Thomas Sowell is a Black American conservative intellectual, and fierce critic of affirmative action, which he argues is actively harmful to Black improvement and uplift. I’ve been reading his Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York: Basic Books), his examination of the effects of imperialism on both the conquerors and conquered peoples, concentrating on four groups of peoples: the British, Black Africans, the Slavs and western hemisphere Indians. In his chapter on Africans, he states very clearly that the western imperial powers committed atrocities, including the imposition of forced labour. This was widely resented and also caused innumerable deaths. The mortality for rate for porters on one route in colonial Tanzania, for example, was 20-25 per cent. However, he also describes the political, social and economic chaos that swept many African nations after they gained independence with coups, ethnic violence and economic collapse. Africans compensated for the disappointment of their political hopes by blaming the former imperial masters and the US. He writes
‘African governments by the dozens were toppled by military coups in the post-independence era. The swift disappearance of newly attained democracy, as brutal dictatorships took over, led to the cynical phrase: “one man, one vote – one time.” The elaborately fragmented peoples of Africa turned upon one another, sometimes with massive bloodbaths. Approximately 30,000 Ibos were slaughtered by Moslem mobs in Nigeria, 200,000 Hutus were slaughtered by the Tutsis in Burundi, and Idi Amin’s regime slaughtered 300,000 people in Uganda. A continent once virtually self-sufficient in food, Africa became a massive importer of food as its own production faltered and in some places declined absolutely, in the face of rising population. It was not uncommon for national output as a whole to decline absolutely for years in various African nations. In Equatorial Guinea, for example, the growth rate was negative for the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, averaging nearly minus 4 per cent per annum for the 1980s and minus 9 per cent for the 1970s. In Burundi the annual “growth” rate of national output was minus 6 per cent in 1994 and minus 18 per cent in 1995, while in Rwanda it ranged from minus 3.2. per cent in 1992 to minus 50 per cent in 1994.
After the soaring rhetoric and optimistic expectations at the beginning of independence were followed by bitter disappointment and painful retrogressions that reached into virtually every aspect of African life, the immediate political response was not so much a re-evaluation of the assumptions and policies which had led to such disastrous results, but instead a widespread blaming of the departed imperialism, or racial minorities such as the Indians, or even the United States, which has had relatively little role in African history, for good or ill.’ (p. 120).
The British Conservative historian Jeremy Black says much the same in his The British Empire: A History and a Debate (Farnham: Ashgate 2015), where he discusses the way contemporary commonwealth politicians have used the history of British colonialism to divert domestic attention away from the failures of their own regimes.
The same attitude is held by some elements of the recent anti-racist movements. Post-Colonial Theorists, for example, will not criticise indigenous colonised societies, but will only attack western nations for the horrors of imperialism. At a Zoom event a few years ago held as part of the Arise festival of left-wing ideas, ‘Why Socialists Should Oppose Imperialism’, Barbara Barnaby, the head of Black Lives Matter UK, demanded that Britain allow in immigrants from the former colonies ‘because you oppressed us under colonialism’. But colonialism was at least fifty years ago in the cases of many of these countries. Western meddling and international capitalism has contributed greatly to many of these nations’ misery, but it cannot be considered the sole cause. These countries had the opportunity of creating better societies and economies for themselves during independence. By and large, they didn’t, at least, not in the immediate post-independence period. Since then it has been African oppressing and exploiting other Africans. The argument that Britain should take in more African immigrants because of imperial oppression is invalid, and is a piece of deliberate anti-White racism by Barnaby and those like her.
There are other, better arguments for allowing entry to Black asylum seekers – common humanity, the moral imperative of giving sanctuary to those genuinely persecuted or oppressed, and common historical ties through the empire and commonwealth.
But not a vengeful attitude of entitlement by Black militants unable to come to terms with the oppression of Blacks by their fellow Blacks.
As a proud Bristolian, I felt I had to post something about this. A day or so ago History Debunked posted a short video arguing that the left in Bristol had no knowledge of the slavery in the city before or after the transatlantic slave trade. Instead, they were solely concerned with historic Black slavery. They were not aware that Anglo-Saxon Bristol exported enslaved children and seemed unconcerned with the conviction a few days previously of two Slovakians for holding smuggled migrants in effective slavery. Such exploitation isn’t called slavery, but ‘people trafficking’. The thumbnail to his video shows the toppling of the statue to Edward Colston by the BLM mob last year.
