Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller
Page 21
To be black, poor and politicised in Britain is to see the ugliest side of the police and indeed of Britain itself; it is to see behind the curtain and not be fooled by the circus, and to feel crazy because so many others cannot see what is so clear to you. When my safety was threatened when I was growing up the last thing I would have done would be to call the police, it would not even have crossed my mind. The police brutalised pretty much every black Caribbean man of my father’s age that I know, with impunity. Cynthia Jarret died when they raided her home, they shot Cherry Groce and despite all of the suspicious deaths in custody and even in cases where inquest juries have returned a verdict of unlawful killing, the police are never punished.15 I know some people reading this will find it very hard to believe that police used to just grab black men off the street and beat them for no reason, but I suggest that if you are one of those people you just talk to some black people over the age of fifty about their experiences, or if you need white confirmation, talk to some Irish people of that age, as they were often treated relatively similarly back then.16
It made no difference whether someone was a criminal – ignoring the politics of that term – or not; my father, stepfather and working uncles all got their beatings, as did my ‘road’ uncles too, of course. I grew up hearing these stories. Even now, with all of my academic work and fully legitimate business interests, I still get nervous when a police car is behind me and I still wouldn’t call them if my personal safety was under threat. Given this history, I was hardly surprised that day back when I was thirteen that I had my first encounter with the police. I was black and I was working class – of course they were looking for me. And I’d been expecting them.
8 – Why Do White People Love Mandela? Why Do Conservatives Hate Castro?
‘The crushing defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale was a victory for the whole of Africa! . . . The decisive defeat of the apartheid aggressors broke the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressors.The defeat of the apartheid army was an inspiration to the struggling people inside South Africa. Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organisations would not have been unbanned. The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale made it possible for me to be here today.’
Nelson Mandela, 26 July 1991, speaking in Matanzas, Cuba1
The boy pulled at his dead mother’s sleeve. Her white shirt caked with dust and blood, she lay on the ground, frozen. Mangled limbs fixed in the patterns of a falling runner. The boy cried and pulled and even nestled himself affectionately under his mother’s armpit, but she was still dead. Around them, stretched over the grass and dirt, lay mothers, fathers and children, scattered, bleeding, dead or dying. Just moments earlier, the sound of song could be heard, but the brutal crack of bullets had left in its wake only silence punctured by screams.
This scene from the 1987 film Mandela, starring Danny Glover, was my first introduction to the brutal reality of apartheid. I’m pretty sure I watched the film not long after it came out, which would have made me just four or five years old. In all the years since then I have not watched it again, yet that scene, which depicted the notorious Sharpeville massacre of 1960 in which sixty-nine people were shot dead, scores injured and many paralysed by bullets in their backs as they fled, has stayed with me as if I watched it yesterday. Thousands of black South Africans had gathered at the police station in Sharpeville to protest the racist pass laws of the South African government. They were unarmed, but this did not stop the police from deciding to massacre them. The film recreated these events in fairly brutal and graphic detail. This was the first time I’d ever had to think about how cheap human life, and particularly black human life, could be.
I watched this film with my mother, stepfather and older sister; as you may have noticed by now my family home was very politicised. The anti-apartheid struggle was the first political issue I recall entering my life; the African National Congress (ANC) freedom charter was on the wall in our house, along with the Malcolm X ‘By Any Means Necessary’ poster. Even though South Africa was thousands of miles away, the black British community was heavily involved in anti-apartheid campaigning and organising. Anti-apartheid activists saw clearly the relationship between the British state’s support for a foreign, racist settler colony and its domestic racism.2
After all, can it really be a complete coincidence that the most tumultuous decade of Britain’s domestic ‘race relations’ history was also the decade of the apex of the struggle against apartheid? As I have mentioned, my pan-African Saturday school was named after Winnie Mandela, in honour of her contribution to that very struggle and in recognition of an internationalist understanding of white supremacy and colonialism. I grew up watching ‘Mama Winnie’ appear on television in the years approaching Nelson’s release from prison and my family went on many anti-apartheid demonstrations. I saw a brilliant production of the South African play Sarafina at the Hackney Empire several times during 1991. The play depicted the Soweto uprisings of 1976 and featured the legendary South African jazz musician Hugh Masakela, who I got to meet. As you can imagine, within this cultural and political environment I had already got a sense of the incredible brutality of imperialism and white supremacy long before my tenth birthday.
You could question the wisdom of allowing a five-year-old to watch a film clearly designed for an adult audience, and I certainly remember feeling disturbed and upset, but even now I remember watching that scene as a turning point in my life, the moment at which I first realised adults could be so horrible and that the world was well and truly messed up. You could criticise my parents for playing me something so brutal at such an age but I think that would be a mistake. The reality is most children in the world do not have the luxury of hiding from the brutalities of systemic injustice and as tough as my upbringing may have been by British standards, there are certainly more children on the planet even now whose lives more closely resemble the lives of a child born in Soweto or Sharpeville than one born in Camden. I think my parents did the right thing, even though it was painful and confusing and it left me with so many questions that I could not properly formulate.
