CGTN News published a table this afternoon comparing America’s per capita spending on healthcare with the rest of the world. America tops it with over $12,000. The next most expensive is Germany with over $7,000. Britain is much lower down the list with over $5,000. Down at the bottom was Poland. Obviously, the list was confined to countries in the western, developed world. What is important is that America’s private healthcare system is far more expensive than the continental healthcare systems, which are either state-owned, like Britain’s and Sweden’s, or funded through a mixture of state and private insurance. The idea that somehow private healthcare systems are more efficient and less expensive, promoted by the Tories and swallowed whole by the Blairite right of the Labour party, is frankly a lie. One of my friends trained as a doctor. He told me that many American hospitals are being kept open because of discreet state funding. But you won’t hear that from the Torygraph, GB News, Tory MPs like Daniel Hannan and grubby right-wing internet hosts like Alex Belfield, now enjoying a well-deserved holiday courtesy of His Maj. This will not surprise anyone who’s read any of the great books against the privatisation of the NHS by people like Jack Davis and Ray Tallis.
Reject the lies. Defend the NHS, and stop the Tories.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I caught a headline from the Torygraph yesterday that Rosie Duffield, the Blairite who claimed she needed protection at the Labour party conference because of threats from transgender activists, had been invited to cross the floor. In fact, as Mike showed in his piece about Duffield’s claim, it doesn’t seem to have happened. Duffield produced absolutely no threatening messages from social media or physical mail. It looked very much like she was following the example of a Jewish female MP, who claimed she had been sent anti-Semitic messages but didn’t produce any evidence of that either. But Duffield is right wing, with a record of demanding further cuts to welfare, punishing the poor for being poor. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if she had received just such an invitation. There have been stories that three Labour MPs are ready to defect, and I know some Tories would have liked Blairite MP Frank Field to join them.
However, even if those particular threats against Duffield were a product of her malign imagination, they’re all too credible because transgender activists can be threatening and violent. There have been a series of cases where TRAs (Trans Rights Activists) have physically attacked feminists demonstrators and beaten them. To add insult to injury, the same activists have then sued their victim for transphobia. Many women are extremely concerned and outraged at the trans ideology. Kelly-Jay Kean, for example, is particularly concerned about the way an increasing number of vulnerable children, particularly girls and young women, have become convinced they are trans or non-binary to the point they are taking up surgery. Other concerns are that the trans label has now become so broad that biological men are being allowed into women’s spaces, such as sports changing rooms, toilets, and prisons, on the grounds that they identify as women. Many of the men in women’s prisons have convictions for crimes against women and the result has been a series of rapes and sexual assaults to the point where the Californian prison service is giving out condoms and contraceptive advice to female inmates.
Underneath this is the concern that natal, biological femininity is being erased to accommodate the expansion of femaleness to include transwomen. The NHS has published medical literature referring to chestfeeding, instead of breastfeeding, and ‘birthing bodies’, instead of women/mothers. Yesterday Kean and her comrades demonstrated outside the offices of the Lancet because the prestigious medical journal had published a piece about how women’s disorders and diseases had not received the proper attention they deserved. This would be a fair comment, applauded by feminists, apart for one fact. It didn’t refer to women except by the reproductive organs natal women possess but not transpeople. Equally incendiary has been Keir Starmer’s refusal to say that only women have a cervix on an interview on television. Instead the Labour leader got angry and said it was a question that shouldn’t be asked. To anti-gender activists, this showed that Starmer was opposed to free speech. Which he is. But then, Jo Swinson of the Lib Dems couldn’t answer what a woman was when asked and posters with the dictionary definition of woman as ‘adult human female’ have been judged hateful and transphobic.
I am very definitely not trying to stir up hate here against genuine transpeople, who do need careful therapy and surgery. I do not want to see anyone persecuted and subjected to abuse and violence because of their gender identification. But there are reasonable concerns about the trans ideology and the extension of the concept of femininity to cover everyone who claims to identify as a woman. One of the maddest things I’ve encountered in this direction is a book published by a trans rights activists about sex between a biological man and a lesbian, and how that should be embraced by the lesbian. The argument is that, as the man identifies as a woman, he is therefore a lesbian, and should be embraced as such. The book then claims that as he identifies as a man, his male genitalia are therefore female. Which is utterly bonkers.
