"Palestine: Utterly Destroy Them," Saith the Lord?

An African Man Observes an Inter-Semitic Genocide

It is night time in a London park, during the pandemic. A young white woman stares up into the camera from her prone position on the ground. Kneeling around her as they handcuff her from behind is a faceless group of police officers, male and female. The woman’s crime? Peacefully protesting the rape and murder of someone just like her, by a policeman.

That striking photograph encapsulates the truth that wherever one may be in the world, the citizen matters less to the state than one would think or expect. That’s true even in England, the country whose policing methods were adopted throughout the British Empire, including my home country, Nigeria.

A few months before that arrest in London, the Nigerian Army had been ordered to open fire on young people peacefully protesting police violence, killing at least twelve of them.

Police violence against European citizens is probably at its most alarming and appalling when the German police confront pro-Palestine protesters, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that the mere act of calling for a stop to an ongoing genocide is considered the most contemptible and heinous of crimes, deserving of the harshest possible treatment, short of indiscriminate machine-gun fire.

The brutality visited upon German protesters is mirrored by the Israeli Police against those protesting the genocidal prime minister and his government; and singled out for the harshest of treatment are the ultra-orthodox men who refuse to serve in the armed forces, and in some cases even openly express solidarity with the people of Palestine. These men suffer merciless beatings similar to those seen against Palestinians prior to October 7, 2023, and they should indeed be grateful that the Israeli armed forces never shoot their own citizens.

Don’t they? Really? The Hannibal Directive is a policy whereby the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) will kill any of their own (along with Palestinian combatants if necessary) rather than allow them to be taken hostage. There seems to be overwhelming evidence that this policy was extensively used on October 7 and in the days after, including, for the first time, on Israeli civilians – in kibbutzim, the music festival, and in numerous cars as they were being driven toward Gaza.

In December 2023, three Israeli hostages were shot dead by the IDF, and untold numbers would have died in the relentless carpet-bombings during the genocide.

It seems that Hamas, already aware of the brutality of the IDF, assumed that by taking as many hostages as they could into Gaza, they would be able to bargain with the Israeli regime in relative safety, both for themselves and the people they represented. This was clearly a big miscalculation, as the flawed assumption within it was that the IDF command and the Israeli government gave two hoots about their own people.

Back in the West, we are reminded of this, not just in how the armed forces treat protesting civilians, but also in how war-mongering – and genocide-enabling governments – simply ignored the outrage, protests and opprobrium of their citizens, and continue to support Israel diplomatically and militarily, even as pre-ceasefire activities have spread to the West Bank.

It is interesting that the African country with the most-recently-defeated system of Apartheid should have been the one to spearhead the international legal challenge against Israel, even if the ANC government would subsequently, in a bid to cling to power, get into bed with the parties that variously oppose affirmative Black empowerment, or are vigorously anti-immigration, rather than join with parties that grew out of the African Liberation Movement. This leads one to wonder how much more than political expediency was behind their championing the ICJ case against Israel in the first place.

Another troubling thing to observe is how so many people of African descent occupy prominent positions among Western genocide-enablers. When candidate Barack Obama prostrated himself before AIPAC in 2008 and then in 2012 as incumbent president (categorically declaring his position to be on the side of the Israeli occupiers), he set a precedent. 

Perhaps most recognisable among recent players were United States UN Ambassadors Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Robert A. Wood. The world has watched aghast as they single-handedly (literally) did their masters’ bidding by vetoing resolution after resolution calling for ceasefires, recognition of Palestine or sanctioning Israel’s bloodlust. The Haitian-born press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was also steadfast in justifying the unjustifiable on behalf of the previous administration.

The UK’s foreign minister, David Lammy, is also a descendant of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean. As a young Labour politician he showed radical promise but has more latterly been so captured by Zionism that its racist, white supremacist ideology causes him to be quite literally an apologist for those who justify the wholesale massacre of Palestinians by referring to them as ‘Human animals,’ just as European enslavers referred to his and my ancestors as apes.

Drafting this in Lagos, Nigeria, I was troubled by the number of people who have bought into the narrative that the genocide has its roots in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. It is now widely accepted that the background and history are important, though it might surprise many that Africa features in these.

At the sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1903, Theodor Herzel presented to the delegates an offer made by then British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, of land in British East Africa, for a Jewish Homeland. Apparently, this offer was considered seriously but eventually rejected in 1904. One area that objections to the idea came from was white British settlers already in East Africa, but the majority of the disquiet was from other Zionists who preferred Palestine. What the Africans knew or thought about the plan appears not to have concerned any of the other players, despite the fact that it was their own stolen ancestral land that was being considered.

The Balfour Declaration would eventually come in 1917, granting the Zionists Palestine: supposedly “a land without people for a people without land.” It was either wilful deceit and self-delusion at play (it is inconceivable that the British didn’t know that Palestinians already occupied the land in question) or it was plain racism, in that they didn’t consider the Palestinians people.

Whilst Africans have particular reason to empathise with Palestinians, the majority of us will be as baffled as the rest of humanity (many Jews included) by descendants of Holocaust survivors behaving in such unashamedly and unapologetically barbaric ways, in full view of the rest of the world.

The bafflement is not total though. In Nigeria, a relative with intimate knowledge of the Bible reminded me that Gaza today is not as bad as Jericho of biblical times: the Israelites, newly emancipated from slavery in Egypt (and emboldened by the act of God obligingly parting the Red Sea for them), were ordered by Joshua to carry out God's commandment as passed through Moses: Utterly. Destroy.Them.

Old Testament scholars likely still debate whether by the time the texts first came to be written (not to talk of the versions available to us so many centuries later), the words ascribed to Moses and Joshua remained a true and accurate account of the instructions that came from the heavens, and not the result of any misinterpretation, manipulation or misrepresentation by the long line of priests and scribes. 

