Читать книгу: «No Win Race», страница 3

I didn’t know at the time, but this had been the double-consciousness American sociologist W E B Du Bois referred to, the conflict between trying to develop your own character while being cognisant of how you are perceived by white society.

Fright.

During my final years at primary school, as Hagler bullied his way through the middleweight division and Minter faded into retirement, racism had become an everyday struggle. Shopkeepers frequently told me to leave their shops for no reason or they would call the police, bus drivers refused to let me on their buses, old ladies clutched their bags in my presence and police stopped and searched me for no reason (ignoring my best friend, who happened to be white). I had an older white youth threaten to slash my throat with a bulb if I didn’t shout a racist obscenity, and another older kid, a neighbour who I had invited round to my house to play, pin me down in my own living room and call me a black bastard.

It wasn’t just the frequency of these incidents that troubled me. The settings, the timings, added to my distress. These incidents happened in the daytime, in sweet shops, at bus stops, on the way to school, on the high street, outside the school gates, in my home.

I tried to minimise my presence when out in public. Walked soft. As I was attempting to do so, Newham’s black and Asian youths had started to fight back. This time I knew their names and I could see their faces.

Fight.

A group of elder Asian youths had taken to protecting younger children from racist attacks by accompanying them home from Little Ilford school. On 24 September 1982, three ‘scruffily dressed’ white men in bomber jackets and jeans jumped out of their car and started abusing this group of young and elder Asian youths, which led to a fight. Uniformed police were on the scene swiftly, resulting in eight Asian youths being badly beaten and taken to Forest Gate police station. It turned out that the ‘scruffily dressed’⁷ white men were plain-clothes policemen. The community mobilised swiftly around what became known as the Newham 8. This led to demonstrations largely frequented by Asian children and young people. The resulting national media coverage exposed Newham policing for what it had been at the time: meek in the face of racism and aggressive in its policing against black and Asian communities. The police had been placing the blame on the victims.

By the summer of 1984, racist violence had not subsided. I had been transitioning from primary to secondary school. At this point, Little Ilford had a mobile police unit situated within its school grounds. It had also erected spiked metal frames on the periphery of the school. My parents decided that it would be safer sending me to Langdon Secondary School in East Ham, some 30 minutes away from our house, instead of Little Ilford.

Disgust.

On 7 August 1984, a group of white youths randomly started carrying out acts of violence against black and Asian people. In one incident, a disabled Asian youth was hit on the head with a hammer. A group of Asian youths decided to confront the alleged white culprits outside the Duke of Edinburgh pub. A fight ensued but whereas five of the Asian youths spent seven weeks on remand for offences that did not warrant such length, their white counterparts were immediately let out on bail.

On 29 November 1984, 16-year-old black youth Eustace Pryce was stabbed in the head outside the Greengate pub in Plaistow. Pryce, his brother Gerald and some friends had confronted racists, which led to a fight in which Eustace was fatally stabbed. The police, on arrival, arrested Gerald and not Eustace’s killer despite plain-clothes officers allegedly witnessing the tail end of the fight. Eustace’s killer Martin Newhouse was eventually arrested. Yet while Newhouse had been let out on bail because ‘it would be wrong to keep him in jail over Christmas’, Gerald had been denied bail. He spent Christmas in prison and on release Gerald was prevented from going back into Newham, despite his girlfriend being pregnant at the time.

Fight.

The black and Asian communities rallied behind both cases under the guises of the Newham 7 Defence Campaign and the Justice for the Pryce Family Support Committee. This led to the National Demonstration Against Racism on 27 April 1985 with 3,000 demonstrators. A further 2,000 demonstrators marched on 11 May. The pressure from both campaigns led to national coverage about poor policing in Newham. This exerted pressure, symbolised by the demonstrations uniting blacks and Asians while also highlighting institutionally racist policing, contributed to justice being done. Newhouse was sentenced to four and a half years’ youth custody for manslaughter and two years for affray, running concurrently. Gerald had not been criminalised. While some of the Newham 7 did time, the case highlighted that reasonable physical resistance against attacks would not automatically result in prison. The coverage of the Newham 7 and Eustace Pryce campaigns also demonstrated that cases like these could no longer be swept under the carpet and that blacks and Asians had the right to defend themselves.⁸

Black was not just a term that unified the African diaspora, it also became a term that united all black and brown people in the fight against racism. This had been my London. The London I grew up in. A London that had been hostile towards me from the beginning, a London where black and brown resistance had been unified and emphatic.