Now I have put up some of Simon Webb’s material when it has been about fake history presented as factual Black history. But he does have some deeply troubling opinions. He seems to believe the Bell Curve nonsense, that Asians are more intelligent than Whites who in turn are brighter than Blacks. He feels Enoch Powell has been smeared and misrepresented and put up a video about 1968 as the year everyone was talking about repatriation. This is apart from videos attacking what he describes as ‘the disability scam’. He’s also made some mistakes when talking about African history. He’s said before now that when Europeans reached Africa, they found its people in the Bronze Age. Not so: iron working in West Africa began about a thousand years before it emerged in Europe because of the presence of easily worked bloom near the surface. I can only assume he believes they were in the Bronze Age because of the Benin bronzes, the bronze sculptures made as shrines to the king’s lifeforce. I got the distinct impression that all of Africa’s peoples were using iron before European contact, with the possibly exception of one of the Khoi-San hunter-gatherer peoples in South Africa. So, like many YouTubers across the political spectrum, it’s worth checking his content for yourself.
He’s right about Bristol being a centre of the slave trade in the Anglo-Saxon period. In the 11th century the Anglo-Saxon cleric, Bishop Wulfstan, preached a sermon in the city against it that put an end to it. This is established historical fact, and is included with the display of Colston’s statue at the M Shed museum in the City. In the city continued to be a centre of the slave trade into the 12th century, when a part of visiting clergy hoping to raise money for one of the French cathedrals were warned not to have dinner aboard the Irish ships then in dock. These had a habit of luring the unwary aboard and then slipping off to sale them in the Emerald Isle. David Harris Sacks in his book, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy 1450-1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1991) also notes that in the 17th century White children in Bristol were also kidnapped by ‘spirits’ for sale as indentured servants in the Caribbean colonies. I got my copy of the book when I visited the ‘Respectable Trade Exhibition’ then on display at the City Museum about the city’s historic involvement in the slave trade.
As for the contemporary enslavement of Whites, the local news for the city and the surrounding region has called it what it is: slavery. A few years ago a farmer in Gloucestershire was found guilty of enslaving migrant workers, and there have been other instances of this, including cases where the victims have been people with learning difficulties. In all those cases they’ve been rightly described, at least on the news reports, as slavery.
What is now called ‘people trafficking’, at least as it involved forcing migrant European women into prostitution, was referred to as ‘White slavery’ in the late 19th and early 20th century. Looking through the government reports held in the archives of the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, I found one government document from the first years of the 20th on an international police conference held in London about the issue. It was interesting because it contains many parallels to contemporary people smuggling and sex slavery. Many of the young women smuggled into Britain and then forced to work in brothels today are from eastern Europe. Back in 1904 or thereabouts, the parliamentary report noted that the victims were ‘German’ girls – really Slav women from the territories then ruled by Germany and Austria. There were differences with today as well. These women were mostly smuggled to service migrants to the Latin American nations, which were then experiencing an economic boom. Today Britain seems to be the destination of the women trafficked here, rather than further afield. Also it would be incorrect to describe all of today’s enslaved women as White, as many seem to come from outside Europe, such as Asia.
As far as I am aware, the mainstream left haven’t ignored the plight of such enslaved women. I can’t remember the details, but I have the strong impression that many of the female MPs in the Labour party were very much concerned with the sexual exploitation of smuggled women, at least when it became a national issue a few years ago.
Black Lives Matter, it is true, has an exclusive focus on historic Black slavery. This is because the organisation, along with many anti-racists,, believes that the modern poverty, poor educational performance, marginalisation and racism experienced by western Blacks is due to the transatlantic slave trade. Hence the call for reparations. How far this is true is open to question. The Black American Conservative Thomas Sowell has argued that slavery did not result in the breakdown of the Black family. Indeed, according to him, marriage rates among Blacks following emancipation were slightly above those of Whites as families separated by the slavery masters sought to find each other and solemnise their relationships through the formal marriage. Other Black conservatives have cited statistics to argue that, despite segregation and Jim Crow, the years from emancipation to the 1960s were a time of professional and economic expansion for Black America. They were moving into more jobs, establishing businesses and were catching up on Whites in the years spent in school. Of course, this is part of an ideological assault on affirmative action and state aid, which they believe has acted instead to reverse these gains. The point, however, is that BLM are not interested in slavery as an issue in itself, but only as far as it is responsible for the current problems of western Blacks.
