Reply to Trevor Phillips
His letter to me is below this introduction, and my reply to him is below that
I’m always use the term ‘Black community’ with great hesitation, because like all so called communities there are communities within the community, but every once in a while something happens where a community as a whole agree or disagree on an issue. It has to be said that my rejection of the OBE was one such issue. The overwhelming response from the ‘black community’ was a good one. Not everyone agreed with all my reasons, and it would be ridiculous to expect that, still most of the Muslims, Rastafarians, Christians, agnostics, and the Sun worshipers in our ‘community’ acknowledged that something is wrong with the honours system and that something has to change. But then so did most of the community in Whitehall.
The most negative reactions have come from some sections of the more the right wing press, (some of whom were openly racist), and from a few black recipients of these so called honours.
On 28-11-03 Trevor Philips wrote an article in the Evening Standard that was styled as a letter to me, I asked the Standard if I could reply on the same page in the same style and they wouldn’t let me, but they said they would print my response as a letter in their letters page. In fact even when it was published I wasn’t allowed to check the copy that was going to print and when it did go to print it was heavily censored. The black newspaper The Voice did publish my piece about a week later (bless them), but still It really does say something about so called free speech and the type of people that we black people have as our so called ‘community representatives’, when the Standard will let their friend Trevor Philips write whatever he likes, joyous as one black man attacks another, whilst they deny me free speech and only allowed me reply in a less prominent way. So here I have printed Mr Phillips’s article without censorship, and my response without censorship.
Get real Ben, this isn’t about empire.
Dear Ben,
So you sent back our OBE. Full marks for bravado. As dramatic gestures go, it’s not original but you did it with more flair and style than the usual self-righteous prigs who do this sort of thing.
It’s the kind of joyous provocation I’ve come to expect from you since 1982, when as a TV producer I put you in front of a nationwide audience for the first time.
I was determined to present the best of black Britain to Christmas viewers, and alongside David Grant (now famous through Fame Academy) there was a gospel choir. And then there was you, our first “dub poet”
The poem you wanted to do gave our lawyers the conniptions. After all, in between David crooning Have yourself A Merry Little Christmas and the choir’s carols, your poem Dis Policeman Is Kicking Me To Death seemed a bit, well, unseasonal.
We took the risk. I’ve never regretted it. The choir shook the roof but you brought it down, and in between the shoals of outraged phone calls we had shouts of glee from black and white alike.
Today, you’ve become an international star in your field. When you announced that you would consider accepting the post if Her Maj approached you to be the Poet Laureate, nobody laughed. I thought you were a brilliant performer 21 years ago, and nothing has changed my opinion since.
But what I can’t allow you to do is create the impression that this is an anti-imperialist gesture backed by the average black Briton.
For a start, we could produce a list as long as this page of distinguished black Britons who have accepted honours. None of these is a simpering colonialist stooge.
Take Sir Bill Morris, who apart from his career as a leading trade unionist, is now using his eminence to mount a fierce assault on the Government’s asylum policy.
Or consider any one of a hundred people who have worked tirelessly for our community, like the septuagenarian Reverend Sybil Phoenix MBE, who has taken hundreds of desolate and desperate young black women under her wing at her home in south-east London, and given them a future. At the other end of the age and entrepreneurial spectrum, there’s Kanya King OBE, the founder of the Music of Black Origin awards, now one of the hottest tickets every year. American stars from Diana Ross to Lil Kim fly the Atlantic in the hope of winning a MOBO – or at least being seen on TV in the show.
And if you want to talk about power, there’s the new leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Amos, and her colleague Baroness Scotland, both Government ministers, two of the toughest operators around, and both brilliant role models for our daughters.
All of these people accepted honours because they were due but also because they were due but also because they come from a community which, as you know, is starved of any kind of recognition. Racism has left us outside the circle of esteem, with two results. One is that it remains harder for us to gain influence, jobs and power. The other is that our young people are discouraged by the feeling that however hard they try no one will recognise their talents unless they happen to be footballers or musicians.
That’s why the honours matter to us. I know that your main argument is about the history of the empire, so let’s take this head on.