Scepticism about religious officials is justifiable considering that in late 2024, the Archbishop of Canterbury (the leader of the worldwide Anglican Church) resigned from his post, and one of his predecessors defrocked himself, due to their involvement in covering up sex scandals. The Roman Catholic Church’s record on that front is famously also shameful.

My relative believes, like many, that the Jews are God’s chosen people, and that what is going on in Palestine is preordained. Interestingly, they don’t accept the biblical justification of African slavery (the curse of children of Ham), dismissing it instead as an excuse for greed and exploitation. We each choose what narratives to believe and how to interpret them, of course.

Had the East Africa Plan of 1903 resulted in a Jewish State there instead of in Palestine, it is conceivable that the situation there could be worse still than contemporary Gaza (unimaginable as that may be): the genocide could potentially have started earlier, and one can only speculate about whether the levels of outrage (and indeed indifference, particularly of international leaders) would have been the same as we see now. And, mirroring the complicity of neighbouring Arab States in the Palestine genocide, it is also likely that neighbouring African states would have turned a blind eye, as they calibrated their interests not according to African brotherhood, but to the dictates of Israel and the West.

Where, for example, would Rwanda stand in a Zionist genocide of Ugandans and Kenyans? It is rather sobering to realise that their 1994 genocide claimed more lives in its 100-day duration than Israel achieved in 15 months, and without the Western-supplied high-tech weaponry used by the IDF. That genocide, itself a by-product of Rwanda’s history and continued Western (and Chinese) meddling, and the rebuilding of the country under Paul Kagame, is now almost universally described as the Genocide Against the Tutsi. This is indeed an inaccurate description because it ignores the four-year civil war that raged in the country before the genocide began, with one side being led by then-General Paul Kagame. It also ignores the fact that during the civil war, through the 100 days, and up until 1996/7 in Rwanda, Congo and Zaire, there was also a Hutu genocide – one that has been officially recognised by international human and civil rights organisations. And yet, the prevailing narrative remains the Tutsi genocide, in a reminder that the African proverb, “Until the lions have their historians, stories of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” applies as much to inter-African conflict as it does to European domination of Africa.

Challenging accepted narratives would therefore lead to some searching questions: Why, for example, did Paul Kagame address the Israel lobbying group AIPAC in Washington DC, and later visit Jerusalem during the Palestinian genocide and speak in support of Israel? Could there be some truth in the suggestion that there is an ongoing, underreported genocide happening in Congo, and that this is fuelled by Kagame’s neighbouring Rwanda aiding and abetting the plundering of the country’s resources by Western and Israeli interests?

African fratricide is also devastatingly evident over the hills in Sudan, where a civil war has been raging since April 2023, but overshadowed by Gaza and Ukraine. That situation is particularly tragic because just over a decade ago, the Arab-Spring-inspired popular protests led to the ousting of the dictator Omar al-Bashir, and the people got tantalisingly close to establishing something close to people power, thwarted only by the army’s insistence in retaining a big stake in government. Two generals, falling out and being encouraged and supported in their violence and equipped by external actors (including Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Wagner Group, Russia and the USA), have left the country in blood-soaked ruins.

One also worries about the answer to questions surrounding Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the current Nigerian president. With an origin story and educational background shrouded in mystery and doubt, and a history allegedly involving major drug-dealing and money-laundering in the USA, Freedom of Information requests into his past submitted by a Nigerian investigative journalist have been blocked by the CIA, the FBI and the DEA – Drug Enforcement Agency, all of them citing or suggesting that their releasing such information (regardless of whether or not the Nigerian public are entitled to it) would not be in the best interests of the United States. In other words, according to people who know better than me, the Nigerian president might be a “CIA asset.”

While on the one hand he called for a ceasefire and condemned Israeli aggression, a recent state visit made by him to France, in which he declared that Nigeria is “open for business,” might cause a collective eyebrow to rise in suspicion. The two presidents, Tinubu and Macron, have been keen to assure the public that the “business” in question does not include the establishment of French military bases in Northern Nigeria, in the wake of their expulsion from the former colonies of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, following popularly-supported coups.  Firmly anti-imperialist, anti-French and even anti-ECOWAS, those three countries have joined together to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – a mutual defence and trade bloc. That they should want to defend themselves against France is one thing, but their neighbours? 

Well, Tinubu it was whose Senate prevented him from sending Nigerian and ECOWAS forces to reverse the coup in Niger in August 2023. Whether other countries will voluntarily join and expand the AES remains to be seen, though there will be those who hope for other soldiers to follow the example of the Sahelian triumvirate and take power. 

Traore,Goita and Tiani will be well aware of the fact that popular anti-imperialist leaders have historically been assassinated by order of Western powers, but one hopes that they and those around them are adequately prepared to repel the attacks when they inevitably come.

Those protectors must include the masses whose protests and actions helped propel them to power. In Western citadels there are masses on the streets too, protesting against their governments’ complicity in the Palestinian genocide, in the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere; but the people in power, owned and controlled by personal ambition or huge business interests, care more about their positions and sponsors, than they do about their citizens.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in Israel, where, despite mass protests calling for a deal so that Israeli hostages could be freed, Netanyahu, in a bid to avoid incarceration, used those hostages as pawns in his sick game, causing and prolonging untold suffering and death in the process. 

All over the world, we the people are effectively hostages to our governments and the interests they serve, and our futures under their control are bleak. There are numerous examples of people fighting back to inspire us to act – from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the actions of uMkhontowe Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, who contributed so much to the downfall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. There are also smaller groups and actions. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose; but if we don’t fight, we don’t win.

