I gather that she’s been in today’s Guardian, where she’s written a piece about the death of Tina Turner. Turner was one of the greatest soul singers, even appearing as Auntie Entity, the ruler of Bartertown, in the film Mad Max 3, for which she also sang and performed a theme song. Shola’s piece lamented the fact that the singer had died before Blacks had received their proper compensation for their historic enslavement by White Europeans and Americans. She’s an intensely controversial figure. Some people feel that she is anti-British and I believe there was 38 Degrees petition launched by someone to stop the TV companies using her as a guest on their shows when debating racism and related topics. I feel that the issues of Black compensation for slavery raises questions about such compensation that crosses racial and national boundaries and which may affect Shola herself. Slavery was practised for millennia across the globe. Black Africans were enslaved by other African nations, as well as Muslim Arabs and Turks, as well as Indians, Persians and Afghans. Odiously, slavery still persists in Africa and the global south, and has been revived in Islamist-held Libya and Uganda. At the same time, Europeans were held in bondage as serfs until into the 19th century in parts of Europe, and were also enslaved by the invading Turks and pirates from Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia. This rises the issue that if compensations is to be paid to enslaved Blacks, then the same principle should mean that the victims of these forms of slavery should also receive compensation from those, who historically enslaved them.
I’ve therefore sent her this message via the message box on her website. I’ll let you know if I get an answer
‘Dear Shola,
I was struck by your article in today’s Guardian about the death of the great soul singer, Tina Turner, and lamenting the fact that she died before Black people had received reparations for slavery. The question of slavery reparations raises issues extending beyond western Blacks, including the complicity of African aristocracies, the enslavement of Blacks by other nations, including Islam and India, as well as indigenous White European forms of bondage and their enslavement by the Barbary pirates and the Turkish empire. As the granddaughter of an African prince, I would be particularly interested in your perspectives on these issues.
Regarding indigenous African complicity in the slave trade, I’ve doubtless no need to tell you about how generally Black Africans were captured and enslaved by other Black African peoples, who then sold them on to White Europeans and Americans. The most notorious slaving states were included Dahomey, Benin and Whydah in west Africa, while on the east coast the slaving peoples included the Yao, Marganja and the Swahili, who enslaved their victims for sale to the Sultan of Muscat to work the clove plantations on Zanzibar. They were also purchased by merchants from India, and then exported to that country, as well as Iran, Afghanistan and further east to countries like Sumatra. It has therefore been said that reparations should consist of Black Africans compensating western Blacks. Additionally, Black Africans were also enslaved by other Muslim Arabs in north Africa and then the Turkish empire. What is now South Sudan was a particular source of Black slaves and one of the causes of the Mahdi’s rebellion was outrage at the banning of slavery by the British. This raises the issue of whether Turkey, Oman, India and other north African and Asian states should also compensate the Black community for their depredations on them.
The complicity of the indigenous African chiefs in the slave trade has become an issue recently in Ghana and Nigeria. I understand that the slavery museum in Liverpool was praised by campaigners and activists from these nations for including this aspect of the slave trade. I would very much like to know your views on this matter. Forgive me if I have got this wrong, but I understand you are of the Igbo people. These also held slaves. I would also like to know if you could tell me a bit more about this, and how this may have affected your family’s history. Your grandfather was, after all, a chief, and this raises the awkward question of whether your family owned slaves. If they did, how were they manumitted and did your family give them reparations for their enslavement?
There is also the question of the enslavement of Whites both under conditions of domestic servitude and by the Muslim powers of the Turkish empire and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Serfdom in England died out in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it continued in European countries into the 18th and 19th centuries. Prussia only liberated its serfs in 1825 and the Russian serfs were only freed in 1860. Serfdom is considered a form of slavery under international law, as I understand. If Blacks are to be granted compensation for their enslavement, then as a general principle the descendants of White European serfs should also be compensated for their ancestors’ servitude.
In Britain, a from of serfdom continued in the Scottish and Northumbrian mining industries. Miners were bondsmen, whose contracts bound them to the mining companies and who were metal identity collars to prevent them running away exactly like slaves. I would be grateful if you would tell me whether their descendants should also receive compensation for their forefathers’ virtual enslavement.
Over a million White Europeans and Americans, mostly from southern European countries such as France, Spain and Italy, were enslave by the Barbary pirates. This only came to an end with the French conquest and occupation of Alegria. If people are to be compensated for their ancestors’ enslavement, then presumably America and Europe should also receive compensation from these nations for this. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 14th century by Mehmet II resulted in the depression of the indigenous White Christian population into serfdom as well as the imposition of slavery. When Hungary was conquered, the Turks levied a tribute of a tenth of the country’s population as slaves. When one of the Greek islands revolted in the 1820s, it was put down with dreadful cruelty and the enslavement of 20,000 Greeks. Do you feel that the descendants of these enslaved Balkan Whites should also receive compensation from their former Turkish overlords?