First, do you genuinely believe that anybody thinks the acceptance of the letters is somehow genuflecting to the history of empire? Get real. The letters mean very little in themselves. We all know that this is recognition by the whole community of a civic contribution, and it’s insulting to suggest that people like Morris, Amos or myself have forgotten our history.
It also disrespects the great pride taken by the older generation – who grew up under the Empire – when their British children win honours.
Second, history is a two edged sword. Should Amos or Scotland refuse to sit on benches once occupied by slave traders? If they did, they’d also be vacating the seats from which British peers voted to abolish slavery.
Should Sir Bill have refused to kneel before the Queen, because she is a symbol of centuries of oppression by the British state? Or should he have honoured the woman who stood up to Margaret Thatcher when the Iron Lady tried to sideline the Commonwealth?
And should I have refused the award that the Royal Television Society gave my team for Windrush, the TV series telling the story of your community and mine simply because of its name?
By the way, I’ve had the unusual experience of living in both British Guiana (a colony up to 1966), and Guyana (an independent nation after 1966). On balance Guyana is better off independent, though it is poorer and less stable.
Freedom can’t be weighed against better roads or a steady supply of British school books, so I am not one of the revisionists who think that we should now pretend that the Empire was a golden period.
But you can’t rewrite history Empire happened. It wasn’t all bad, and what’s happened since isn’t all good. During the colonial period, black and Indian people of my parents’ generation never got a sniff of the top jobs, and the colonial government deliberately provoked vicious racial infighting. But even so British Guiana produced some of the best-educated people in the Commonwealth.
Guyana, on the other hand, has experienced catastrophic economic decline over the past 25 years. Levels of crime are far too high for comfort and Aids is rampant. But on the other hand, the Guyanese people are charming and sophisticated.
Multiculturalism survives under huge stress, the Kaieteur Falls are still one of the most dramatic sights in the world and startlingly beautiful butterflies still swarm in one of the world’s few untouched rainforests, the size of England.
It’s a mistake to imagine that turning down an honour strikes a blow for ethnic minorities. Actually, instead of getting wound up over what the gong is called we should be asking why many more black and Asian folk who have come here and made massive contributions to Britain are not being given gongs.
Frankly, the radical demand is not to refuse honours – it is to insist that as long as the system exists, we too receive our fair share of recognition.
Yours, still in struggle Trevor
Zephaniah pens a response to Trevor Phillip’s letter.
Dear Trevor,
No mate you got it wrong, I didn’t send my OBE back, I couldn’t send it back because I didn’t accept it. And it really doesn’t matter to me if what I did was original or not; I was simply being true to myself. This is all a bit embarrassing really, I am walking into ex-servicemen’s clubs to applause, people are stopping me in the streets and thanking me, and I’m getting mail from Jamaica, India, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Guyana, and various parts of Africa congratulating me on something that I didn’t do. Hey, I made it clear many times that I don’t want to be laureate and in 2001 I made it very clear that I would never accept an OBE, so I really don’t think that I have done anything great.
I must also say that the first person to put me on nationwide television was the documentary filmmaker Simon Heaven, it wasn’t you, but it doesn’t matter anyway, you are just one more person jumping on the band wagon claiming to have made me famous, as if anyone cares. Certainly you were one of the first, and one of the things I remember about the making of that programme was the way you booked me. You were trying to pay me very little and exploit my lack of knowledge of the media industry, and when I demanded a higher fee you said that you wanted to make me a star, I replied saying, ‘I am a star already, but you haven’t found out yet’. That’s how it was. We who lived outside the TV stations knew what was happening already, you were only catching up with what was happening in the real world, but again it really doesn’t matter.
When I performed Dis Policeman Keeps on kicking Me to Death, it was seasonal, because it was happening to us then, in that very Christmas season. The response on the streets was pretty much like the response to my rejection of this empire thing. Back then the SUS laws were our big enemy and black people were being beaten in police stations all over this land, but nobody was saying anything, well not on TV anyway. But I did, and many people felt that I was speaking the unspeakable, which is what many people feel now. But you must know that for me nothing is unspeakable, I have to tell it as it is, and I can do so because I am not on anyone’s payroll. I am not looking for a career or seeking power, which means that I am free to speak my mind, as every poet should be in my humble opinion.