One small group is proving to be an effective part of the fight against the Israeli regime. Started by two individuals in England, Palestine Action has grown into a movement that has through the actions of several ordinary people of all ages, shut down three sites owned and operated in the UK by the Israeli arms and technology firm Elbit Systems. They have also caused the company and its subsidiaries losses of millions of pounds in revenue, cancelled contracts, and security costs, through a sustained campaign of disruptive activity. An American factory has also been forced to close by Palestine Action Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Elbit is also active in Africa. It is probably more difficult for a Palestine Action Nigeria or Rwanda to achieve similar successes, since the authorities in most African countries are less likely to hesitate to order their minions to shoot activists on sight, or to deal with them in other violent and unjust ways. 

This is where another historical internationalist example can inspire new ideas. Oliver Tambo, uMkhonto weSizwe leader-in-exile, organised a clandestine mission in which young white volunteers from around Britain entered South Africa and carried out a dramatic operation, the purpose of which was to announce to society, to the subjugated African population as well as to the Apartheid regime, that, despite the apparent total defeat of the resistance, the ANC was still active. The psychological effect on both sides was tremendous, not least in resurrecting hope among the African population. 

This internationalism is arguably easier to generate in this digital age. Palestine in particular has made it abundantly clear that there are two sides to our struggle: the global elite and the rest of us, and that we are their hostages. It is only we, acting in solidarity with each other locally and globally who will liberate ourselves from elite tyranny.

As Nelson Mandela famously said, “We know full well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

On pro-Palestine marches worldwide, one of the most popular chants is "In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians." 

We must hold this particular truth to be self-evident, be we young white women in London, England, or middle-aged Black men in Lagos, Nigeria.

How Micro-Aggressions Go Nuclear

Notes from a sceptical Nigerian in England

I arrived at Bryanston (a boarding school in Dorset) in September 1978, from King’s College, Lagos. It was my first time in England, I found myself in a school with girls for the first time since puberty, and I was one of only three Black students. I survived, and even thrived, though not entirely unscathed.

In Summer term 1979, a group of about thirty of us went on a school trip to France, by ferry. At Calais, our teacher went through customs and continued ahead to make some arrangements. I, coming up near the rear, was taken to one side after it was noted that I had no visa in my Nigerian passport. I was detained, summarily manhandled like a criminal, and then thrown unto the next ferry back to Dover.

That memory came back as I was watching scenes of Africans being prevented from fleeing Ukraine, following what most pundits have called Vladimir Putin’s “unjustified, unprovoked act of aggression.” What’s happening to Africans (some of whom will be King’s College OBs) in Eastern Europe right now puts my experience into perspective, but reveals some interesting parallels. 

Back at Bryanston, there was a trip to Greece the following March (I had a visa this time!), from which I have two distinct memories: first, remaining on the coach and watching “those crazy white people” going into the sea at the beach (in March!), just because it was Greece. The second was being harassed throughout the trip by another boy, on account of my race – he made that clear. The matter was resolved when I went into his room one night, locked the door, beat him up and left.

On another occasion, I was called the N-word to my face by another boy. I didn’t fight him, partly because he was in the Rugby 1^st XV, or even report it. I remember him, but when we met decades later, I sensed his discomfort, even without the incident being mentioned.

Fast forward to late December 2021, forty years after leaving Bryanston to study architecture. By now, I have switched from architecture to being a self-producing touring actor/singer. I often post my events on Facebook groups that I belong to, including the Old Bryanstonians group and a small subgroup called Sundaylunch8. Imagine my surprise when one of the admins responds to a post on the next online sharing of my radio play, Paul Robeson’s Love Song with the following comment: “I think you’ll find that one way of getting kicked off this group is by promoting yourself on it.” To this I responded, “Oh, is that so? Happy New Year to you too.”

A week later, I posted another comment, asking the general membership if I was the only one to wonder what made the admin think it was acceptable or appropriate to address me in that way, saying I hoped it might start an interesting conversation. A few (three, I think) responded with some thoughts. Days passed, and I did another post asking for more comments. Some days later, I couldn’t find the group, so I messaged four friends asking them to tell me what they knew. One responded privately to confirm that I was indeed no longer a member.

At the time of writing, nobody else on the group, save for the one who replied has said a mumbling word.

Silence can have grave consequences.

With that in mind, I would now like to zoom out from the personal to the global, of which the treatment of Africans in Ukraine is but a part.

I would argue that many silences – especially the deliberate silencing of voices of peace and reason – have brought us perhaps to the brink of World War III, and perhaps of a nuclear catastrophe. It is sad to note how Paul Robeson’s words, written in 1958 during enforced house arrest in his country, ring true today. Referring to 1930s Europe in his book, Here I Stand, he recalled that "The years that I lived abroad witnessed the rise of fascism: the crash of martial music and the sound of marching jackboots drowned out the songs of peace and brotherhood."

He talked of fascism. Today we talk (or we don’t talk) of neo-fascism. Let’s talk about it. As recently as December 2021, a vote was held in the UN on a resolution “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

 
121 countries (mostly Global Majority countries, and including Israel, not surprisingly) voted in favour; 53 (mostly Eastern European and many Western European: England, France and Germany included) abstained, and 2 voted against the motion: United States and, er, Ukraine. This despite the much-lauded President Volodymyr Zelenskyy being Jewish.

This raises two questions:
1. Zelenskyy notwithstanding, could this explain the vicious, murderous treatment of Africans at this time of grave threats coming both from bombs and from neo-fascist, white supremacist groups now being armed by other Western countries? 2: Does this illustrate some kind of benign hold that the US has over Ukraine? Many suggest that the Ukrainian government is a puppet regime installed after a US-inspired coup in 2014, and that this (and not Putin) led directly to the current situation.

