it’s probably the most ‘arty’ thing I’ve ever done. It was about how people all over the world decorate their faces – from those who still live tribal lives, and use face paint to distinguish themselves as being from a particular tribe, to people who put on make-up to go dancing in clubs, to attract sexual partners or to simply make themselves feel better. There were two versions of this show: one where the dancers performed to pre-recorded music and poetry, and another where I would stand in the middle of the stage and the dancers would dance around me.
In 1987 a hurricane caused devastation in southern England. It was bad, but I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t as bad as many of the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean every year. There was a lot of talk about how Mr Fish the weatherman had got it wrong, but what struck me was the many stories told of that night: of how people had checked on their neighbours, rescued each other and found themselves in unusual situations.
So when I was approached by Radio 4 to write a radio play, I wanted to explore how a couple who had grown apart become close once more as they lie in bed listening to the hurricane outside. When pitching the idea to radio producer Jeremy Mortimer – the son of barrister and writer John Mortimer – I knew I needed to use an original approach. I went to his office and performed the sounds of the wind and the music and the voices all by myself. It was so important to me that he heard the rhythm of the piece, which could not be written down. As he sat listening, I could see that he completely got it. When I finished, he simply said, ‘That was the most unusual pitch I’ve ever heard. We have a deal.’
After the play was broadcast in 1988 I went away, then, on my return, Jeremy told me Hurricane Dub had won a BBC Young Playwright of the Year Award. I didn’t even know it had been entered or that it was part of a competition. There’s nothing on my mantelpiece.
37
DREADLOCK IN WEDLOCK
When I had been in Liverpool, a young woman had introduced herself to me while I was doing a performance in a community centre. She’d been working for a radio show on a community radio station, and with a youth theatre group, and they were interested in putting on one of my plays. Her name was Amina. I’d actually met her a few years before, when I’d done a performance in Liverpool before I lived there. Then it was her sister, Ruckhsana, who I’d met, and as I spoke to Ruckhsana she introduced me to her little sister, Amina. I patted her on her head and said hello. Next time I met Amina, she had grown up and was keen to get into the world of theatre. I told her she should go right ahead, and that I would love to see their interpretation of my play. She had a genuine enthusiasm, which impressed me. As time ticked on we struck up a rapport, and agreed to meet again so I could listen to her ideas.
The next time we met the atmosphere was very businesslike. We discussed the theatre group and our conversation turned to the arts. We started talking about a film that was showing in the city. Amina said she and her sister, Hamida, were going to see it. I sort of invited myself along to watch it with them. Amina was about seventeen and we started to date. Our relationship blossomed and she moved in with me. She came from a poor family who were Pathans with roots on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. Many people had expected that the family wouldn’t accept me because of my race, but I got on so well with her mother that by the time we got serious she wasn’t seeing my colour.
When my residency in Liverpool ended, I returned to London, but I kept the flat on in Liverpool so Amina could live there. My personal life had been complicated at the time because I’d also been seeing a girl I’d met at a university a couple of years before. This wasn’t like it was in the old days; I wasn’t collecting girlfriends or partaking in good old-fashioned two-timing. I was trying to decide if I should be leaving this girl or not. I liked her a lot, so much that I even took her over to Jamaica to meet my grandmother and the rest of my family, but in the end I couldn’t forgive her for cheating on me. So I told her it was over.
I was thirty-something, Amina was eighteen, and her family wanted us to be a bit more serious about our relationship. I was at an age where I thought I ought to be growing up. I hated the idea of marriage, though. I had read, and was influenced by, Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin and bell hooks, and after watching what my mother had gone through, I believed marriage was about ownership and control. But then it got personal, and there was a part of me that thought it would reassure Amina’s mother if I married her.
But when I told my mother I was marrying Amina and not the other girl she was not just a little disappointed, she went mad. Her actual words were, ‘What! You’re marrying a Pakistani?’ She didn’t even know Amina. She didn’t have anything against people from Pakistan per se, it was that she was so fond of the other girl, who she thought was lovely and innocent and would make a good wife. I knew better, of course, but she had always wanted us to get married and settle down. My mother thought she was perfect, and refused to hear anything that wasn’t praise for her, which meant she knew very little about her.