The gender critical movement has been attacked as right-wing, but very many of its members actually come from the left, such as Kean and Linehan. Last week Linehan said on his weekly video about the transgender craze, The Mess We’re In, that he was surprised at the silence in the Tory party about all this. This was in contrast to the state of the Labour party, which is tearing itself apart over the issue. He believed that they were waiting to hoover up women, who felt disenfranchised and marginalised by the trans movement.
If the invitation to Duffield to join the Tories is real, then it proves this is starting to happen.
And while liberal feminists support trans rights and initiatives to counter transphobia, this is increasingly rejected by gender critical feminists as well as ordinary women and their male supporters, who have been peaked by seeing just how extreme the trans ideology is becoming.
Duffield herself is a noxious individual, and her departure from Labour would be no loss. But it would be hugely damaging to the party as a whole if they alienated ordinary women just to cater to an extreme gender ideology.
Marcus Garvey is a towering figure in Black history, starting up one of the earliest Black rights organisations, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Black History Month was launched in Britain in October 1987 to mark the centenary of his birth. There are monuments, streets and parks to him in various towns in the UK and in New York. A few months ago a Black writer published a piece in the Radio Times calling for him to be taught in schools. History Debunked has marked Black History Month with a series of video showing that in reality, many of the heroes being commemorated are actually much less impressive. Garvey was very definitely one of these.
The video states that he was born in 1887 and apprenticed to a printer, but didn’t take to it, and spent some time instead travelling around Central America and Britain. He returned to his homeland, Jamaica, where in 1914 he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, whose aims included inspiring Black brotherhood and the civilisation of the backward peoples of Africa. This ran into trouble, as many Jamaicans dislike the word ‘Negro’ as, in my experience, many West Indians still do. More seriously, he was suspected of using the association’s funds to support himself personally. So he moved to Harlem in New York where he set up his organisation there. This again was massively controversial. Garvey was a racial separatist who hated racial intermixing and Blacks, whose skins were lighter than he is. He became even more unpopular amongst Black New Yorkers by going off to meet the head of the Klan. They got on like a house on fire, as Garvey assured the White racist that they both had the same objective. He wanted Blacks to go back to Africa, while the Klan wanted a White America. But what really brought Garvey down was his attempt to found a Black shipping company, the Black O Line. He was prosecuted for fraud as he was caught selling shares in a ship that didn’t actually exist. Both the judge and the prosecution in the trial were Jewish, as were two members of the jury, or so he claimed. He then made an anti-Semitic rant which blamed the Jews as well as the White authorities for his prosecution. And there the video ends.
I think Webb has been rather selective in the video, choosing some of the worst episodes of Garvey’s career. I understood he was forced out of Jamaica by the authorities, who regarded him as a subversive. Not that it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t also unpopular there for the reasons Webb suggests. Webb does mention that in New York he invented various bizarre uniforms for himself and his followers. The image for the video shows Garvey in one of those uniforms, a hat which makes him look a bit like Napoleon. When I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum one of the boxes of items donated to the Museum contained pamphlets from Garvey’s organisation. And they were weird. One of them seemed to be for some kind of rally and listed a whole series of paramilitary ranks and organisations, such as head of the armoured division. It reminded me of the White British Fascists, who invented grandiose names and titles for themselves but have at most a handful of members. The type of people lampooned in the Jeeves and Wooster books in the shape of Spode and his Blackshorts, who seemed to be always going off to address the Eagle battalion in Minchinhampton. Garvey emigrated to Britain, and certainly wasn’t ashamed of the weird Fascist nature of his organisation. He said in an interview with a British magazine in 1938 that Hitler and Mussolini took everything from him. I don’t think they did, and you would have thought that by that time Garvey would have wanted to keep any similarity between his outfit and Fascism very quiet. But he didn’t.
He also seems to have fancied himself as the self-appointed leader and saviour of Africa. In New York he declared himself to be president of the continent, and he and his lieutenants were the government in exile. This was without any input from the African themselves. He carried on calling for himself to be made the Africans’ leader when he emigrated to England. He made repeated request to the Colonial Department to be made its head. The video doesn’t mention that. Nor does it mention that Garvey also joined the Conservative party after he moved here. As I think Webb himself is a Telegraph-reading Tory, I don’t think he wishes to remind people how Garvey entered the party.
A few months ago I drew this cartoon of Garvey to express what I consider to be real Fascist elements in BLM and some of the other, supposedly anti-racist movements. Here it is.