There is also the fact that after Britain abolished the slave trade, she paid compensation to the former African slaving nations for their losses as part of a general scheme to persuade them to adopt a trade in ‘legitimate’ products. This was believed to benefit both Britain and the African nations themselves. How do you feel about the payment of such compensation? Do you feel that it is unfair, and that these nations should pay it back to us, or that they should pay it to the descendants of the people they enslaved?
Finally, slavery still persists today in parts of Africa and has even revived. The Islamist terror groups that have seized control of half of the former Libya have opened slave markets dealing in the desperate migrants from further south, who have made their way to the country in the attempt to find sanctuary in Europe. At the same time, slave markets have also opened in Uganda. Slavery is very much alive around the world today. I would be greatly interested in your perspectives on this issue, which is affecting people of colour in the global south. How do you feel it should be tackled? Are you working with anti-slavery organisations, such as Anti-Slavery International and the various organisations by former African slaves to combat this? If not, I would be very grateful if you could tell me why not, when you are obviously motivated by a human outrage at the plight of the historic victims of western slavery.
I hope you will be able to provide me with answers to these questions, and very much look forward to receiving your reply.
It seems I’m not the only one on the left concerned about the rise of ‘wokeness’ and the detrimental effects it’s having on politics and culture. Looking for various books on Amazon yesterday I found Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke, by Umut Ozkirimli. The blurb for the book runs
‘Right now, someone, somewhere is being cancelled. Off-the-cuff tweets or “harmless” office banter have the potential to wreck lives. The Left condemns the Right and the bigotry of the old elites. The Right complains about brain-dead political correctness. In reality, both sides are colluding in a reactionary politics that is as self-defeating as it is divisive. Can the Left escape this extremism and stay true to the progressive ideals it once professed?
In this provocative book, Umut Özkırımlı reveals how the Left has been sucked into a spiral of toxic hatred and outrage-mongering, retreating from the democratic ideals of freedom and pluralism that it purports to represent. Exploring the similarities between right-wing populism and radical identity politics, he sets out an alternative vision. It is only by focusing on our common humanity and working across differences that the Left will find a constructive and consensual way back from “woke.” ‘
The potted biography for Ozkirimli states that he ‘is a Senior Research Fellow at IBEI (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals), a professor at Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, and a Senior Research Associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He is the author of the acclaimed Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, currently in its third edition. His writings appear frequently in The Guardian, openDemocracy, Times Higher Education, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, among others.’
I remember a piece in Lobster from over a decade ago where editor Robin Ramsay attacked postmodernism and the new identity politics. He felt that it had arisen in the 1990s as a substitute for the traditional class politics of the left as it retreated and rejected traditional socialist policies. He was particularly critical of its use or promotion by Tony Blair. To be fair, I’m not sure Blair was particularly woke. I think there was more noise about multiculturalism than anything really substantial during Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. This included, if remember properly, one song which started out as standard pop but then included traditional Indian musicians and dancers along with other musicians and performers from ethnic minorities in one pop contest. But Blair is also quoted as saying that multiculturalism is a failure, and I’m quite prepared to believe that this is the old warmonger’s real view. I note that Ozkirimli doesn’t attack pluralism, just radical identity politics, which seems fair and moderate. With the Conservatives turning to cultural issues and particularly attacking ‘wokeness’ and multicuturalism, this might have some important insights into how the left can free itself from radical identity politics without succumbing to the reactionary nationalism being promoted by the Nat Cons.
I don’t know if people remember it, but over a decade ago Cadbury’s released an advert in which a gorilla appeared to play the drums for Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air’ tonight. I found this parody of it on the scifi band channel on YouTube, with Chewbacca doing the honours instead of the gorilla. There are a number of other parodies like it, but this is the one I prefer. I’m sticking it up here as I thought some of the great readers of this blog might also enjoy it. I supposed I should have really put it up on Star Wars day, May 4th, but it’s a bit late for that now.
I hope you’re all enjoying this Bank Holiday Monday, despite the drizzle. The Met police has been widely criticised for its heavy-handed conduct during the Coronation. They arrested 50 or so anti-monarchy protesters simply for standing there and protesting. According to this Channel 4 news report, the arrests were made under legislation that permits this to be done during large events. From what I’ve seen, some of the arrests were ‘pre-crime’, where someone was arrested carrying a banner or placard before they could demonstrate. This is, as I believe Mike over at Vox Political, has pointed out, another infringement of democracy. People have a right to demonstrate and protest, even at events like coronations. He fears, rightly, that this is going to have a chilling effect on young people’s engagement with politics. They will feel that they cannot express their views and so there is no point in becoming politically active. And so democracy withers away, rather than be felled in a swoop through a Fascist or Communist coup.