Now I doubt that Black Lives Matter and movements like them are aware of the broader history of the slave trade outside of the enslavement of Black Africans. They’re also not concerned when it’s done by Black Africans to other Africans. Barbara Barnaby, the head of the British branch of Black Lives Matter, condemned the new slave markets opened in Libya. But she did so as part of a general attack on the new western imperialism,, and didn’t mention the other slave markets that have opened in Uganda. The impression I have is that BLM is strongly based on Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory, which are solely concerned with White racism and ignore it and as well as other oppressive practices in non-western societies.
Black Lives Matter does enjoy widespread support among parts of the left, although I think its popularity is waning as time wears on. It’s been hit in America by a series of scandals, must notably surrounding the disappearance of donated money to the tune of millions and the use of some of it by its former president to buy herself five upmarket homes. Several of the protests were in fact riots, in which Black-owned businesses were also attacked and looted.
Black Lives Matter, although highly visible now, is only part of the broad left. And while I believe its members and supporters should be far more aware of slavery as an issue, and that it also involved the enslavement of Whites, BLM does not represent the whole of the left.
I believe very strongly that many on the left in Bristol are aware of its history as centre of the slave trade before it moved into transatlantic, Black slavery, and are definitely still active campaigning against contemporary forms of enslavement, such as people trafficking. Even if it is no longer called ‘White slavery’.
One of the extremely positive features of Sean Stillwell’s Slavery and Slaving in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014) is that includes short descriptions and quotations from slaves, slavers and slave masters in Africa describing their careers and situation. There was a striking variety of slave systems in Africa. In some societies, slaves were acquired for use and soldiers and could rise to high social rank through their connections to powerful chiefs., One of these was the Sokoto royal slave Dan Rimi Nuhu. The book states
‘At the end of the nineteenth century, during a civil was in Kano (located in what is now northern Nigeria) Emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate, Dan Rimi Nuhu, a powerful royal slave official, soldier, and titleholder, crowned the rebel pretender, Yusufu, as emir. Nuhu had long supported Yusufu’s cause and claim. Nuhu was a well-known and powerful slave i8n the palace, but he had joined the war camp of Yusufu early on in the struggle. When Nuhu arrived on horseback, Yusufu said, “Our trip is successful, our trip is successful since Nuhu has joined us, he has joined our camp!” Thereafter, Nuhu transformed Yusufu’s military camp into the proper seat of a rival emir. He gave Yusufu the royal regalia and insisted that he follow Kano court protocol. With Nuhu’s support the rebels later took the Kano throne. Afterward, the royal slaves and their families who supported the new emir gained a substantial amount of power.’ ( pp.89-90).
Others were not so well treated.
‘Msatulwa Mwachitete grew up in Chitete, located in central East Africa, to the west of Lake Malawai, in the house of his father, who had twelve wives. Their home was attacked numerous times by Mkomas of the Inamwanga, who regularly carried off women and children into slavery after setting fire to surrounding villages. During one such attack, Msatulwa was captured, along with his mother and brother. He was taken some distance from his home and given as a slave to Mitano. Msatulwa was forced to grind corn, cut firewood, cook, hoe fields, and fetch water, but was eventually given to another person, who treated him better. In the end Msatulwa found his way home after running away.’
Horrifically, slavery isn’t a thing of the past. The Islamists that have seized power in one part of Libya after the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafy have reopened the slave markets, selling the Black migrants who have travelled north in the hope of reaching Europe. Slave markets have also reopened in Uganda. The book also gives the testimony of Ahok Ahok, an enslaved Dinka woman, given to Anti-Slavery International. She was captured and forced into slavery during the Sudanese civil war in the ’90s.