I don’t think he was ever a supporter of the Nazis, but the parallel between his organisation and White Fascism is so close that he is features in books on Fascism, including Mark Christian Thompson’s Black Fascisms (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2007).
Garvey is an important figure in the history of Black Liberation. The Rastafarian religion grew out of his Negro Improvement Association. But it’s questionable whether he should be celebrated. I suspect there are far worthier figures waiting to be discovered and promoted, who people haven’t heard of.
Further evidence to condemn Starmer, Smeeth and Hodge as fanatically intolerant Blairites with absolutely no qualms about lying to the wider party to support their witch hunt against decent people, especially Jews, because their socialists and/or they criticise Israel. Mike has on his piece about this shameful incident a tweet from Labour Grassroots, in which a tearful delegate to conference describes how they were gaslighted by the odious Ruth Smeeth into support the grotty rule changes that have concentrated powers in the hands of the leadership and General Secretary. Smeefy got up on her hind legs to tell conference that they couldn’t consider themselves anti-racists or opponents of anti-Semitism without backing the changes. She was then followed by the equally repulsive Margaret Hodge, who said the same thing. The delegates states that this was all about concentrating power in the hands of an undemocratically elected official and continuing the witch hunt, but she was too frightened to speak up. She and her colleagues were hoping that someone else would, but nobody did. She describes it as the lowest point in her experience of the Labour party.
Mike states that, with these changes having been passed, her experience is going to get a lot lower.
Smeeth is the noxious MP, who got genuine anti-racist and opponent of real Nazism thrown out of the party as an anti-Semite. Why? Wadsworth caught her passing on a Labour brochure to a hack from the Torygraph at a party rally. Smeefy then accused him of using the old trope of the disloyal Jews. Except that Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish, and didn’t mention Jews at all. Wadsworth has a long and proud career as a real campaigner against racism, arranging for the parents of Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela, and working with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 80s to pass legislation against NF attacks on Jews in the Isle of Dogs. This didn’t prevent an angry squad of right-wing, White female Labour MPs descending on his trial to demand his expulsion. Commenters have said this squad was like a racist mob about to lynch a Black. As for Hodge, who looks to me like a cross between a Dr. Who monster and a ferocious female character, Mrs Slocombe, from Are You Being Served, she infamously screamed at Corbyn in parliament, calling him a ‘f***ing anti-Semite!’ This was against the rules, and she was suspended. She then whined that this was anti-Semitic, and made her feel like the Jews in Nazis Germany waiting for a knock on the door from the SS. This, not unreasonably, angered Jews and gentiles, whose relatives had been carted off to the concentration camps by the Nazis. And as an MP, she was so complacent about the threat from the BNP that seven of them got elected to Tower Hamlet’s local council and their leader sent her a bouquet as thanks. It’s partly thanks to these two lying clowns that Stalin has now managed to tighten his grip on the party.
I don’t blame the speaker for being too scared to stand up. I think that anyone who did, would have been smeared as an anti-Semite. But this shows that you can stand back and expect someone else to speak out against lies and authoritarianism, ever. Because if you stand by and allow it, it will be passed unopposed. Andsooner or later, they will come for you.
I have several times posted about and reposted some of the videos made by Simon Webb of the History Debunked channel. Those I’ve reposted are usually criticisms of Black Lives Matter or falsehoods repeated as truth in Black history. I’ve said that Webb should be taken with caution as he’s a Telegraph-reading Tory. Where he quotes historical and mainstream scientific texts, I think he’s correct. But occasionally he comes up with falsehoods of his own which show he needs checking. Yesterday he put up a video on the transatlantic slave trade and how it benefited west Africa. Now he’s right that the slave trade did bring some benefits to west Africa. The African states who supplied the European slave merchants, Dahomey and Whydah, for example, grew extremely rich. Duke Ephraim of Dahomey had an income of £300,000 a year, and the abominable trade plugged Africa into the wider global economy. According to mainstream academic historians, it introduced modern commercial methods into Africa and allowed capital accumulation.
But Webb seems instead to make a very curious claim. Noting that the Black African professionals people may meet tend to be Nigerian or west African, Webb says in this video that its because Europeans brought iron working and civilisation to Africa. Before the arrival of the Europeans, Webb claims, most buildings were made of mud. Bronze was used for decoration – I assume here he’s talking about the Benin bronzes, sculptured heads what were produced as shrines to the king’s spirit. But iron was unknown. This is bizarre, as it’s very much not the view of conventional historians and archaeologists.