Amina and I were together for a year before we got married. If two years before you had asked me about marriage, I would have said something like, ‘Me is a roots natty dreadlock, and natty dread nah check fi wedlock.’ Although deep down I still felt marriage was a trap, I thought it would be great for Amina and both families to see I was serious, and it was a way of bringing both families together. I had to tell myself to forget all the stuff that church and state tell us about marriage, and that we should be able to marry for our own reasons and live in our own way. We had to know for ourselves why we were getting married and forget about what the priest or imam thought of the idea.
We married on Amina’s birthday, which was also St Patrick’s Day, in 1990. I drove myself to the register office in my Peugeot 205 (good car!), and I parked illegally outside the office. The reception party afterwards was a very multicultural affair, with lots of drumming and people wearing their national costumes, but there wasn’t a honeymoon. We talked about the idea of one but decided against it. I had some gigs to do, and neither of us were romantic types. We preferred to be pract
ical. In fact, a couple of days after the wedding I went to the States on tour and had to leave Amina behind. Many of our friends thought this was a little cruel, but we just thought this was what life was going to be like. I’m a poet, I tour, and sometimes the show must go on.
Amina moved down to my house in east London and I gave up the flat in Liverpool. It was sad leaving the city, but I consoled myself with the fact that I’d taken a bit of Liverpool with me. At first, life was pretty much the same as it had been before we’d got married. We didn’t have kids, so there weren’t little ones for us to look after. We did start to think about them, and some family members, especially on Amina’s side, began to ask when the first baby would arrive, but I’d always suspected I was infertile, so I didn’t hold out much hope.
Amina was a little more organised than me and she started to take care of some of my business affairs. After a while she actually worked for me and collected a wage. She loved theatre and wanted to be an actor but unfortunately she couldn’t act. In fact, I thought she was a terrible actor. I told her as much, which was harsh but true. But because she loved the theatre so much she began to look for other roles available to her in the theatrical world. I spoke to my old colleagues at the Hackney Empire, and Amina found a job there for a while as an administrator.
Personally and professionally we got on extremely well and we made a great team. Although she was naive and inexperienced, her heart was in the right place politically. What was also great for me was that she loved literature and martial arts. She had done karate for a few years, and as I was still practising Chinese kung fu we were always sparring. Sometimes we would be sitting at our desks working and we would suddenly jump up and start play-fighting. Sometimes, as we passed each other in the living room, I would fire off a kick to test her reflexes. Her Japanese karate meant she was really strong, but stiff and straight, whereas my Chinese style was about being light-footed, flowing, with lots of circular movements. I would kick her very lightly on one shoulder and then move around to the other, whereas she would kick and punch me as if she were breaking bricks.
We also had our differences in working styles. She was an organiser, and very efficient around the office. I had always been very tidy, my office was orderly and I knew where everything was, but she knew how to file and she was good with figures. That was helpful, but her urge to make the figures add up sometimes proved embarrassing. I have always kept an extensive collection of books and DVDs, and when friends came to the house they would often ask to borrow some. Amina would write down the time and date of the loan in her own little book and, if the item wasn’t returned on time, she would tell me or phone the person who’d borrowed it, quoting the time they borrowed it and demanding the items be returned – even the local library didn’t do that! Sometimes I would tell her not to worry and to calm down, but usually I’d leave her to it. Sometimes it was useful, because if I’d lost something she’d know where it was, but on other occasions it would annoy people and I would find myself having to apologise to them.
Generally I was adjusting to married life quite well, though. I now had to think about someone else when I travelled, and I consulted Amina when important decisions had to be made, but that was good – I needed that. I liked having someone else to think about, and having someone else to think about me.
38
NELSON MANDELA
On 11 February 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from prison. After twenty-seven years, the boxer, lawyer, freedom fighter and the figurehead of our struggle against apartheid and racism worldwide walked free, with Winnie Mandela at his side. I, like many others, watched his walk to freedom on television, and I remember wondering what the future held for South Africa. Nelson Mandela was a revolutionary when he was arrested on 5 August 1962 – how much would he compromise, and how much compromise would his people tolerate? I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to promote revenge, but I could see him promoting a peaceful revolution. The question was, would his people go with him?
While in prison, Nelson Mandela had a government in exile. Some years later I’d go to Robben Island and meet an old prison guard who told me Mandela and his comrades were all incredibly well behaved. They knew they were political prisoners and not criminals, and that one day they would be guiding the nation, so they wanted to set an example. The way they behaved in prison was the way they wanted other people to behave. The guard told me the only thing they would take was newspapers because they wanted knowledge; they needed to keep up as much as they could with world affairs.