‘Mummy, if the police are supposed to protect people why are they shooting them?’ ‘Why are all the police white and all the people protesting black?’ ‘But they were only singing; why did they kill them?’ ‘What is going to happen to that little boy now that his mother is dead, Mummy?’
If the overriding white nationalism of Anglo-American governments is to be fully understood then we need look no farther than the issue of apartheid South Africa. Decades after the supposed war against fascism, the British and American governments and the capital they served could be found supporting a regime whose ideas were rooted in the same kind of genocidal racial ‘logic’ as the Nazis. The governments of Britain and the US, who had styled themselves as the world’s policemen and who had invaded numerous countries on apparently ‘humanitarian’ grounds, would obviously not be invading South Africa, perhaps the most universally unpopular regime of the late twentieth century. No, they would in fact support it. While Margaret Thatcher claimed to be against apartheid ‘on principle’ she consistently opposed sanctions against the regime. Westminster, Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill had played crucial roles in constructing apartheid in the first place, despite the number of black South Africans that had fought on the British side in the Boer War and would fight for them again during the Second World War – the war to end fascism, remember. It is inconceivable that if the race roles in South Africa had been reversed Britain and the US would have supported a black government committing such outrages on its white population.
Britain, France and the USA had consistently blocked calls from the international community to impose an arms embargo on South Africa, even after the murder of schoolchildren and the banning of opposition political parties and groups; this is usually what the great powers call ‘supporting democracy abroad’. To think this kind of naked support of a government who believed black people to be subhuman
would not have an effect on the domestic black population is obviously totally ludicrous, but successive British governments either did not care or were willing to manage the contradiction. As you’ve already seen, we were very much still second class citizens in the 1980s.
Black Britons, for reasons that should be abundantly obvious, were overwhelmingly against apartheid, though the situation in southern Africa was much more complex than one struggle – the divisions of ethnicity, traditional nobility and actually potentially having to run a country all complicated matters and divided loyalties. I also appreciate that it is easy to be radical from thousands of miles away, when the boot is not on your neck and the bayonet is not in your back. Nonetheless, anti-apartheid was an issue around which the vast majority of black Brits were united (which is what made Frank Bruno’s tacit support all the more galling). It’s also worth remembering that Jamaica and Barbados were the first countries to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime, and naturally that stand filtered down to Caribbean descendants in the UK.
Across Britain more widely, hundreds of thousands of people participated in marches and demonstrations against apartheid, high-profile artists recorded tribute songs and lent voices of support to enforce a cultural boycott of South Africa, and the concert at Wembley Stadium in honour of Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday that called for his release from prison was graced by some of the biggest music stars from across the globe. From 1986 to 1990, activists in the UK organised a non-stop picket outside the South African embassy in London. The response of the state was to arrest activists and try to ban the protest. Think about that; the British government having its own citizens arrested for protesting a foreign racist settler regime. It seems that large sections of the British public have long been more forward thinking than those in power.
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 it was a momentous occasion for us. The iconic photo of Nelson and Winnie with their Black Power fists in the air graced the covers of newspapers the world over. The Voice, Britain’s most popular black newspaper at the time, ran the photo with the headline ‘Free At Last’, in obvious reference to Martin Luther King Jnr. The Daily Telegraph, on the other hand, ran the headline ‘Armed struggle will go on, says Mandela’, a very misleading headline given that the internationally backed apartheid regime and their black collaborators were still massacring ANC members and supporters and that apartheid itself had been rooted in grotesque violence.3 Now that Mandela’s ANC has become the ruling party in South Africa, it’s easy to forget just how precarious things were back then, even after Mandela’s release. Soon after his release, a second concert was held at Wembley Stadium and Mandela graced the stage to address the world.
In my family home, at the Hackney Empire and across the black British community and anti-racist activist circles, the mood was one of celebration and victory. While the more cynical (and astute) among the adults knew even then that justice would not really be served, that those who had committed decades of atrocities under the apartheid regime would not be punished, nobody questioned that this was a significant moment, that the powers that be had been forced to compromise and that the last white settler regime in Africa had been formally defeated.
In later years, my connection to the struggle became more personal; one of my schoolfriends was living in the UK in exile after his father had been killed by the apartheid regime. In our secondary-school hip hop group, he rapped:
To me the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seems insane
Since lies and suffering is all we seem to obtain.
Even a teenager could see that truth and reconciliation were not justice.
From his release from prison until his death, Mandela became a virtual saint in the mainstream media, an elder uncle to our broken world, praised by everyone from Bill Clinton to the Pope. When Mandela died, the Daily Mail ran with the headline ‘Death of a Colossus’, Downing Street flew the flag at half-mast and then Prime Minster David Cameron called Mandela ‘a true global hero’. Statues of Mandela now stand outside of the Southbank Centre and even in Parliament Square – along with two of the architects of apartheid, Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts. How is this possible, you might legitimately ask. How can people that love the makers of apartheid also love the breakers of it? Surely something must be amiss here?