I looked in Colin McEvedy’s The Penguin Atlas of African History (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1980) to see when sub-Saharan African entered the Iron Age. He notes on page 30 that iron-working communities emerged around Nok in what is now Nigeria c. 202 BC. Iron-working also existed in Nubia by AD 200. C. 200 AD is started reaching the rest of Africa as the Bantu peoples expanded east and south, pp. 34, 36. I don’t actually know why Webb should think that they only developed iron working with the slave trade. I think it perhaps comes from the fact that Europeans did trade iron bars for slaves. These were made into objects called manilas, shaped like bracelets. A few of them are on display in the slavery gallery in Bristol’s M Shed. Webb has said that metallurgical analysis has shown that some west African artefacts now at the centre of demands for repatriation, were ironically made using metals that could only have been introduced by European traders. I’ve no doubt this is true, but it doesn’t contradict the fact that Africans were perfectly capable of producing iron for themselves. It may just indicate that Africans were willing to import European iron because it may have been cheaper, better or more easily accessible than that domestically produced. Just a Britain now imports cars despite having a domestic car industry.
HIs claim that Africans also built in mud is also questionable. They certainly did in west and other parts of Africa, so that it’s largely true. The city of Whydah was built of wood, and the Dahomeyans certainly used mud brick to build their towns. But the Islamic states of the Sahara, including Nubia, built in stone. And the Swahili were using coral blocks to construct their cities from the 9th century onwards, roughly as the same time when the ancestors of the Shona built the fortress of Zimbabwe.
This seems to come from Webb’s view that Africa didn’t produce any real civilisations. This was very much the view of 19th and early 20th century historians. On the other hand, one commander of the West African Squadron, Captain Denman, testified to parliament that the mass murder of slaves by one of the African cultures was remarkable, given that the people there had made such progress in the arts of civilisation. Which shows that at that time in the 19th century, not all Europeans thought Africans were uncivilised savages.
I think its undoubtedly true that Europeans introduced modern science and technology to Africa during colonialism, even if this was to exploit the countries and their peoples. They also benefited from the introduction of modern education and literacy, when it was available. If Nigerians are more prevalent among Black African professionals in Britain, it may well be due to a number of factors that have little to do with the slave trade. It may simply be that Nigeria is a richer country than many other African nations, and so has a larger middle class able to afford an education. It also possesses its own university, though I don’t know if it has a medical faculty. It is certainly more populous than some African countries, with a population of about 100 million. It may also have stronger ties with the west and particularly Britain, so that it’s people go here rather than to France or Portugal, the other African colonial powers.
It is therefore far more likely to be due to the education, science and technology introduced to Nigeria and west Africa during colonialism, and the enduring ties with Britain forged during this period, that have led so many west Africans to migrate here rather than the slave trade. Which certainly did not, in any case, usher in the Iron Age in Africa.
Excellent article once again by Tim Fenton utterly refuting right-wing lies. Two years ago the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, which awards fellowships to students and academics wishing to study abroad, in consultation with its trustees, changed its name to the Churchill Fellowship. This went unremarked until earlier this week, when the Scum got wind of it and immediately started a tsunami of right-wing lies. The Scum, the Mail and Nigel Farage on GB News immediately leapt to the conclusion that the name change was due to ‘woke’ politics and was an attempt to erase the great warleader from history. Unnamed volunteers were cited as telling the papers how outraged they were, and that the name change was due to the charity’s chief executive, Julie Weston. Except that the Churchill Fellowship doesn’t have any volunteers, so any quotes from non-existent volunteers are obviously fabricated. Zelo Street concludes
“Fortunately, the Churchill family has put the record straight, as reported by theGuardian: Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson, asserted “I and the rest of my family, fully and unreservedly, support the remarkable work of the Churchill Fellowship”. Also, “The changes were overseen by the charity’s trustees headed by Jeremy Soames, another grandson of Churchill”. But the lies have already taken hold. And that’s not good enough.”
I was particularly interested in this tale as History Debunked did a piece about it yesterday, showing that he too had been taken in. I’ve reblogged a number of his videos, but always with the caveat that he’s a Torygraph-reading Conservative and so some facts may need to be checked. When he cites his sources and its about history, I think he’s usually correct. But this shows that on other issues, his opinions may be far less based on fact.