Putin is not the Russian people, yet they – whether at home or in the Diaspora - are starting to suffer as a result of having an evil, despotic tyrant in power. That he was genuinely democratically elected is of course open to question, but what about leaders of the great Western countries that teach the world how to do democracy, by force if necessary? Were there no alternatives? It might be instructive to hear two voices “of peace” that were drowned out by the noise that brought us some of our current NATO leaders.

I remember thinking we were in big, big trouble when, during the 2016 US elections, this happened:

Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC all broadcast Trump's empty podium instead of Clinton's big speech. Hillary Clinton, who had already admitted her role in the 2009 Honduran coup, was the Democrats’ preferred candidate. 

And as her Party and the media feigned disgust, they completely ignored Bernie Sanders, even as he drew bigger crowds than anyone else. His thoughts on NATO? Among other things, he was against its expansion to include new member states, “because it risks provoking military conflict with Russia.” 

Bernie was thwarted by the media and by the Democratic Party (and Obama) both in 2016 and 2020, and now we have Joe Biden, despite a rather bad smell emanating from his and his son’s dealings in, er, Ukraine.

Here in the UK, we have Boris Johnson, the compulsive liar with misogynism and racism challenges, and a certain opacity about his party’s links to Russian oligarchs. Two abiding, very contrasting images from the last two General Election campaigns are: Johnson hiding from reporters in a dairy fridge in 2019, and Jeremy Corbyn being cheered by hundreds of thousands at Glastonbury in 2017. 

Corbyn’s rock-star-like popularity saw him miss becoming Prime Minister in 2017 by less than 2,500 votes, which was such a shock for the Establishment and Corbyn’s own fellow Labour MPs that they went into overdrive in their efforts to damage him politically. The media and the Establishment ridiculed him on any issue at every opportunity, this tweet from Lord Digby Jones being a perfect example:

Q: Who said “NATO should shut up shop, give up, go home & go away.”
A: Jeremy Corbyn just five years ago
Vote Labour; get a clear & present danger to our Country as its Leader.

The Establishment hatchet job was completed when in the final days of the 2019 race, the Archbishop of Canterbury lent his weight to Anti-Semitism allegations against Corbyn’s Labour. Strangely however, Labour has lost tens of thousands of members since Corbyn stepped down, and we now have the bizarre situation whereby it is reported that Jews are almost five times more likely to face
antisemitism charges than non-Jewish members. Doesn’t such a statistic suggest  that whatever the truth or falsehood of allegations of anti-Semitism under Corbyn, Labour is certainly manifesting it much more under Keir Starmer? If one wants to examine with an open mind whether the extent of the problem during Corbyn’s time was exaggerated, one could watch the trailer for an undercover documentary, The Lobby. It never made it onto any major broadcasting channels, and I presume the American version also remains largely unseen. They point the finger at Israel, suggesting that Corbyn was the biggest victim in a well-designed, deliberate campaign to besmirch her critics.

Ukrainians are currently suffering as badly as any people anywhere can suffer. We all feel for them, as is abundantly clear from the amount of coverage their plight is getting. The pictures are indeed horrific. So too, however, are similar pictures that we are not currently seeing coming out of Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia or Tigray, for example. This is troubling, and we should ask ourselves how complicit we are in the singling out of Ukrainians for compassion because they are, to quote their deputy chief prosecutor, “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair,” or “pure Aryans,” in (neo-)Nazi-speak.

Furthermore, because of their crazed, despotic president, millions of ordinary Russians at home and abroad are also suffering, but it seems for the moment that they don’t matter as much as Ukrainians. Among the Russian victims are artists: people who enrich, inspire and transform other people’s lives with their words, music, dance, art and so on. As they contemplate dwindling incomes, certain other operators are making a killing (pardon the pun): arms dealers, and the many politicians around the planet in their pockets. A wonderful documentary, The Shadow World illustrates this beautifully, and its maker very cleverly opens the trailer with this very candid boast from an arms dealer:  “The thing about politicians is that they are very much like prostitutes, but only more expensive.” The cast list in the trailer alone includes, in order of appearance, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, George W Bush, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George H W Bush, Richard Nixon, and South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki.

If it were possible to find anything positive from the current situation, it would be the hope that the desperate plight of so many “Aryans” might increase empathy for people fleeing terrible situations elsewhere. One could hope for more scepticism from citizens about what their politicians and their media feed them, and point to why journalists like Julian Assange, Mumia Abu-Jamal  and Craig Murray, but not others, end up in jail. Epithets like Cop Killer, or Rapist (respectively in the case of the first two) exist to discourage you from accessing their output, such as this wikileaks-shared cable. 

When I heard snippets of Zelenskyy’s speech to the UK Parliament, and the rapturous reception it received, a certain play came to mind. Considering him alongside most recent and current so-called leaders of the free world (many of whom use great oratory to profess to be peace makers),  I am reminded of Moliere’s Tartuffe, the impostor.

What has all this got to do with Bryanston OBs? The treatment of my fellow Africans in Ukraine triggered that memory of my experience at Calais in 1979. In 2022, I am addressed in a disrespectful, offensive way in a Facebook group, given no explanation or apology and then kicked off the group with hardly a murmur in my defence. Three of the four people I subsequently asked for help didn’t respond. In my opinion, such apparent disinterest in abuses of power leads, at a macro level, to the kinds of politicians we have today. The admin provoked me, and I felt justified in identifying him on the Bryanston ex pupils Facebook page.

On a world scale, Putin was provoked - maybe even goaded - by generations of (mostly) men who belong with him in jail. The rest of us should use whatever peaceful weapons we have at our disposal to spread love and peace, and to seek justice for victims of corruption and war, whether they be blue-eyed and blonde-haired, or Black like me.

Tayo Aluko

The above is an adapted version of a blog posted in the Bryanston ex pupils Facebook page on 10 March 2022.