Minter–Hagler symbolised more than the racial divides of the time. It symbolised the choice you had to make growing up back then. Blackness or Britishness? Colour or country? Do you side with those with shared experiences or those with a shared birthplace? I had to choose. Rebel or comply. Be bold or be shy. Risk exclusion or be subservient.

I knew it would be impossible for me to remain anonymous being black. No middle ground. There were no hiding places for black athletes. No hiding place for blacks. And no hiding place for me.

^* The Virk brothers were racially abused and attacked by five white youths in East Ham. The brothers fought back and one of the white youths was stabbed. The Virks called the police and they were arrested. When they went to trial, the police’s chief prosecution witnesses were the white youths. The Virks were found guilty and served time. The Ramsey family had been subjected to frequent harassment from the police including a raid on their home when 11 family members were arrested. Akhtar Ali Baig was killed in East Ham by two young men and two young women aged 15 to 17 years who spat in his face, racially abused him before stabbing him in the heart. One of the assailants allegedly said, ‘I’ve just gutted a P*ki.’ Ten-year-old Kennith Singh never returned home after going to the shops in Plaistow. His dead body was found under some old carpets several days after he went missing. The Touissant brothers were racially abused and attacked by the police and eventually taken to a police station for no apparent reason.

CHAPTER 2
BLACKWASHED

IN MY HOUSE, THE ATHLETES my father and mother admired did not try to hide. The foremost sporting names had been the boxer Muhammad Ali and the West Indies cricket team. I kind of missed the Ali era, only catching the tragic tail end of the most magnificent career in sport’s history. I grew up at a time when Larry Holmes ruled boxing’s heavyweight division, from 1978 to 1985. In truth, there was little to choose between Ali and Holmes. Both were wonderful boxers, great thinkers, with piercing jabs and an ability to control the narrative in the ring, to improvise, to ensure they had the final say in the storyline. Both were technically gifted and incredibly tough with a frightening ability to absorb huge punishment without being knocked out. Both looked good too, like lighter-weight fighters. Most heavyweights are lumbering, crude, one-dimensional, mechanical. Imposing. But difficult to watch. Ali and Holmes had speed, mobility, fluidity.

Holmes couldn’t scale to Ali’s heights though. Couldn’t come close. He didn’t have the charisma. He didn’t fight with the same balletic grace. Didn’t have Ali’s back story, the way he stood up for black people, his eloquence, his beauty, his ability to be vocal in situations when he had been expected to be compliant. Holmes, it seemed to many, stood more for money than politics. And rarely would his fights have as much drama as Ali’s. Holmes’ fights were well scripted, technically sound, not expansive, unrepeatable, intimidating in their excellence. Ali won against the odds. Performed miracles. Against Sonny Liston in 1964. Against George Foreman in 1974. On both occasions people feared for Ali’s health because, like Mike Tyson in the eighties, Liston and Foreman were frightening, more than human. Ali mocked fear and his opponents before the fight. He cracked jokes, made up poems, all while talking black politics, black liberation. All while spending as much time with ordinary people – signing autographs, delivering magic tricks, listening to their stories – as he was in training. Then he’d control the narrative in the ring. Perform a miracle. Then he’d crack more jokes afterwards. Talk more black politics, spend more time with people. Ali was the most grassroots megastar ever. Likely the first and only sports star crowned the most famous person on the planet.

Budd Schulberg, the Academy Award winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront, once wrote: ‘Nothing reflects character more nakedly than boxing.’ Schulberg once regarded the heavyweight champion of the world ‘with a reverence just this side of religious fervour’. According to Schulberg: ‘The heavyweight champion was no mortal man but stood with Lancelot and Galahad.’ Ali stood with Lancelot and Galahad, perhaps more so than any of the great heavyweights, from Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey to Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano.