Here’s another very interesting video by Simon Webb of History Debunked attacking what he considers to be the semi-literate fake history retailed as fact by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. He notes that the museum has changed its emphasis somewhat so that there is less about the British navy’s victories and British sea power, and more about peaceful exploration and, inevitably, the slave trade. But it is its attack on Drake that really draws his ire. Drake’s achievement in fighting off the Armada isn’t mentioned. Instead the museum blithely calls him a pirate, whose circumnavigation of the globe was really a secret mission to raid Spanish shipping and colonies by Queen Elizabeth. It also says that he kept no record of the treasures he acquired in order to avoid paying tax to the Spanish. He is also described as slavery, who began raiding west Africa for slaves with Jack Hawkins as early as 1560.
Webb points out that England was at war with Spain at the time, and so Drake’s attacks on Spanish possessions wouldn’t therefore be what people normally consider piracy. It, and his concealment of the goods seized, were acts of war. As for slaving, Drake apparently released slaves from any Spanish vessels he captured. He quotes John Sugden, an authority on Drake, who says that the Elizabethan seaman was the closest his age came to an abolitionist. He acquired an insight into slavery through a Black man, known only as Diego, and when attacking Spanish ships in the West Indies, captured two. He released their slaves onto Jamaica so that they might gain their liberty.
The ’10 Facts about Francis Drake’ on the museum’s website, which promotes these lies, also seems to have been written by someone with a very dodgy command of English. At one point it says that Drake led an ‘exhibition’ against the Spanish on the pacific coast of America. He concludes the video by saying that other countries celebrate their heroes. We run ours down.
I know very little about Drake beyond the Spanish Armada, the circumnavigation of the globe, and the fact that he was a privateer. They were private sailors commissioned by the crown to fight against the Spanish, with whom we were indeed at war. So, not quite a pirate then. Jack Hawkins certainly was a slaver, but this is the first time I’ve heard that discussed about Drake. He may well have started off as one, I really don’t know. But if he did have a genuine sympathy for enslaved Africans and released them, then that needs to be mentioned as well.
I’m aware that, as a man of the Torygraph-reading right, some of Webb’s views need to be taken with a pinch of salt. However it does seem that there really is a campaign going on to rewrite and falsify British history in the name of anti-racism. If so, then it needs to be challenged, whatever your political views.
History must not be allowed to be rewritten and established facts altered, whether it’s done by the left or the right.
First the good news. Black anti-racism campaigner Marc Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Jewish Chronicle, one of the Jewish newspapers involved in the press and media smear campaign of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as raging anti-Semites and Nazis. Wadsworth was unjustly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled from the Labour following accusations from the noxious Ruth Smeeth. Wadsworth had seen her pass on a Labour party brochure to a Torygraph hack sitting next to her at a Labour party, and so commented about her helping the Tory press. Smeeth and her supporters in the party and beyond chose to interpret the comment as more anti-Semitic tropes. He was accused of saying she was part of a conspiracy, just as Jews are accused of conspiring against gentiles, subjected to a kangaroo court like like the others the Labour right and right-wing British media and political establishment smeared as anti-Semites, and thrown out of the party. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth isn’t any kind of anti-Semite or Fascist. Far from it. In the 1980s he worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to bring in legislation to protect Jews in Thanet from real anti-Semitic assault by members of the NF/BNP. He was also responsible for arranging the parents of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela. During his farcical trial by the Labour party, a squad of angry White female Labour MPs turned up to demand his expulsion. Some observers found this extremely chilling as it was very reminiscent of the lynch mobs attacking Blacks.
Wadsworth sued the Chronicle for libel because it also claimed that he was part of the Labour In Exile Network, which was targeting Jewish Labour party activists at their homes in order to ‘take care of them’. Wadsworth wasn’t a member of the group and didn’t have anything to do with what the Chronicle claimed they were doing. As a result, he has won his libel case, the Chronicle was forced to apologise to him and pay him substantial damages. Mike over at Vox Political is particularly glad Wadsworth won as he too was on the receiving end of the Chronicle’s mendacity when it smeared him years ago as an anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier. Zelo Street has also suggested that he might also care to launch a libel suit against Tom Bower for the smears and lies in his biography of Jeremy Corbyn. This repeats the Tory establishment lie that Corbyn is some kind of Trotskyite traitor and anti-Zionist Nazi. It repeats the smear that Wadsworth anti-Semitically abused Smeeth, despite the fact that not only is he definitely not a Jew-hater, he didn’t even know she was Jewish. But this hasn’t stopped Bower repeating the libel with a few additions of his own. He has invented a statement that was never made by Wadsworth, writing that after he made the conspiracy theory comments, Wadsworth said ‘And she’s Jewish’.