One of issues is the Met police’s arrest of three volunteers from the 5-Star movement – not the right-wing Italian party or the 1980s British pop band – who were handing out rape alarms the night before. The police claim that they had intelligence that the alarms were going to be used at the coronation to spook the horses. They alleged that some of the protesters were even planning to through them at the horses, causing them to bolt into the crowd. The volunteers, who I’ve heard were giving them away at 2 O’clock in the morning, have explained on the other hand that they do it to protect vulnerable women on girls on a night out. This seems to me far more plausible than the Met’s story. I’ll be interested to see what evidence the Met has for this intelligence, assuming we’re allowed to see it and it’s not another fairy tale to allow the cops to clamp down on peaceful protesters and perfectly innocent volunteers in a fit of judicial paranoia.
I’ve been looking through Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England for anything suitable to put up for the coronation. I thought of something written for the restoration, but the only piece I could find like that is this ballad by Henry Jones of Oxford, published in 1660. It celebrates Charles II hiding from Cromwell and his troopers in the oak at Boscobel, which then became commemorated every year afterwards as Oak Apple Day. Palmer gives a description how it was celebrated in one school in Leicestershire, which is rather alarming: the children went around with stinging nettles wrapped in dock leaves looking to inflict a few stings on people who were insufficiently royalist. Given the debacle yesterday, when the Met police was arresting anti-monarchy protesters simply for the terrible crime of protesting, I think some of those cops have the same mentality. The ballad goes on to describe how Charles pretended to be the servant of the serving maid helping him to escape, and there’s several touches of humour as the disguised Charles comes a cropper in front of Roundhead troopers, who all have a good laugh. He finds sanctuary at the Three Crowns in Bristol, where he’s told to wind up the jack, but overwinds it instead. The ballad finally ends with Charles catching a ship to safety in France.
I recite the ballad’s lyrics and also play the tune as reproduced in the book. I don’t, however, do the two together because words and music are printed separately and I haven’t worked out how to fit the one to the other. Sorry.
I hope people enjoy it, whatever their views on the monarchy.
No, not a tale about a funny performing animal who can speak. Gef the Talking Mongoose was a poltergeist that haunted a Manx family in their remote farmhouse in the 1930s. As well as making knocks and scratches it also spoke, claiming to be a spirit from India that had come to Europe. Although it made many other claims and hints about its identity as well. When manifesting, it took the form of a small, furry creature. There are photographs of the spook, but they are less than entirely convincing. Its appearance in once photo has been compared to a woman’s fur stole of the type worn in the period. There is a cast supposedly of the ghost’s footprints, and they are unlike those of a mongoose or anything else, for that matter. The front paws are much larger than the rear. The case was investigated by the Hungarian lawyer and parapsychologist Dr Nandor Fodor and the British ghost hunter Harry Price.
Apparently they are making a film of the case to be released later this year. The film is produced and directed by Adam Sigal, and stars Christopher Lloyd as Nandor Fodor, Minnie Driver as Anne, Simon Pegg as Harry Price, and Neil Gaiman as the voice of Gef himself. Lloyd was the mad scientist in the Back to the Future films, though he also appeared as a Klingon commander in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. Some of us can still remember him as Mad Jim in the 1970s/ early 80s comedy, Taxi. Pegg has appeared in a series of comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End, as well as the rebooted Star Trek films and Paul, about a Grey alien who really has been living on Earth for all these years. Neil Gaiman is a comics and Fantasy writer, who created the cult Goth comic back in the 90s, The Sandman, co-wrote Good Omens with the late, much missed Terry Pratchett, the BBC fantasy series Neverwhere, and a string of Fantasy novels like American Gods, which I think may have been adapted into a TV series. I’ve a very strong interest in the paranormal and Gef the Talking Mongoose is a fascinating case. I believe there was a radio play about it on Radio 4 a year or so ago. According to the imdb page the film is expected to be released on the 16th September this year.
Shades of Max Headroom, anyone? Max was a computer-generated video jockey and the presenter of Channel 4’s Max Headroom Show in the 1990s. This showed pop videos interspersed with Max’s quip and jokes. Although he was supposed to be computer generated, in fact the character was played by actor Matt Frewer in makeup. Only the background was supposedly created by computer, but I’ve read since that it was done by Sid Sutton, the artist who produced the computer graphics for the Beeb’s TV adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t watch the national lottery, but I think they also had a computer generated presenter in the 1990s. In the same decade, the Japanese announced a computer generated pop star. William Gibson, the SF author who helped to create the cyberpunk genre with Neuromancer, depicted a romance between such a Virtual star and a real human in his novel Idoru.