‘Our family was captured about six years ago [i.e., about 1994] when we were already fleeing north and had crossed into the North into Kordofan. I was captured with my son, Akai, and my two daughters, this one called Abuk … who was about eight at the time, and a younger one, about two. We were taken by a tribe called Humr [i.e. Misseriya Humr], who split the three of us up. The man who took me subsequently sold me on to some other nomads to look after cattle, for about 130 Sudanese Pounds. I had to look after their cows and spent about six years with them before I managed to escape to Makaringa village…. Meanwhile my three children had been taken by others. For six years, until I reached Makaringa village, I had no news of them. When I reached the village, my son Akai heard where I was and joined me there. He is with us at this CEAWC centre. We then contacted the Dinka Committee and they were able to find my daughter Abuk, who had been renamed Khadija. She had initially been put to work looking after livestock, but had got into trouble when some animals had escaped – she was too little to look after them. After that she was employed as a domestic servant. She hardly speaks any Dinka language now, only Arabic… I still have no news of my youngest daughter and am still hoping to find her.’ (211-2).
The book also gives the names of some of the African organisations set up to help slaves. These include Timidria in Niger, the Dinka Committee in Sudan; El Hor (Free Man), set up in the 1970s by former slaves in Mauretania; and SOS-Esclaves, set up in 1995. These organisations face continuing difficulties to fight slavery and improve conditions for former slaves, as shown by an additional piece of testimony:
‘It is uphill work…. Some of their members have been imprisoned. Seeking help through the courts is usually useless. Sharia courts maintain that slavery is legal. Since no laws have been passed, laying down penalties for enslavement or detailing the rights of slaves, other courts and local officials maintain that they have jurisdiction if slaves bring cases for custody of their children or try to establish their right to remain on the land they farm. Former owners may claim the property even of freed slaves when they die.’ (213).
These slaves are not going to get any help from the western advocates of Postcolonial and Critical Race Theory, because these disciplines are exclusively focused on White racism and the horrors of White colonialism. I’ve mentioned that feminists in India and the Middle East have been bitterly critical about the refusal of the activists and scholars supporting these forms of Critical Theory to criticise the treatment of women and LGBTQ folk in these countries. Indeed, Indian progressives have attacked these postmodern ideologies for giving support to the most reactionary elements of these societies on the grounds that, as they are part of these societies’ traditional structures and not the product of western colonialism, they are exempt from criticism. And you could see the attitude in a speech given by Barbara Barnaby, the head of the British branch of Black Lives Matter to a fringe meeting of the Labour party last summer. She criticised the resurgence of slavery in Libya, because this was a product of Blair’s colonialism. But she didn’t condemn it elsewhere in Africa, where it is the product of indigenous forces. Her demand that Britain and the other European countries was based on the abuse of the peoples of the global south during colonialism, but made no mention or criticism of the tyranny, corruption and poverty of African rulers and regimes that is behind much of the migration to Europe.
This isn’t, as Kate Maltby tried to claim in the I a few years ago, an attempt to avoid being diverted from the campaign for equality and social justice in the west into criticism and activism against non-European slavery. It is the product of a profoundly racist ideology that sees slavery and other human rights abuses as only worth fighting if they are committed by Whites.
Barnaby, Black Lives Matter and similar organisations may have the best intentions, but their exclusive focus of White racism is actively hindering real anti-racism and campaigns to eradicate modern slavery.
You can say one thing for Tony Blair and his inclusion on this New Year’s Honours list, it’s united the British people in a way that’s rarely been done. Right across the political spectrum, from Corbynist left to Tory right, people despise him as a warmonger. The petition on Change.org to have him stripped of his knighthood has reached 650,000 signatures. Which I think means that it has to be debated in parliament. Unfortunately, as the mad right-wing internet broadcaster Alex Belfield has said in one his videos, there’s little chance of the politicos taking notice of it or doing what nearly three-quarters of a million people want.
Mike has pointed out that the people want him denied the honour because he took the country into an illegal war with the Iraq. The charitable interpretation of this is that Blair believed the fake information that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But rather than wait for a UN resolution authorising military action, Blair put pressure on his advisers to state that he could launch an invasion,, and then went ahead and acted according to the advice he’d decided he should be given. Nearly a million people have died as a result of the war that followed.