 

Journalism Died, July 2021. Pour the Champagne!

The voices of two great journalists fell silent at the end of July 2021.

Glen Ford, who died on July 28, was first recruited to read the news on his father’s music radio programme in Georgia in 1961, at the age of eleven. By the late 1980s, Glen had co-founded a Rap Music radio syndicate which provided a platform, on 66 radio stations, for many young Black American artists to express themselves artistically and politically. The independent music labels associated with the syndicate were slowly bought up by corporate interests, and before long, the politics was overtaken by the misogyny and profanity that is now more commonly associated with the genre.

Ford went on to co-found the Mutual Radio Network in Washington DC; America’s Black Forum – a weekly television programme, then The Black Commentator (blackcommetator.com), and finally, Black Agenda Report, of which he was Executive Editor until his death, and which also had a radio and a TV component. With his experience and track record, Ford could have been a media mogul, but his intention was always to provide news, analysis and commentary of national and world events from the Black Left perspective, and he was therefore accepting of, and philosophical about the fact that he would hardly ever be seen on mainstream media. Even Democracy Now! stopped inviting him on after a frosty debate with then-Obamite Michael Eric Dyson.

He was especially unpopular with avid supporters of Barack Obama. When Obama first started being noticed as an Illinois senator, Ford and a colleague at The Black Commentator were immediately suspicious of the sudden removal of an anti-war speech from the politician’s website. They questioned him constantly over a period of weeks (they found him a willing, accessible interviewee, at first) and finally sent him a last set of questions about his intentions were he to become a US Senator. Ford would say years later, “I’ve never regretted a political decision as much as having passed Barack Obama when he should have failed the test.” He would later refer to the president constantly as “not the lesser evil, but the more effective evil,” when compared with Bush, or his Republican rivals, McCain and Romney.  Furthermore, Obama's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacies were diametrically opposed, Ford opined, and he argued that Obama's effect on the continent of his father's birth was disastrous.

Ford was particularly scathing about other Black American politicians, dubbing them “the Black Mis-LeadershipClass,” for what he saw as their complicity in the exploitation of the global majority. Always part of a very small group of lone voices in the wilderness (he estimated that BAR had an audience of about 25,000), he lived relatively unscathed to the age he did probably because with such figures, he never posed a real threat to the establishment.

The same cannot be said of Craig Murray, who has over 93,000 followers on Twitter. By comparison, the editor of the Times has 7,000, and the Guardian’s has 113,000. Thanks to social media and to the sheer quality of his blog (www.craigmurray.org.uk), he has a reach of literally millions. He had lost his job as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan after turning whistle-blower and exposing the Tony Blair government’s complicity in torture programmes. 

Since then, his blog has been a counter to what he describes as relentless state propaganda. Three examples of stories he has very rationally demonstrated the untrustworthiness of mainstream media’s coverage of are 1: The case against Julian Assange; 2: The Skripal affair; and 3: The Alex Salmond trial. His dispatches regarding this last case strongly suggested that Salmond, the former leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, was set up by his successor and those around her. The defence case was that these people concocted false allegations of sexual impropriety by Salmond against several women. This would have landed Salmond in jail, had a majority-female jury not cleared him of all charges. On all these, Murray’s journalism was in a class above all the major outlets - the BBC included - and adds credence to his suggestion that the Scottish and UK governments are corrupt, the SNP hierarchy has little interest in Scottish Independence (the reason for which the party exists) but is maintaining a charade in collusion with Westminster, and finally, the mainstream media does little more than just spread government propaganda.

In many countries, such brave journalism could send you to an early grave, or to jail. Scotland has shown itself to be one such country, for Murray was found guilty of contempt of court, for the curious charge of "possible jigsaw identification" of Salmond's accusers. The trial was held in Scotland (without a jury), and the Supreme Court in London refused to hear his appeal, giving him and his supporters the sense that this was very much a political conviction arranged between London and Edinburgh.

Tremendous outrage was shared on social media, and demonstrations were held in Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen. Murray finally surrendered himself to police in Edinburgh on August 1, amid dozens of supporters who had gathered to wish him well. They sang Auld Lang Syne, and raised a toast to him over champagne. 

Mainstream media reported none of this. The British public, on the whole, does not know that a journalist has become the first media person to be imprisoned for contempt of court in Scotland in 70 years, or that the charge was designed to ensnare him alone among all journalists.

Rather worryingly, the National Union of Journalists has been totally silent on the matter. This is hardly surprising, as the NUJ’s leadership, in apparent contravention of the union’s rules, prevented Murray from renewing his membership in 2020, citing objections from persons unknown. This reminds me of a quip I heard once: that bosses of a construction union, and many of its members, would happily agree to build a prison for construction workers only, just to keep themselves in work for a while.

One is also reminded of Pastor Niemöller’s poem, “First, they came,” to which there is this pithy adaptation:

First they came for the journalists
And I did not speak out, because
I was not a journalist.
We don’t know what happened next

But we do: authoritanianism and fascism.

Journalists like Glen Ford and Craig Murray have given us, at huge personal sacrifice, valuable weapons with which to fight: information. Thankfully, there are others in their mould still standing. Murray will be out in a few months, and even though Ford won’t be back, there is this line of inspiration from a dissident Greek poet:

You tried to bury me, but you forgot I was a seed.

Rest in Power, Glen Ford. We pour some drops of champagne into the earth in your honour. And see you again soon, Craig Murray.

www.tayoalukoandfriends.com

Washing Away All African Blood.

A Personal Study of Historic and Contemporary Institutional Racism As Revealed in Some of Liverpool’s Buildings and Spaces.

“I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, every brick in whose infernal town is cemented with an African’s blood.”