Now, according to Interesting Engineering, the Kuwaitis have decided to get in on it all. Kuwait News, the country’s English language news broadcaster, has unveiled Fedha, a computer generated presenter powered by AI. Presumably the AI involved is something like the ChatGPT programmes now holding conversations with geeks and nerds across the globe. As Max used to say, ‘The future is now!’ But this programme won’t have his cheesy jokes, arrogance nor love of golf. Nor will it have his mechanical stutter. All of these have made Max a cult character long after the series ended.
Here’s a video I found on the Knowstalgia channel on YouTube describing Max and his TV career in America and Britain, ass well as the Max Headroom incident in which video pirates wearing a Max Headroom Max interrupted an episode of Dr Who broadcast by two Chicago TV stations.
Okay, here’s something a bit different for this Easter Day. I was looking through the genre film site, Teleport City, yesterday when I came across a review of the 1968 Indian movie Wahan Ke Log. As well as covering western films, Teleport City also has excellent reviews of Asian genre cinema. Much of this is about the various Hong Kong martial arts epics, but it also deals with other countries like India. I’ve no idea what the title means, but the review was fascinating in what it said about the influence of James Bond on Asian cinema at the time and also how the UFO phenomena had reached Asia and influence popular culture over there, at least in the form of this movie. Apparently the success of the Bond films led to the release of a number of similar flicks in Asia, as countries like India sent their suave, elegantly dressed superspies after nefarious villains intent on world conquest. In this case, it was a UFO invasion from Mars. Among the suspects was an Indian scientist, who has invented a laser gun, which his criminal son has gotten hold of and is using for his evil purposes. And yes, there are song and dance numbers as the hero goes into nightclubs to see the female lead sing while knocking back cocktails. In the end it is revealed that the Martian invasion is a hoax, perpetrated by one of India’s Asian rivals, though the review wouldn’t tell you whether this was Pakistan or China. The only hint they gave as to who was responsible was that it wasn’t Burma.
It’s a long review, and I admit, I did no more than skim it. What interested me is what the film says about the global nature of the UFO phenomenon. It first arose in America in the 1950s and so can appear very much as a western phenomenon even though there have been sightings all over the world. The sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, used to complain that UFO researchers had a simplistic view of non-western cultures when it came to interpreting UFO encounters. They assumed that witnesses from regions like Africa could not be faking their experiences or mixing it up with material from the global UFO culture because, living in such distant parts of the world they were somehow untouched by western popular culture. That this was not so was shown in one UFO documentary where an African UFO witness wore a Michael Jackson T-shirt.
I’d also assumed that there was little in the way of Science Fiction in India. One of the anthologies of SF stories I read in the ’90s included one Indian short story, but stated that there wasn’t much of it. I read elsewhere that when it came to fantastic cinema, the main genre was the ‘Theologicals’ about the Hindu gods. These satisfy the need for the fantastic and cosmic that in the west is catered to by Science Fiction and Fantasy movies. It certainly seems that the majority of science fiction cinema and television from Asia comes from Japan, although China might be starting to catch up with its television adaptation of the Three Body Problem.. I also found it interesting for what it also showed about the nationalistic tensions in Asian cinema as well. Some of the 1950s SF movies have been seen as metaphors for the Communist threat, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or otherwise informed by Cold War paranoia. One of the clearest examples of this is the B-movie The Angry Red Planet, in which the voice of God appears on people’s radios from Mars denouncing Communism. I think. Wahan Ke Log shows that the theme of invasion from outer space could also express the same national and political fears in Indian cinema of covert foreign plots to take over the country.
Not all Indian SF cinema may be so grim, however. A couple of decades ago our local multiplex had posters up for the Bollywood epics it was also showing as well as the latest Hollywood releases. One of them appeared to be about an alien family with large, high craniums landing and living in India. One of the pictures was of the family on a bike trip, their cycle helmets suitably shaped to cover their peculiar noggins. It was only when thinking about it a little later that it occurred to me that this could be India’s answer to the Coneheads. There’s a whole world of SF and space related cinema out there, which takes themes and tropes from the west and adds its own unique experience and views, as countries around the world industrialise and start to explore the High Frontier for themselves.