It’s great that Wadsworth has won his libel battle against the Chronicle, but the injustice remains. There are many others, like Mike, who were thrown out of the party and similarly falsely smeared, who have spent years trying to clear their names.
And theLabour party’s witch-hunt and smear campaign is continuing under its useless and partisan leader, Keir Starmer.
Quite honestly, I’m sick and tired of posting pieces about racial politics, especially from a perspective that could be seen as anti-Black. I’m very aware that, as a whole, the Black community in Britain is poor, marginalised and suffers from poor educational performance, a lack of job opportunities. And I’m very much aware of institutional racism. Black and Asian friends and relatives have changed their names from their exotic originals to something more White British to get job opportunities. I’m also very much aware how the Tories are exploiting the issues around Black identity politics to drive a wedge between the Black community and the White working class in order to dominate both and drive them further into poverty, starvation and despair. But these issues are important. There is a real strain of anti-White racism in what is now being presented as anti-racism post-Black Lives Matter. It’s in the shape of Critical Race Theory, which parents are challenging in American schools. It’s also in the bad, tendentious history pushed by David Olusoga. One of History Debunked’s videos is a debunking of the claim by Olusoga and Reni Eddo-Lodge about a supposed lynching in Liverpool. This was of a sailor, who was chased into the docks. But instead of the innocent victim of a violent and prejudiced mob, the Black sailor instead was a vicious thug, who was part of a gang that had started a fight with Scandinavian and Russian seamen, and who had responded to the intervention of the rozzers by shooting two policemen.
A few days ago Simon Webb, the main man of History Debunked, put up the video below commenting on a statue in Nigeria to Efunroye Tinubu. She was a merchant in the Abeokuta region in the 19th century who traded in tobacco and slaves among other commodities. Through this she became extremely wealthy, enough to acquire a private army and act as kingmaker in Nigerian tribal politics. She also has a square in Lagos named after. There is, Webb says, absolutely no shame about her and her wretched trade. Rather, I think the Nigerians are proud of her. And she had absolutely no qualms about selling Black peeps. When she was hauled before a court on a charge of slave dealing after selling a boy, she cheerfully admitted it, saying she had a large household that needed to be fed well. When we went to war against the Nigerian city states involved in the slave trade, she announced that she was prepared to do anything for Britain, except give up slaving.
Webb uses her to attack the ignorance and hypocrisy of the present anti-racist iconoclasts, the people who tore down Edward Colston’s statue and wanted Rhodes’ removed, but say nothing about African participation in slavery and its memorialisation in statues like this. He is particularly scathing about David Olusoga, who produced the documentary last week on the Beeb about the controversy surrounding the felling of Colston’s statue. I didn’t watch it, but my parents did. According to them, Bristol’s elected mayor, Marvin Rees, came out of it very well. I’ve been extremely impressed with his handling of what is a very delicate affair, and I hope he seeks election as an MP. Olusoga comes in for criticism as he was born and raised in Nigeria, but while he’s glad that Colston’s statue was torn down, he has nothing to say about Tinubu’s.
There does indeed seem to be a concerted effort to blame the blame for the Black slave trade firmly on White Europeans and Americans. In Bristol this was shown by the motion proposed by Cleo Lake, the Green councillor for Cotham, and seconded by Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy mayor, who is also head of equalities. This called for reparations for slavery to be paid to all ‘Afrikans’, including both Afro-Caribbean folk and Black Africans. I sent an email to both of them stating the objections to this, the foremost of which is that it was Black Africans that did the actual messy job of raiding and enslaving. So far I have received no reply. I doubt I ever will.
I think this attitude partly comes from W.E.B. Dubois, one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement. Dubois wanted equality at home for Black Americans, and freedom from European imperial domination for Africa. It was Dubois who first described the slave trade as a ‘holocaust’. In Britain, I was told when working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum that West Indians and Ghanaians didn’t get on, because the Ghanaians looked down on Afro-Caribbean people as the slaves they sold. This was certainly what Caryl Philips, the Black British writer, found when he visited Ghana a few decades ago, even though the country was trying to encourage western Blacks to migrate there.