So George F. Cooke, 18^th Century actor, is supposed to have responded to an audience admonishing him for being obviously drunk at Liverpool’s Theatre Royal, Williamson Square sometime in the early 1770s. 

Theatre Royal, Williamson Square.
Source: The Internet  Archive and University of Toronto. 

Though the building no longer exists, the story lingers to remind us of the truth of Liverpool’s unquestioned central role in one of the major forces that shaped the world as we know it today. 

The Shakespeare Theatre.
Source: liverpoolpicturebook.com

Over a century later, in another theatre- The Shakespeare - a stone’s throw away, a young Black American actor was appearing in a play in which his character was required to whistle. He was totally incapable of doing this, so he was asked to sing instead. Somewhere on Fraser Street, Liverpool, where there is now only a car park, was heard on the professional stage for the first time in Britain, the glorious singing voice of Paul Robeson.

Charles Wotten plaque

Image: Dan Lewis

One wonders how welcome Robeson felt on that his first visit to the city, for only three years earlier - June 5, 1919, the city had witnessed a race riot in which a young Black man was chased by a mob into the river at Queen’s Dock, pelted with rocks, and drowned. His name was Charles Wotten, and he has been memorialized on a plaque on a three-foot-high stone dock bollard since early 2017. Some may consider it unsatisfactory that Liverpool’s first race riot of the 20^th century - and its only victim - should be marked in so remote and seemingly so insignificant a spot, but that was not always the case. In 1974, with support from Liverpool City Council and in recognition of the fact that there was poor representation of Black people in higher education, the Charles Wootton [sic] College for Further Education was set up, and it catered primarily to Black people from the Liverpool 8 area, and the city. “The Charlie,” as locals called it, was housed in a converted Georgian building at 248 Upper Parliament Street and became something of a landmark in the city: one that not only kept the young man’s name alive, but also became a symbol for Black self-help and advancement in a city that has always struggled with its slave-trading history. Sadly, the Charlie closed its doors in 1994, for reasons too numerous and complex to address here, seemingly reflecting a halt in the progress that it represented. The building is now an anonymous block of flats, with no indication that it was ever a significant part of Liverpool’s Black History.

 

Stanley House Youth

Source: Liverpool 8 and Liverpool 1
Old Photos Group (facebook) 

A few blocks away, one comes to a much more modern building, Gladstone Court - another block of flats. It occupies the site of what was once Stanley House, a community centre opened in 1946 for the local Black community, with funding from the Colonial Office.

At its height, it provided activities and facilities for all ages, literally from cradle to grave. In its basement, a Black vocal group called The Chants was formed in the early 1960s.

They so impressed two white musicians that they persuaded the singers to let their group of four white boys be their opening act in one of their gigs some weeks later.

The Derelict Stanley House

replaced by Gladstone Court
Source: Philip Mayer, flickr

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, like countless other white musicians, had also been regular attendees at many of the dozens of clubs on and around Upper Parliament Street – like the Gladray, The Pink Flamingo, The Beacon, The Somali, Rachael’s, The Nigerian, where Black musicians from Liverpool and beyond, played all kinds of music from the US, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere - on their way to creating what would eventually become known as the Mersey Beat. It is likely however that most tourists travelling from the Cavern Club or the Beatles Museum to Penny Lane would drive along Upper Parliament Street or Princes Avenue without realizing how much modern Pop Music was spawned behind the facades and in the basements of the buildings they were driving past.

The father of the founder of the aforementioned group, The Chants, had first arrived in Liverpool from the Gold Coast (Ghana) around 1930, and soon became organist and choirmaster at a church called The African Churches Mission, started in 1931 by a Nigerian man called Pastor Daniels Ekarte. From the Mission, Pastor Daniels provided food and shelter to the poor of the Dingle area of Toxteth, to many Black immigrants who found themselves homeless or destitute, and to children abandoned by white mothers because they were the result of liaisons with Black men, some of them American GIs stationed nearby in WWII. For 33 years, he heroically continued with this work despite being repeatedly denied assistance from the City Council, and finally the Mission was demolished in 1964. In the early 2000s, a housing association built a block of flats on that site. It would have been nice if they had named it after Pastor Daniels, but they didn’t.

John Archer Hall
Source: geograph.org.uk

One building nearby actually bears the name of probably Liverpool’s most illustrious Black son. Born near the Brownlow Hill Workplace in 1863 to a Barbadian father and Irish mother, John Archer became Britain’s first (or second, if recent research is correct) Black mayor, in the Battersea borough of London, fifty years later. A fine portrait of him, painted about fifteen years ago by a Liverpool-born Black artist hangs proudly in Liverpool’s Town Hall, and at the junction between Upper Hill Street and Windsor Street in Toxteth, John Archer Hall is a well-used building, among whose uses are as an arts venue, offices for some Third Sector companies, and a community garden. Mr. Archer would be proud that his name is associated with such worthy causes so long after his death, but it would ironically also support the argument that as a Liverpool-born Black person, you often have to leave Liverpool to succeed professionally.

Many immigrants do thrive though - right there on Upper Parliament Street itself, one will find several African doctors working in the Women’s Hospital. In my own case, having completed my training at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1992, I fared pretty well as a self-employed architect in the years leading up to, and following the millennium, with buildings here and around the North West. When I decided in the mid-2000s to become a developer however, things began to unravel, to such an extent that in 2009 I was forced to liquidate my architectural and property development companies. I did keep a community-interest company dormant, with the aim of resurrecting it at some future date, in case any of my “dreams deferred” looked like they might one day come to fruition.