Less charitable individuals might follow instead the information in Greg Palast’s book, Armed Madhouse, which showed that the real reason behind the invasion was economic. The Neo-Cons wanted Hussein out the way because he occasionally sent aid and support to the Palestinians. The American and Saudi oil industry wanted to loot Iraq’s state oil industry and oil reserves, which are the largest outside Saudi Arabia. Western multinationals also wanted to get their mitts on the country’s state enterprises. And the Neo-Cons also had a plan to turn Iraq into the kind of free trade state with precious few tariff barriers against imports they wanted for America. The result was that Iraq’s oil is now in the hands of foreign countries, a situation authorised by the new constitution written for the country. Many Iraqi businesses went bust as a result of the lowering of tariff barriers, as the world dumped their surplus goods on the country at cheap prices. The country’s own businesses couldn’t compete and went out of business. The unemployment rate skyrocketed to 60 per cent.
The country had been relatively secular with a welfare state and, I believe, free healthcare for its citizens. This has vanished. Women were also safe on the streets and could follow a career outside the home. That vanished too. One of his Hillary Clinton’s female officials tried telling a crowd that things were actually better for Iraqi women during a diplomatic tour of Turkey. She was very definitely told the contrary by a group of annoyed Iraqi ladies. And domestically the country collapsed into bloody chaos. In Baghdad, peace walls had to be erected between Sunni and Shia Muslim areas. Sectarian death squads roamed the country looking for the wrong kind of Muslims to kill, with the cooperation of the American military authorities. The mercenary companies also employed as peacekeepers were also out of control. They ran drugs and prostitution rings, and their soldiers shot ordinary Iraqis for sport. One American diplomat to Iraq was so shocked that he came back to the Land of the Free to the tell the media all about it, including the Nazi regalia sported by some US squaddies.
Over 2 million severely normal Brits marched against the Iraq invasion. One of the priests at my local church was one of them. They were ignored. Just as Blair’s successor, Keef Stalin, is also keen that the government or Her Maj not rescind Blair’s knighthood. Apparently he gave some kind of speech listing all the good things that Blair had done, like winning three elections. Blair’s administration was responsible for some good policies. He would have liked to have privatised the health service, but under him it was still properly funded and he had some success in tackling poverty. But he was also responsible for the Work Capability Tests that have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of disabled people wrongly judged fit to to work, and thrown off the state support they desperately need. All too many have died of starvation and neglect as a result.
And that still doesn’t remove the fact that Blair launched an illegal war and on that account is viewed as a war criminal by many. I bought a book a while ago, written by a lawyer, which made that very case. It went through the relevant international legislation and showed through repeated examples how Blair and Bush had violated it. There were even attempts by Canadian and Greek human rights activists to have the two arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity. This failed as it was successfully blocked by politicians and other officials.
The war also further destabilised the Middle East, setting up the conditions for the expansion of Iranian power into the Iraq, while at the same time radicalising parts of the country so they were taken over by Daesh. Who then went on to smash the monuments and sacred buildings of Christians, Shia and other religions they didn’t tolerate, and destroy priceless antiquities going back to ancient Babylon. This, along with the civil war in Syria, has also fuelled the refugee crisis. I’ve no doubt many of the channel migrants, or ‘dinghy divers’ as they’ve been dubbed by anti-immigrant right-wingers like Belfield, are people fleeing the chaos in Iraq. I am definitely no fan of Barbara Barnaby, the head of the British branch of Black Lives Matter. But she made a good point at a Corbynite Labour meeting last year when she said that Britain should admit these refugees because of our responsibility for the wars that forced them to leave their homes.
I’ve also heard the other side of the argument, that Blair should have got the knighthood after leaving office, as was customary for all prime ministers. He wasn’t. This has also caused a further problem, in that apparently they have to be granted to prime ministers in order. This has meant that Cameron hasn’t got one either and Tweezer hasn’t been made a dame or given some equivalent honour. The insult, on this view, is that it already has taken so long to grant Blair his honour.