I think the acceptance of the Black African participation in the slave trade is changing. A little while ago I posted a piece about a Ghanaian journalist and broadcaster on their television networks, who had made documentaries about this issue. I believe the traditional chiefs in both countries are coming under increasing criticism to acknowledge and apologise for their participation in the transatlantic slave trade. There’s also been friction in Ghana between Black Americans and Ghanaians about the memorialisation of the slave trade at one of the old slave forts. The Americans would like the whole building used as a monument to the slave trade, But the fort is the locus for a number of different social functions, including the local market and so the local peeps definitely don’t want this to happen.
Black African involvement in the slave trade was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary back in the 1990s, back when the channel was still worth watching. I think Tinubu was mentioned there. I recall there being some discussion about a female Nigerian slaver, who made the trip to antebellum America to negotiate slaves of slaves over there. This aspect of the slave trade had been withheld from the Black Americans, who came to visit the slave sites in West Africa. The result was literally shock and horror. Some of them reacted with screams, wails and tears, and you can understand why. All their dreams of Black brotherhood and common victimhood at the hands of White racists were suddenly dashed. I mentioned this one day at the Museum to a Black historian with whom I was working. He told me that in the Caribbean, their mammies told them very clearly who sold them to whom.
But it seems to be completely absent from the consciousness of Black Brits. When the BLM mob was tearing down Colston’s statue, a reporter asked members of the crowd how they felt about it. One of them, a young man, said simply ‘I’m Nigerian’. Of course, the answer to that is ‘But you sold them to us!’ But the reporter didn’t say that, and the Nigerian young man clearly didn’t connect his nationality to the sale of Black slaves to people like Colston.
I’ve posted pieces by History Debunked before, and the usual caveats apply. He’s a Torygraph-reading man of the right who believes in racial differences in intelligence. Some of his facts may well be wrong, such as his claim that the government didn’t encourage Black migration to Britain. But here he cites both an article on Tinubu on the website, The Black Past, and a book on her published in Nigeria by Oladipo Yemitan, Madame Tinubu: Merchant and King-maker, (University Press, 1987). I’m reasonably confident, therefore, that he has got his facts right.
I strongly believe that we should resist the oversimplification of the history of the slave trade into virtuous, wronged Blacks, and evil, racist Whites. All racism and enslavement has to be condemned, even if it makes the self-proclaimed anti-racists uncomfortable. If we are to have racial justice, it must be founded on good history.
This is another video from Middle East Eye that’s been posted on YouTube. It shows mobs of Israeli rioters attacking shops and businesses owned by Palestinians. You can see these thugs waving the Israeli flag. It’s an absolutely chilling sight, especially as it brings to my mind Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht, when the Nazis attacked and smashed Jewish owned businesses. This is very much the kind of video the Board of Deputies of British Jews does not want you to see. Peter Oborne, a deeply principle journalist, who previously worked for the Torygraph, made a video over ten years ago for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby. He interviewed Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Groan, and Avi Shlaim, an Oxford expert on the Middle East. Rusbridger described how, when his newspaper ran stories about Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians and their allies, the president of the Board would turn up with his pet lawyer in tow to complain that the story would increase anti-Semitism. The Board also denounced the Beeb as anti-Semitic because its highly respected correspondents on the Middle East, Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin, also reported Israeli atrocities, including the massacre of Palestinian refugees by their allies, the Christian Phalange. Shlaim stated that the Beeb’s reporting was actually overwhelmingly factually correct, although there were a couple of minor faults, according to an independent review body.
It is Israeli Fascist violence like this that Jeremy Corbyn opposes, not Jews. As have any number of pro-Palestinian Jewish activists – Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and veteran thesp Miriam Margolyes. Nearly ten years ago Margolyes condemned the attacks on Gaza as ‘a proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’. It is because of their activism on behalf of the Palestinians that these people have been foully smeared and reviled as anti-Semites.
It’s time this stopped. Terrorism by anyone is wrong, and I don’t agree with the Palestinian attacks either.
But its time the Israeli attacks on Palestinians ceased, Netanyahu condemned for his barbarous treatment of the country’s indigenous Arabs, and the Board condemned for seeking to cover up such racist barbarity.
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