I don’t know what you mean when you use the term ‘the average black Briton’, personally I don’t think any of us are average, but the cord I have struck with many black Britons, and many white Britons, just can’t be ignored. All I did was say no and say why, and millions said it makes sense. The work that we do can be acknowledged without relying on Downing Street or the palace telling us that we are good. What I would say to you, the great Bill Morris, Sybil Phoenix, and all the others that have accepted these awards is this; If you need to go places, get influence, receive justice, and make friends, and you are stopped by people who will not communicate with you because of your race, as bad as they are those people are being honest about their views and what they think of you. If they decide to let you in because you met the queen one day and you have some letters behind your name, be careful sisters and brothers, don’t trust them, they are not being honest, and they are not the kind of people you should be doing business with.
With all respect to Kanya King the founder of the Music of Black Origin Award, her thing has it’s place, but I should tell you about an award I picked up at the Ocean in Hackney on 12th October 2003, it’s called the Black History Day Awards. They gave me an award for my work as a writer, musician, and activist. I accepted this because they knew why they were giving it to me. They are not concerned with who is popular, they are not concerned with record or book sales, they don’t do their things in big central London hotels, and they don’t get great press coverage. The thing is they are concerned with the artist, cleaner, childminder, or the activists’ commitment to the community.
If the word empire really means nothing, let them remove it, I shouldn’t have to deal with it, if it’s not that important let it be gone. My mother came here in the early fifties and worked as a nurse, she loves the royal family, but she is not proud of me because of anything to do with the empire, her proudest moments were when I was in the Jamaican newspaper The Jamaica Gleaner with Nelson Mandela, and when I had a hospital ward named after me. There are alternatives, and now people are beginning to think about them, we don’t need to bow before the queen. It’s simple man; we are all kings and queens, you may not know this but most black people do.
I really didn’t want to write this letter but so many people have expressed anger to me over the piece that you wrote. You must be one of the few public figures who have my address and phone number. Which is why I too was pretty horrified by the cowardly way you wrote to me via the press, you could just call me. I just get the feeling that you are trying to impress your friends in high places. If you want to write an article write one, don’t couch it in a letter to me and don’t call me Ben. If you really knew me you would know that’s not what my friends call me. If you want to pick up awards from royal societies that’s up to you, and I can see why you are upset, you need to defend your OBE, but remember that when you made the Windrush programmes the ideas came from many sources, it was not just you and your team. And can I please have my research papers back?
I have made it absolutely clear that I don’t want to rewrite history and that my obsession is with the future, so let’s deal with the future. People keep telling me you are just a Blair babe and that you have sold out, and that you only care about your career, and that I should tell you’re an uncle Tom, but I say no, ‘he’s not that bad’. Look Trevor, Instead of getting wound up about me staying true let me ask something of you and your position. You are the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, and you are speaking at a conference in Birmingham on 24th March 2004. While you are up there please have a meeting with my sister Joyce Springer, or one of my cousins Sharon Powell or Marcia Williams, they want to talk to you about my dead cousin Michael Powell. Stop writing those reports to justify your salary and go and listen to members of my family who are crying out for help from people like you. They are expecting you, I told them that you care; I told them that you would use your OBE to help them get justice. Go on Trevor, this is not for me, not for you, but for another dead black Briton.
Stay black
Benjamin
The Race Industry
The coconuts have got the jobs.
The race industry is a growth industry.
We despairing, they careering.
We want more peace they want more police.
The Uncle Toms are getting paid.
The race industry is a growth industry.
We say sisters and brothers don’t fear.
They will do anything for the Mayor.
The coconuts have got the jobs.
The race industry is a growth industry.
They’re looking for victims and poets to rent.
They represent me without my consent.
The Uncle Toms are getting paid.
The race industry is a growth industry.
In suits they dither in fear of anarchy.
They take our sufferings and earn a salary.
Steal our souls and make their documentaries.
Inform daily on our community.
Without Black suffering they’d have no jobs.
Without our dead they’d have no office.
Without our tears they’d have no drink.
If they stopped sucking we could get justice.
The coconuts are getting paid.
Men, women and Brixton are being betrayed.
Taken from Too Black Too Strong. Bloodaxe Books, 2001.