Well, I still don’t think he deserves one. Just as I don’t think Cameron and Tweezer deserve honours either. Cameron held the vote on Brexit thinking it would fail and he’d defeat the Eurosceptics in the Tories. It didn’t. It narrowly won. However, it divided Britain. England largely supported it, while the Welsh, Scots and northern Irish rejected it. It’s breaking up the union and has particularly betrayed the people of Ulster. Both Loyalists and Nationalists wanted the border with Eire to remain open. The loyalists, as you might expect, also didn’t want a tariff barrier separating the Six Counties and the rest of the UK. An open border with Eire was one of the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the war in Northern Ireland. With Britain leaving the EU and the imposition of a hard border, instability and sectarian violence have returned. Speaking on the BBC comedy show, Room 101, Jeremy Paxman nominated Cameron to be sent into the room containing all the most horrible stuff in the world. Cameron was, declared the former bane of politicians on Newsnight, the worst prime minister we’d had since Lord North. He was the PM who lost us the American colonies.
My guess is that Blair will still get his knighthood. But millions of severely normal Brits will still hate him as a warmonger, the man who lied to us to get the illegal war he wanted, and sent Britain’s courageous young servicemen and -women to fight and die in decades of pointless war. I think Blair will still get the honour, but millions will still remember him as war criminal, and further resent the honours system that has rewarded him.
Bush and Blair were subjects of satire and ridicule when they started the war. Someone on the Net cut footage of various speeches and press gatherings by the duo to show them singing Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’. Which has the fitting lines ‘Let’s start a war. I want to start a nuclear war’. Let’s hope Blair and the world’s other politicians never do.
I’ve posted a number of videos about Simon Webb and History Debunked. Webb’s channel specialises in attacking what he considers to be myths and falsehoods published as authentic Black history. He’s a Telegraph-reading Tory, and so, like everything else on the net, his claims need to be checked. Sometimes they’re true and at other times they’re much less so. As I’ve also pointed out. But this short video, of just over two minutes, is interesting.
In it, he contrasts the massive reporting of the felling of the statue to Edward Colston in Bristol last summer by a mainly White crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators with the felling of a statue to the late Ethiopian emperor, Hailie Selassie three weeks later. This received hardly any coverage. The Beeb briefly mentioned it, but did not report that its attackers were Black. The statue had been attacked as part of a dispute between the Oromos and Amharas, two Ethiopian tribes. It didn’t receive the same coverage as the attack on Colston’s statue as it didn’t fit the narrative the media were trying to push at the time of the BLM protests.
I can see how this would be so. Colston’s statue was torn down as part of the Black Lives Matter movement’s anger at the racism they perceived in British society and the continuing legacy and celebration of colonialism and slavery.
The problem is, so could the attack on Selassie’s statue.
My guess is that the attack on the statue wasn’t covered because it was seen as a dispute between the citizens of a foreign country which didn’t have any relevance to British racial politics. But this is not the case. Ethiopia has rightly been admired by Black radicals because it is the single African country that was not conquered by Europeans. But it was, like many other African nations, a slaving culture. In the 19th century the British and Egyptian authorities were concerned about Abyssinian slave raiding in the Sudan to the point were a punitive expedition was launched. In the early part of the 20th, the British authorities in central Africa were concerned about Abyssinian raids into Uganda to capture slaves there. One British officer, Major Darnley, was so outraged at the Britain’s refusal to stop these raids that he went undercover into Abyssinia itself to write a book, Slaves and Ivory, to describe his adventure. Darnley wrote that the dominant tribe, the Amharas, were enslaving the other Abyssinian peoples and as a result, whole provinces were being depopulated. His book was written with the intention of provoking an outraged British public into demanding an invasion to stop these atrocities. In fact, so great was the problem of Ethiopian slaving that Dame Kathleen Simon, a fervent opponent of it, supported the Italian Fascist invasion in the belief that it would finally put an end to it. The entry on her on Wikipedia states “Lady Simon embarrassed the supporters of Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, on the eve of the Second Italo–Ethiopian War by uncovering his slave-owning wealth.[2] She claimed that Benito Mussolini had convinced her that he would try to eradicate slavery in Ethiopia.[5]“
It’s clear that this is a problem for Black Lives Matter and their attacks on historical slavery as there really does seem a determination to play down indigenous African slavery and involvement in the global slave trade. Slave markets have reopened in the continent in Libya and Uganda. However, there is silence about this from western Black activists. Barbara Barnaby, the head of British Black Lives Matter, mentioned the slave markets in Libya in a speech at the Arise Festival of left-wing ideas, Why Socialists Oppose Imperialism. But did she did so only as the result of European and American imperialism in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafy. She didn’t mention Uganda at all. The I’s columnist, Kate Maltby, has said this refusal to involve questions about Black slaving is because the question is a diversion to stop the struggle of western Blacks against racism. She has a point, but there is still a racial double standard being exercised. Whites are being criticised for historic crimes, but the same outrage is not directed at African peoples and nations that were equally culpable. How many Brits, for example, are aware that there are streets named after and statues to Efronye Tinobue, a 19th century female African slaver, in her native Nigeria? I doubt many of the mob that demolished the statue to Colston were aware of the African involvement in the slave trade, and would probably be upset if they were told.