After her great and highly controversial Rwanda plan, Suella Braverman yesterday announced another grand scheme, this time to tackle the grooming gangs. She announced that she was going to set up a special police task force to deal with them. This is another area fraught with racial politics. Cruella declared that there was something in Pakistani culture that caused them. When challenged about this, she said she was just referring to the gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. The news about this latest policy from the Tories included various experts. One of these cited a report commissioned by the Tories two years ago that found there was no link between the grooming gangs and ethnicity, and that the majority of men in these gangs were white. Which is what you’d expect, as this is a White majority country. Other issues include concerns about racial stereotyping and putting the focus on the perpetrators rather than victims. The concern was that the girls who were preyed on by the gangs were left without police and authority protection because of their high-risk life styles. Aside from this, Braverman has not made any statement about what funding and resources will be allocated to this new crime unit, how it will be organised and operate, and so on. So I wonder how serious she is. Not very, is how it all seems.
Firstly, the Tories have had years to set up a dedicated squad to deal with the gangs, ever since the scale of the abuse and the inactions and cover-ups by the police and local authorities became a scandal. They haven’t done so. Instead, this announcement has been made right at the time when the Tories are nearing the final years of their term, are low in the polls and, it seems, desperately looking for a policy that will resonate with the public. And I don’t believe it was an accident either that Cruella specifically mentioned Muslim/Pakistani gangs. Because of the size of the scandal, the impression was given that the grooming gangs generally came from this ethnicity. She was appealing to the Islamophobic right.
There are real issues regarding Islamic culture and attitudes to women. Traditional Islamic culture requires women to dress in the black, all-covering chadors and cover their hair with the hijab. Women were not supposed to go out in public except in the company of their husbands or close male relatives. And female sexual promiscuity is strictly forbidden. Thus there is an attitude in some parts of the Muslim and general Asian community that White girls are whores or sexually easy. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote about this in one of her columns in the Independent years ago. One of the lines in a spoof of ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ on Goodness, Gracious Me, altered so that it was instead, ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother’, was ‘Your mother says, ‘that White girls just a whore”. Anthropologists have also documented similar attitudes in the wider Muslim community. Norway has lessons for immigrants to teach them not to molest or rape western women. A few years ago the Finns released an English-language video with same intention. This featured three women singing, ‘Hey! Don’t touch me there! That’s my no-no space’. But I don’t see any attempt to tackle similar attitudes among Muslim migrants to Britain.
It looks to me instead that Braverman is deliberately appealing to the Islamophobic right and that section of the population that may be considering voting for Reform or whatever it is rump UKIP is calling itself. This is empty, culture war electioneering, and I see no intention of tackling grooming gangs, whether they’re Asian, White or whatever.
This is just about the Conservatives wanting to con people into re-electing them. And if they are, they’ll forget it, just as they’ve broken every other policy which hasn’t been about boosting the bloated incomes of the rich at the expense of the rest of us, Black, White and Asian.
David Rosenberg, Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s (Five Leaves Publishing 2011).
Here’s something to cleanse the palate after the discussion of fascism and the Tufton Street gangs of free trade looters. While looking for books on fascism on Google, I found this book by David Rosenberg. I’ve got a feeling he may be the same David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, who was one of the advisors to Jeremy Corbyn and is The Wrong Kind Of Jew. He’s very firmly in the tradition of the Jewish Bund, the mass Jewish socialist party of Poland and Russia. As well as opposed to capitalist exploitation, they were also anti-Zionist and wanted Jews instead to remain in their home countries to live as free people with the h same rights and privileges as their gentile fellow-countrymen. Their anthems are on YouTube, and I’ve put up a number of them here.
The blurb for the book on Amazon runs
‘During the 1930s, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts intensified their campaign against the Jewish community, particularly in London’s East End. As that campaign became more overtly antisemitic, and more physically intimidating, Jewish groups debated how to deal with the fascist threat, ultimately building their own defence organisations and forging alliances with others. The simmering tensions in East London culminated in the Battle of Cable Street, when more than 100,000 people, mainly from the local Jewish and Irish communities, prevented Mosley’s troops marching through the East End.’
Tony Greenstein, another Jewish critic of Israel, has also written a book about the fight against Mosley thugs in Brighton and the south coast. Unfortunately, despite being a self-respecting Jew who was obviously proud of his townsfolk’s resistance to the BUF, he was also smeared as an anti-Semite and thrown out by the Blairites. One of the points he makes is that the Jewish people who fought Mosley with the Irish, trade unions and Commies did so on their own initiative. The Board of Deputies told them instead to stay indoors and not fight back. Which is something to think about the next time Marina van der Zyle starts shouting that the Labour party is institutionally racist and it’s only the Board standing up for Jewish people.
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