On 16 April 1990, a couple of months after his release, Mandela came to England. He came for a variety of reasons, but there happened to be a big concert being held in his honour. It was a concert that we activists didn’t care much for. Most of us were simply not invited and, like the big concerts that had been held before, the organisers preferred to book big-name artists and pop stars rather than grassroots activist musicians. They also somehow managed to do concerts with Mandela in mind and not allow any politics on stage, which I think was an amazing feat in itself. One could say they had to do both those things in order to reach as many people around the world as they could, but I remember lots of people who had worked hard over the years feeling completely left out.
While Mandela was in London I got a message saying he would like to meet me, but he requested that the meeting take place at a ridiculously early time in the morning. He had a press conference booked, and a meeting with Margaret Thatcher, but he wanted to see me first. I made the effort and got up early, then drove into central London to meet him. We spent the first few minutes thanking each other for our works against racism and for human rights. I couldn’t believe how much praise he was heaping upon me; it was almost embarrassing – so much that I had to get a little firm with him and say, ‘Now, Madiba, it doesn’t matter what you say about me, what I’ve done is nothing compared to twenty-seven years in prison and everything else you’ve had to endure.’
I found him to be a very rational person, and very warm; he never got overemotional or carried away. I didn’t feel in awe of him, I didn’t feel any special dust sprinkling from him, I just saw him as a human being. In fact I felt guilty because I didn’t see the aura around him that some people talked about, and I didn’t feel like I was in the presence of a saint. I saw a normal, ordinary man who had done extraordinarily great things.
We talked a lot about Mrs Thatcher and how strange it was that she now wanted to see him even though she hadn’t supported the boycott and said the blacks of South Africa were all right under apartheid. We talked about the way in which so many people had jumped on the bandwagon in the years leading up to his release, and he really appreciated those of us who had been there in the very early days. He knew all about people like me and Tony Benn, doing benefits and giving talks, and in so doing had been branded ‘terrorist sympathisers’. The thing I was most proud of was that he confirmed he had read my poetry in prison.
I spent a good half hour with him discussing his life and struggle, and the way people in the West had tried to highlight his plight. We even joked about the way some others had been against the boycott, even pro-apartheid, until they realised his release was inevitable and then were suddenly keen to be seen singing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ in nightclubs. It was this conversation that inspired me to write the poem ‘Who Dun It’, with the refrain: ‘Nobody dun apartheid, they were all revolutionaries.’ We left the room and were met by an army of photographers; he went off to do his diplomacy, and I went home to catch up on my sleep.
39
US AN DEM
One morning in 1990, after my morning run, the phone rang. The voice said, ‘Hello, is that Benjamin Zephaniah?’ I confessed to being me, and the voice said, ‘My name is Chris Blackwell. I’d really like to talk to you. I’m in the air at the moment, flying into London. Can we meet tomorrow?’
Chris Blackwell was probably the most important man in the music business at that time. He started Island Records and was famous for
introducing the world to Bob Marley, Robert Palmer, Millie Small, Traffic and U2, to name a few, and he was the person most musicians would like a meeting with. But I was no young kid looking for a record deal, so while I was surprised by the call, I wasn’t running up and down filled with joy, thinking this was my big moment.
The next day we met in an apartment he owned in a posh part of London. He told me he had been reading some of my work and people had been talking to him about me, and he couldn’t understand why we hadn’t worked together. In fact, I was already having low-profile talks with a well-known Island Records man called Jumbo, but it was all a bit slow. Once I said that I would be willing to do an album on the Mango label, a subdivision of Island, things started to move quickly.
It didn’t take long for us to sign a deal, and the idea was that I would find a couple of producers, work on a track with them in order to try them out and then pick one. Jumbo suggested that I work with Paul Smykle, known to us all as ‘Groucho’ – a name he was given simply because although he was black he looked like Groucho Marx of the Marx Brothers. He had done some great work in the past, most notably with Black Uhuru, and was well respected in the music-making world. We got on extremely well, and so we got down to work. His style was futurist; he hated drum rolls, and was very much into the emerging digital technology. I liked his style, I thought he would produce a great remix, a great single, or even an album in the future, but I wanted this album to be a lot more rootsy.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 18