52-56 Upper Parliament St.
Sales Brochure (2008)
The site remains undeveloped

Prior to that, shattered dreams included a showcase green block of flats which needed financial support from Liverpool City Council to fill a funding shortfall due to the expense of green technologies. After about two years of asking, the Council finally said they would consider providing some funding the following year, but this came too late to prevent the site being repossessed by the lending institution. Elsewhere, I was gazumped by a Housing Association on another site owned by Sefton Council, without correct due diligence procedures having been followed. I tried to stand my ground, and eventually an investigation was commissioned by the Housing Corporation (now Homes England). The association’s own auditors were engaged, and they never asked me a single question. Their report, obtained only after an intervention by my MP, confirmed lack of due process but still cleared the organisation on a technicality. A few years later, Cosmopolitan Housing Association went bust, and the ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the entire Social Housing sector, citing poor regulation as a major factor in their decision. After about five years out of the game (I have been touring nationally and internationally as a theatrical performer since 2008), another idea emerged – for a multi-generational housing community on a site owned by Liverpool City Council in East Liverpool, for which I negotiated a three-year Option to secure planning approval, partnership and finance. I revived my community-interest company (CIC) and very, very slowly (almost three years) got to a position where I accepted a lucrative partnership offer from a private-sector developer, although they weren’t interested in the initial idea, and even less so in the CIC. I requested more time from the council, and permission to change the CIC to a Limited Company. They took four months to grant a three-month extension and to inform me, without explanation, that I couldn’t change the company status. That developer walked away, and I was left with a few months to find alternatives. I was making progress with that, but the Council wouldn’t give any more time and withdrew the Option in February, reclaiming the site with the benefit of the planning permission I had obtained and paid for, with the loss of five years’ work and thousands of pounds to me personally.

62 Rodney Street
Source: ipernity.com

Someone suggested that if I had drugs money to launder, it would have been a different story. I won't comment other than to say that even here, one can find historical precedent. One particular house on Rodney Street (named after the Admiral that saved Jamaica for the Crown against France), No. 62 was built by one John Gladstone, owner of slave plantations in Jamaica and Demerera. When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, Gladstone received the largest compensation on record - £83 million in today's money. His son William would become British Prime Minister four times.

Had my dreams come to fruition, I wouldn’t have been the first Black developer, or entrepreneur, in the city. Most of the clubs mentioned earlier were Black owned, though they no longer exist. It would be difficult to list the number of Black-owned lodging houses (where else would Black people find accommodation up to the middle of the last century?) that were compulsorily acquired in a so-called slum clearance, and made way for the expansion of the University in the 1960s. Much more recently, another Nigerian made national headlines when his company succeeded in developing many homes for some housing associations in the city in the mid 2000s. His company sadly no longer exists, and his recounting of the difficulties he had along the way may suggest one of the reasons. Sneaking a peak at his file during a meeting with a bank manager once, he told the Observer, he saw a card on which was written, 'Black, Nigerian, Liverpool, Living in Toxteth, High Risk.'

Following the Liverpool 8 uprising (the local description of the “Toxteth riots” of 1981), the Granby Triangle, the former centre of Liverpool’s Black population, is only now recovering from over thirty years of blight, as the vast majority of millions of pounds of regeneration money that flowed into the city as a result of the uprising seemed to bypass the area.

The 1989 Gifford Report on the uprising confirmed what the community had warned about in the years leading up to the riots: that such an explosion was inevitable because racial discrimination in the city was “uniquely horrific.” This would certainly have been at the back of the minds of the city’s leaders when in December 1999 they issued a formal letter of apology for the city’s involvement in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It reads in part: “The City Council hereby commits itself to work closely with Liverpool communities and partners and with peoples of those countries which have carried the burden of the slave trade. The Council also commits itself to programmes of action with full participation of Liverpool's Black communities which will seek to combat all forms of racism and discrimination and will recognise and respond to the city's multiracial inheritance and celebrate the skills and talent of all its people."    

Twenty years on, I am sorry not to be able to offer myself as an example of this commitment having been met, nor does anybody else readily come to mind. I can however try to see what else is happening in the heart of Black Liverpool, in the world of property development. Let’s go back to Upper Parliament Street.

The Merseyside Caribbean Centre is a small building on a large piece of land owned by the City Council, leased to the Caribbean Community since the 1960s. In its heyday in the 1990s, the centre attracted visitors from all over the country to the annual carnival and to multiple year-round events, but it closed in 2013, the site now serving mostly as a car park for the Liverpool Women’s Hospital

opposite.

A community-interest Company called the African Caribbean Heritage Centre recently took up responsibility for its residual affairs, which now include dealing with a private developer (introduced to them by the council) who has drawn up a scheme for over 400 residential units, on the understanding that a new Caribbean Community Centre will be included somewhere in the development, although affordability of the flats to the local community didn’t appear to be uppermost in the developers’ or Council’s minds.

Source: Save the l8 Caribbean Centre (facebook)/
Barbara Ainsworth

One tragic story associated with the Caribbean Centre concerns the son of one of the Jamaican men who was a regular there in the 1980s. In 2005, Anthony Walker was brutally murdered by a pair of racists, in a case that gripped the nation as much as Stephen Lawrence’s murder in London had, just over a decade earlier. In addition to charitable educational foundations, these two young men are memorialized in buildings: Walker in a large room – the Anthony Walker Education Centre in the International Slavery Museum at Albert Dock, and Lawrence in a building at Greenwich University. In Liverpool, it seems that as a murder victim, you have to have been world famous and foreign to be accorded such an honour: the International Slavery Museum renamed one of their buildings after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 2013, and there is a Steve Biko Court in Liverpool 8.

MLK Jr. Building
International Slavery Museum
Source: The Guide, Liverpool 

Dr. King famously spoke of his dreams of racial equality, peace and justice. Stephen Lawrence dreamed of being an architect, Anthony Walker a lawyer. One can only speculate what Charles Wotten’s dreams were before the salt water of the Mersey filled his lungs in June 1919, but they would certainly have been similar to most people’s: to be healthy, happy and well fed, and to do good for oneself, one’s family and for society in general.

