Society
What history could teach my driver
Published 23 October 2006
We are in the middle of Black History Month, that period in which we ought to be reminding ourselves about where we have come from, where we are heading and the rate at which we are getting there.
In London, the month is celebrated in every borough and is financed by the mayor's office. Outside London, events often have to rely on voluntary work and small donations gathered from here and there.
When these celebrations were first launched, I expressed scepticism about history being seen as a series of names, dates and places that recall the courageous deeds of men and women whose names are plastered everywhere. In recent years there has been a decline in the numbers of people attending. So, when Islington Council's race and diversity department invited me to take part, I accepted with resigned loyalty. I was told, sotto voce, that the organisers had defied a militant minority who opposed the invitation because they thought me too controversial.
I arrived on time to explore the topic "Who am I?" on a platform with six men and women. The hall was packed (not even standing room), the audience mostly black, with a handful of white and Asian visitors. Each of us, with no prompting, placed our lives in the context of building the Caribbean community from the bottom up, over a period of 50 years or so, with the dark cloud of racial antipathy hanging over our nappy heads.
The speakers were humorous, at times chillingly and ruthlessly objective. The entire two and a half hours could be summed up with a simple, lucid slogan: "We did not come alive in England, Scotland and Wales." Our history did not begin when the white population discovered us in Notting Hill, Brixton and Handsworth. I told tales of the anti-colonial movement at home in the Caribbean (I was a young teenager then) and of our largely successful attempts to uplift ourselves in Britain when this land was, and still is, hostile terrain.
Black History Month could be wiped off the calendar because, its detractors say, it encourages separateness and undermines racial integration. Perhaps the audience had a sense of this, and so they turned out in droves to keep the institution on its feet. Only a day or two earlier, the Black Police Association had drawn a crowd of 2,000 black folk to its "Celebration of Life" and, dare I say it, our lives and our history.
For the journey home from Islington, I boarded a taxi driven by a young Muslim who was intensely worried. He simply could not understand the unrelenting hostility towards his people, when by far the majority of them were against al-Qaeda and its aims.
He likened the situation of Muslims in England today with that of the Jews in Germany just prior to the Holocaust. His wife, he said, wears the niqab, and beneath that veil - as beneath the veils of many of her age who were born in this country - is concealed a militant feminist. Yet militant white feminism assumes the opposite. On this racial issue, sisterhood, he said, has broken down. He would not be convinced otherwise.
Perhaps the time has come, I told him, for his community to join in Black History Month.
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