But if monuments to Whites withconnections to slavery are to be torn down and renamed, so should those to Africans with the same connections, like Hailie Selassie. And the African and Islamic involvement in the slave trade should be far better known.
Okay, it’s taken me several months to do it, but I also sent an email to the peeps at the Arise Festival of Left Labour Ideas about what I firmly see as anti-White racism. This was in a webinar ‘Why Socialists Are Anti-Imperialists’. As you can read from the email, I largely agreed wholeheartedly with what was being said, especially when some of the speakers, like Murad Qureshi of the Stop the War Coalition, warned against the return of the Neocons and their ideology of imperial conquest and the plundering of nations. It’s destroyed Iraq and its destroyed Libya, and the scumbags want to destroy Iran.
But I also have a few quibbles here. They saw the rise in Islamophobia as being a product of these interventions, but I think it predates them. It was on the rise in the west with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the murder in the Netherlands of Theo van Gogh, a film-maker, by a Moroccan who was offended at his film attacking traditional Islamic attitudes to women.
But what angered me was the speech by Barbara Barnaby, the head of the Black Liberation Movement. She was firmly anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, but some of her attitudes themselves seem colonialist to me. She stated that Britain and Europe should take in migrants, ‘because you oppressed us under colonialism’. This might be putting it too strongly, but it does seem to be a form of Black and Asian colonisation in revenge for the European conquest of Africa. She holds Britain and the rest responsible for the return of slavery in Libya, which is reasonable, but has nothing to say about its return in Black Africa in Uganda. I know this is outside the subject, but it’s important. It suggests that she considers slavery and other atrocities acceptable if they’re done by Blacks, and that their discussion and criticism by Whites is somehow an assault on African dignity. Here’s my letter. Unfortunately, I call Barbara Barnaby Barbara Biti throughout, as I forgot her surname.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for inviting me to the various online events organised by the Labour Assembly Against Austerity as part of the Arise Festival of Left Labour ideas. I have found them extremely necessary and stimulating. This country needs real socialism and action for its working people of all colours and creeds, as well as real international solidarity and action against the multinational capitalism that is ruining our planet, despoiling the nations of the Developing World, and exploiting working people across the globe.
However, I have several very grave objections to some of the opinions presented at the webinar, ‘Why Socialists Are Anti-Imperialists’ presented on the 24th April of this year. I am sorry it has taken me so long to communicate them.
I should first say that I strongly agree that socialists should be anti-imperialists. I agree wholehearted with Murad Qureshi about the dangers of a renewed neo-Conservative right demanding further invasions. I am very much afraid that the warmongers in the government and international capitalism are preparing for an offensive war against Iran, and dread the consequences for the Iranian people and the Middle East.