I am grateful that my own dreams of developing property for social and environmental good have cost me only money, time and faith in the city I call home, and not my life. I have seen my local MP about the series of resistances I have experienced, and she has taken it up with the new Chief Executive of the Council. While one cannot expect a finding similar to that which followed the enquiry into the police handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder (in which the Met was described as “institutionally racist”), I can’t help feeling justified in describing my treatment by Liverpool as “institutional cruelty” at the very least.

Nonetheless, I have one new dream to share. I have a dream that in a few years, the site of the former Caribbean Centre will be developed into social housing primarily for people of African descent, regardless of financial means. I have a dream that the development will be led by a community-owned company, using Black developers, architects, builders and the like. I have a dream that it will be self-sustaining, spawning several thriving community-interest companies. I have a dream that little Black boys and little Black girls will live and play there together, with their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, all caring for one another and enjoying together beautiful music, art, stories and good, clean air. I have a dream to share. I have a dream that Liverpool City Council, with several Black men and women in its leadership, will be a national and international example of excellence in promoting community cohesion and prioritizing people over profit. I have a dream that all the contributions that Black people have made to Liverpool, and to the world from Liverpool, will be properly recognised in the naming of streets and buildings, and that people will come from far and wide to celebrate and marvel at their achievements. I have a dream to share.

I’m sure many Liverpudlians – Black, White, Brown, Yellow, whatever - would share this dream.

And the council? Well, if the extent of their creativity is to use a community-interest company’s legal status to thwart a great idea, I fear that they might be institutionally incapable of sharing this dream.

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Dedicated to the memory of three men whose funerals I attended in the space of a single week at the end of June 2019:

Alhaji Captain Miftah Osi-Efa, one of the founder-members of the Al Rahma Mosque, Liverpool.

Paul Agoro, one of the founders of the Granby Residents Association, who successfully resisted plans for the wholesale demolition of the Granby Triangle.

Bala Lloyd-Evans, whose first business idea was in employment for ex offenders, but was knifed to death in an unprovoked attack. His funeral reception was held at the Caribbean Centre.

UPDATE 1, 20 Nov 2019. On September 6, following an email from Dame Louise Ellman MP to Tony Reeves, the Council's Chief Executive, a meeting was convened which included David Turner and Pauline Iveney of the Property and Asset Management Services Department (PAMS), the Council solicitor Brian Beattie, Dame Louise and myself. In the meeting PAMS stated, disingenuously, that they had informed me through my solicitor of the reasons for denying the change to a limited company. At Dame Louise's request, they promised to forward proof of this. As of November 1, this had still not been sent, and Dame Louise repeated her request, to no avail. She has now resigned as an MP.

UPDATE 2, 2 Dec 2019. The prospective Labour Parliamentary Candidate to replace Ms. Ellman is Ms. Kim Johnson, who happens to be a local Black woman. If she decides to take on this case, another piece of information she will have is that at the aforesaid meeting of September 6, PAMS confirmed that the party they were selling to (no tender, advertising, anything) is Cobalt Housing Association, with whose John Westerside I had been negotiating when the Option was terminated. What communications there had been between Cobalt and PAMS during that negotiation process will probably never be known, but my reluctance to trust housing associations is probably vindicated.

UPDATE 3, 19 Dec 2019. The Liverpool Echo reported today that two arrests were made by the police: one is the managing director of Elliot's the developer behind the thwarted take-over of the site of the Merseyside Caribbean Centre and to whom a site previously earmarked for a Slavery Memorial, St. James's Church, had been sold, for housing. The other person under investigation is the Council's Head of Regeneration, under whom PAMS serve.

UPDATE 4, 28 April 2020. My new MP, Kim Johnson, finally made contact three weeks ago. It appears that the allocation of staff to her following her election to Parliament has been particularly tardy. We have started liaising, and Covid-19 notwithstanding, I remain hopeful that her intervention will help get to the bottom of this.

UPDATE 5, 12 May 2020. On the advice of a local councillor, I submitted a formal complaint online. If not resolved to my satisfaction, it could eventually get to the Local Council Ombudsman. In going back through historic correspondence and writing it up, it seems that the case is even more shocking than I realised! It can be read here.

UPDATE 6. 3 July 2020. Complaints procedure in motion with Liverpool City Council. It is currently being investigated by a Council officer. Letter here.

UPDATE 7. 9 July 2020. Letter received today from the Council, rejecting my complaint in its entirety. I will proceed to the Local Government Ombudsman.

UPDATE 8. April 6, 2021. Local Government Ombudsman, after much correspondence, states (contrary to much apparent evidence of foul play and Council withholding of evidence) that she won't investigate the case, as she is "unlikely to find fault in the Council's actions." I requested a review of the case, pending receipt of information requested from the Council under the Freedom of Information Act, being strangely delayed.  Ombudsman would not confirm that I would be granted an extension of time in which to request the review. I referred the matter to the Information Commissioner's Office, who eventually compelled the Council to release documentation, finally received 30 October. Of the 80 pages, only 5 were of any interest, and they were heavily, or completely redacted. This basically provided me with no more information than I had at the beginning of the process. A further complaint to the ICO was referred to them, and on 29 March they wrote to say that my complaint was not upheld.

UPDATE 9. October 25, 2022. 18 months after first complaining to the Information Commissioner, LCC has finally released what it referred to as unredacted copies of the previously redacted documentation. Despite my drawing the commissioner's attention to the fact that very little new information revealed and that further concealment of information was obvious, the commissioner has issued a decision notice favouring the Council. I have lodged an appeal to the General Regulatory Chamber of HM Courts and Tribunals Service. It includes what I call the evidence of concealment.