Why did the opinion of the white conservative mainstream and respectable liberals suddenly come to view Nelson Mandela as a hero at some unknown point in 1989? Remember, sections of the British press had accused the ANC of wanting to establish a ‘Communist-style black dictatorship’ in South Africa, Margaret Thatcher had labelled the ANC a ‘typical terrorist organisation’ (it was recognised as such in the USA until 20084), and opposed sanctions, and the federation of Conservative students ran a ‘hang Mandela’ campaign. While there is no evidence that a young David Cameron participated in the hang Mandela campaign, he certainly did travel to South Africa in 1989 on a fact-finding mission paid for by a lobbying group that sought to lift sanctions. So why all the Mandela love post-1990 from people that were at best ambivalent to black South African life at any point before then, and at worst openly hostile to it?
I know why I love and respect Madiba, and I know why my community and people that were anti-apartheid before it was fashionable do. We love Madiba because he risked his life and lost his freedom for twenty-seven years for opposing one of the most unjust regimes in history. We love him because even when he was offered his freedom in 1985 in return for a capitulation to apartheid, Madiba refused, telling the South African people that his freedom was inseparable from their freedom. And yes, we love Madiba because he had the courage to take up arms against a morally indefensible racist settler colony. We also love Mandela because, even once he was released, he never forgot those countries that had supported his struggle, no matter how unpopular their leaders became in the mainstream press. But what about all the new-found Mandela worshippers? Why did they suddenly love Madiba?
Was it that the white mainstream had suddenly come alive to the evils of white supremacy and in a moment of moral epiphany – much like the manner in which ‘they’ ended slavery – had discovered that Mandela’s struggle was a just one? Were they suddenly committed to the freedom charter? Did they wish to see the wealth of South Africa even mildly redistributed? Are those that belatedly learned to love Mandela committed to trying to eradicate the things for which Mandela lost twenty-seven years of his brilliant life or are their motivations rather more sinister?
We can glean some insight by contrasting how these same organs of the press and political institutions have chosen to remember or depict another man and country of whom Mandela was a great admirer; Castro and Cuba. Somehow these belated anti-apartheid types have either forgotten or do not know that the only non-African nation to send its troops to actually fight the apartheid regime was Cuba. Not only that, but Cuba provided medical aid and military training to the ANC in exile. Cuba’s role in helping to bring an end to formal apartheid in Africa was decisive and Mandela, until the end of his long life, never forgot it. He once wrote that ‘the Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character.’5
The first foreign country Mandela visited upon release from prison was Cuba, where he met and shared a podium with Fidel Castro, a man he referred to as ‘my brother’ and ‘my president’. So how is it possible that Mandela’s new-found white conservative fan club came to such different conclusions about Castro and Cuba than Mandela himself did? To understand, we must visit the history of how apartheid actually ended, because like all achievements of black freedom before it, the fall of apartheid seems to be remembered as a gift from newly enlightened white rulers and liberal campaigners putting pressure on odious regimes. This could not be further from the actual truth.6
In 1974, the dictatorship that had governed Portugal collapsed under pressure from the Carnation Revolution, and the new leftist governme
nt stopped the military actions of the previous regime in Portugal’s African colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. These three territories were the last vestiges of direct European colonial rule in Africa and all three countries had already been undergoing military struggles against Portuguese rule, supported by Cuba and, to a much lesser and more ambiguous extent, the Soviet Union. With the change in government in Portugal and independence declared in Angola, a new set of problems arose that would play a key role in ending apartheid. Angola had declared itself independent under the leadership of Agostinho Neto’s leftist MPLA, a movement that was openly hostile to South African apartheid and had links with the ANC. In response, the apartheid regime invaded Angola; they had already been occupying neighbouring Namibia for almost a decade, imprisoning and torturing children as they had in South Africa itself. In response to requests from the Angolan government, 36,000 Cuban troops deployed into Angola between 1975–76 to assist in the struggle against the racist regime in Pretoria. For all the bravery of MPLA and SWAPO (the Namibian liberation movement), it is entirely inconceivable that they would have won without this Cuban contingent, a contingent in which Afro-Cubans had a significant presence. Or at least that’s what the African revolutionaries themselves maintain.
Up until 1987, the apartheid regime made repeated encroachments into Angola and armed a brutal and unscrupulous proxy leader named Jonas Savimbi of UNITA, to try to overthrow the Angolan government. However, at the crucial battle of Cuito Cuanavale, referred to by Mandela in the epigraph of this chapter, the Cubans, Angolans and SWAPO defeated the apartheid forces. The negotiations after this defeat led directly to the independence of Namibia, the unbanning of the ANC and the fall of (political) apartheid. Perhaps as many as 400,000 Cuban personnel would serve in Angola over these years and Cuban troops would stay in Angola to help protect the country and train the Angolan army until 1991, by which time South Africa had granted Namibia independence and agreed to set Nelson Mandela free from prison, directly as a result of the defeat at Cuito Cuanavale.