But I also disagree that these attacks on the peoples of the Middle East alone are responsible for rising prejudice against Muslims in Britain and abroad. I believe a critical moment in this was the fatwa the Ayatollah Khomeini placed upon Salman Rushdie. This, in my experience, turned many western intellectuals, who may otherwise have had a positive view of Islam and Muslims, against the religion. Another was the murder in the first years of this century of the Dutch film-maker, Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh had offended Muslim sentiment through his film, ‘Submission’, criticising the traditional Islamic attitude towards women. In retaliation for this movie, shown on Dutch TV, he was attacked and beheaded in the street by a Moroccan immigrant. And I also believe that what is driving much anti-Muslim prejudice in this country is the continuing scandal of the Muslim grooming gangs. These gangs were covered up and allowed to operate unchecked and unpunished for 20 years because the authorities were afraid of creating race riots. But it has taught a large section of the British electorate that Whites have less protection against racial violence and sexual exploitation in their own country, and that Muslim criminality goes unpunished I realise that this is not the message the authorities mean to give, but it is nevertheless the one that is being received. And I do feel that this scandal has helped to win a section of the White working class electorate in the North to the Tories.
I am also concerned about the underlying anti-White tone of the talk given by Barbara Biti, the head of the Black Liberation Movement. I do not dispute that the global south is exploited and that Black people in Britain are marginalised and suffer from high unemployment, poor education and career opportunities. And I think that she is correct when she says we have a duty to take in the refugees caused by our imperialist wars.
However, she also betrays a set of double standards towards White and Black atrocities as well as what can be seen as a colonialist mentality herself. She stated that we should take in migrants from the south, because ‘you oppressed us under colonialism’. As an argument, this doesn’t work. The peoples of our former colonies were given their independence as they demanded, and this was supposed to solve some of the problems of colonialism. If it hasn’t, then the fault lies primarily with those states and peoples themselves. But they no longer wanted us, and so I believe our obligations in that direction ended at independence. If we are to take in refugees, then it should be for reasons of common humanity and the long-standing connections that were forged with these nations during colonialism.
I also noted that while she was quick to condemn the west for the resurgence of slavery in Libya and north Africa, she said nothing about its revival in sub-Saharan Africa, in countries such as Uganda. Slavery existed in Africa for centuries before the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade, and pirates from north Africa also carried off White slaves from Europe. But Biti seems to regard this as an embarrassment that should be hushed up. And while Africans certainly were exploited during colonialism, part of the rationale for the European invasion of the continent was to put an end to it. But Biti clearly feels that this should not be mentioned, let alone criticised. This seems to be part of a general campaign by Black activists to put the blame for slavery solely on White Europeans in contradiction to history.
This shows a further racist attitude in Biti’s speech. While I am sure she has White friends and supporters, her refusal to acknowledge any criticism or failing of the Developing World and its people, and her placing the blame firmly on the West, suggests that she sees White people as a terrible, exploitative other, in line with current far left theories of Whiteness like Critical Race Theory. While Black activists have made it very clear in this country that they do not promote racial violence, I am afraid that this attitude legitimises it. You may remember that 20 years ago, I report came out revealing that the majority of victims of racist crime in this country were White. This pattern seems to be recurring, as it has been claimed that recent government statistic by the Hate Crimes Unit show that 41 per cent of a reported hate crimes are against Whites.
Finally, Biti’s demand that Britain accept non-White immigration as a kind of reparation for colonialism sounds itself like a form of colonialism. Her hostile tone suggests that she has the attitude that just as we colonised the world, so we should accept being colonised in turn as non-White immigration. It looks very much like a form of ‘reverse colonialism’ I can remember the FT talking about in a review of a book on the British empire also nearly 20 years ago. Again, it’s another flawed argument, as the peoples of Africa and elsewhere fought against the European invasion and occupations of their countries and demanded their independence. But there is a set of double standards here in that Biti, and activists like her, deny White Europeans the right to protest or legislate against mass non-White immigration.
I regret that these criticisms need to be made, as I do share the speakers’ concerns about the rise in imperialist ideologies. I also strongly believe that the White working class, Blacks and Asians need to unite to topple the Tories as well as combat the real structural racism that exists. But I am afraid that identity politics that see racism as solely something done by Whites and which does not recognise the complex reality is merely creating more alienation, division and racial hatred.
I would be very grateful for a response to this letter, as I intend to put it up onmy blog.
Thank you and solidarity.
Yours faithfully,
I haven’t received a reply, but they’re still sending me material about future events so they obviously haven’t decided I’m an evil Fascist or White supremacist just yet.
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