Saturday, June 30, 2007
MURDER CAPITAL OF LONDON?
How a year changed Brixton
Published 28 June 2007 ARTICLE FROM NEWS STATESMAN
Any conflict between young blacks in south London, no matter how insignificant, can now lead to loss of life
One Saturday afternoon last summer, as I eased along Coldharbour Lane in Brixton to visit my mates, a crowd of black, Caribbean women was assembling further down the street. Voices were raised. A conflict was brewing.
Two young women, with bairns in their prams, stood toe-to-toe exchanging the vilest abuse. Cheers and shouts of approbation greeted every insult. It turned out that both had given birth to babies fathered by the same man, and had done so almost simultaneously. They offered their public evidence of what he bought for their respective offspring, at what price, at what shops and with what brand names, too.
All this was punctuated with crude expletives, the likes of which I remember hearing as a boy in our working-class community in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; in Kingston, Jamaica; in St John's, Antigua, and wherever else I have been in the Caribbean.
Soon, police vehicles drew up alongside and officers were about to intervene. I offered my opinion that they were merely witnessing public entertainment. They took my word and went on their way. The gathering then quietly dispersed, abuse being hurled on both sides of the love divide. There was not even a hint of physical violence amid this verbal slug-fest.
A couple of weeks ago an incident similar to the one I have just described took place only a stone's throw from my home here in south London. Two mothers with children by the same man clashed in a torrent of abuse, each with supporters in tow. The verbals were as vile as those that their counterparts had issued in Brixton the previous year. The taunts were laced with sarcasm; the interventions were bitter and sharp.
There the similarity ends. One of them produced a knife and rammed the blade into the body of her rival, who fell to the ground. Her friend came to the rescue, cuddling the injured woman as she uttered her last words, "Don't let me go! Please, don't let me go!" Then she took her last breath, and died.
Within a year much has changed. Any conflict between young blacks in south London, no matter how insignificant, can now lead to loss of life. This used to be exclusively a male preserve: now our daughters and sisters are involved. There was not much for the police to investigate. They knew within seconds of arriving on the scene who did what to whom. Friends spilled the beans and are prepared to be witnesses in court.
This murderous meanness of spirit is winging its way throughout the black communities of this unpleasant land. I am certain that black communities are not much more deprived than any others in the UK. But a frustration is building up among them, based on the feeling they are being denied equal opportunities because of their skin colour. The good life appears to be slipping from them, never to be retrieved in their lifetimes.
They believe that they deserve more than the menial jobs that their parents performed a generation ago. All the material wealth accumulated by the white, upper-middle classes is flaunted before their very eyes. Bemused and confused they turn savagely against each other. Death stalks; gratuitous internecine violence is the order of the day. A French-West Indian psychologist, Frantz Fanon, paid particular attention to this social phenomenon before and during the struggle for Algerian independence from France.
Prior to the beginning of the war, Algerians displayed the most destructive violence against each other. Fanon surmised that this was a consequence of the helplessness they felt when faced with the Herculean task of confronting the colonial power. There is a ring of truth to this. Prior to April 1981, when the insurrection of black youth was launched against the police all over the UK, the same internecine strife was at large.
Linton Kwesi Johnson described the moment in his poem, "Five Nights of Bleeding": "Steelblade drinkin' blood in darkness, it's/War amongs' the rebels/Madness, madness, war."
One does not lead inevitably to the other. There is time for intervention from the powers-that-be. Even so, I am not holding my breath. In these past weeks, there have been plenty of political debates as senior politicians canvassed for the deputy leadership of the ruling party. These were going on as Sian, the deceased, lay dying on one of south London's streets.
Harriet Harman, the successful candidate for the post of deputy leader of the Labour Party, talked about everything on the face of this earth, ranging from Guantanamo Bay to whatever else. But there was nary a word about the loss of life of young black men and women on the streets of her constituency, which is known among young blacks as the murder capital of London.
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