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.
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 1st 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.
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.
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.
