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New Publication Celebrates Black Cultural & Political Activism In The UK
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Hardbeat News, New Publication Celebrates Black Cultural & Political Activism In The UK >>
The highlight of the May 20 event was a reading from Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jamaican-born dub poet extraordinaire and the voice of black Britain throughout the trubulent period of the 1980s, when young black youths rioted for almost two weeks to protest primarily, though not exclusively, against the racist treatment they suffered at the hands of the police.
While Linton delivered a softer and more introspective performance, his poems still evoked the power and intensity of the era in which htey were written. Linton, the members of the Padmore Institue and the former participants and organisers of International Book Fair, Jon La Rose, Gus John, Jack Mapanje and Max Farrar, were the people who thought they had and WERE the antidote to Thatcherism. They were going to change the world and the global economy: by eradicating class and gender and race inequalities and bring about socialism and mass democracy. Their struggle in the vapid 80s to transform British society wiht little or no financial backing was sharply contrasted with what was happening in the City (London). Young white boys made millions of pounds on the London Stock Exchange did very little to earn it, and did very little with it -- but fed their greed. And so, Thatcher came and went -- and the International Book Fair came to a halt in the pointless 90s. As the 21st century approached, these Black British and socialist activists would watch as the world went right back to the viciousness of colonial times, in spite of the technological leaps of industrialised countries. It was as if a 'revolution' of sorts had not taken place.
As Gus John, a Grenadian-born visiting professor at Strathclyde University, described the period to those in the audience who were too young to be a part of this important struggle, as the movement that required white people to know and understand themselves, before they could work iwht people from the so-called Third World to transform societies -- to construct cultural, political, social and economic ideologies and systems to truly change the lives of the dispossessed.
-Melody Walker 05/27/05 >> go there
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