Ali and Holmes faced each other on 2 October 1980, a few days after the Minter–Hagler fight. Ali was 38, Holmes 30. Ali had been retired for about two years. Holmes had graduated from being Ali’s former sparring partner to world champion. Ali by this point had already started slurring his words, walking slower, talking slower.

Ali’s biographer, Thomas Hauser, recalled on ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary episode Muhammad and Larry: ‘Before the Nevada State Athletic Commission licensed Ali to fight, they asked him to go to the Mayo Clinic for a full report. That report said that when Ali tried to touch his finger to his nose, there was a slight degree of missing the target. He couldn’t hop with the agility that doctors expected he would. He had trouble coordinating the muscles he used in speech. This is before he fought Larry Holmes.’

By fight night, Ali looked sedated. He was Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For ten rounds, Holmes hit him. Over and over. In round nine, Ali screamed. Ali didn’t fight back, couldn’t fight back. But he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t go down. Holmes kept looking at the referee, he wanted him to stop the fight. He wouldn’t. Eventually Angelo Dundee, Ali’s long-time trainer, threw in the towel. Holmes cried.

I remember when highlights of the fight were shown on television. Not so much the details of what happened, more my father’s response to the fight. I had little to no conception of Ali’s full history, the 1960 Olympics, the poetry, Henry Cooper, Liston, the Nation of Islam, the Vietnam War, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, ‘The Thrilla in Manilla’. My father cherished Ali’s defiance and willingness to confront mainstream America, to defeat white America. If the Black-British footballers in the seventies, often victims of abuse from crowds, had symbolised what black people were going through in their everyday lives, Ali had been emblematic of what we could be. He did not bow when criticised for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and converting to Islam. He did not bow when he had been threatened with jail and lost his world titles because he refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He had been the highest profile athlete across the globe, yet he did not minimise his politics to attain or retain fame. He used his platform to highlight the plight of black people across the globe. With black history having been bleached, silenced and obscured, in education, on television, Ali was our great hero, our great king, a symbol of a heritage that had been denied, the black messiah.

I knew Ali had been an important figure to my father. My father would often pull an Ali pose in photographs with me. He’d pretend to be Ali when play-boxing against me. When Leon Spinks, a man who had no front teeth and the scowl of a demoted worker, defeated Ali in ’78, our house mourned as if a major political figure had been assassinated or something.

At the point when the Ali–Holmes fight was about to start, my father put on his coat to leave the house. I thought my father’s memory must have been fading. This was Ali. This was boxing. This was how we bonded. Yet what I had been seeing on the screen was not always what my father had been feeling. What I witnessed on the surface rarely reflected the reality of the situation. We were, in many ways, bonded by sport, but at times miles apart.

Maybe my dad knew the result. Maybe he knew the inevitability of the result. I didn’t. I asked where he was going. Informed him that the Ali fight was about to start. He turned, and I’ll never forget the look on his face. Anger mixed with hurt. A kind of disempowering look. Must have been the first time I’d seen my father display any level of vulnerability. When he said something like I don’t want to see that fight, and then left, something sank inside of me.

Ali retired in 1981. At the time, I was still at an age where my parents’ Jamaican culture conflicted with my external environment. I preferred chips to my mother’s rice and peas. At home, the sounds of Max Romeo and Bob Marley were a constant. But I preferred Adam and the Ants. In my house, my father had two large speakers (roughly the height of an average year four pupil) in our living room. Never saw speakers that size in my white friends’ houses. My father liked cricket. I preferred football. I was more cockney than Jamaican. Like two different worlds.

My attitude changed between 1981 and 1984. I had started to become more comfortable with my home world and friends with shared experiences. This gave me a sense of belonging, it welcomed me, strengthened me, put me at ease. Unlike the external environment – school, shops, transport – it had not been hostile or limiting. My emerging love of the West Indies cricket team played a fundamental role in that shift. The West Indies represented strength, they represented my parents’ history, my heritage. No single team captivated me more than the West Indies side that toured England in 1984.

Cricket had always been a feature in the stories that my parents told me about Jamaica. They grew up in Galina, a small district in the hilly parish of St Mary in the northeast. St Mary had been the former residence of playwright Noël Coward who lived in a place called Firefly. Apparently, Coward did not like to entertain guests there, so he kept a guesthouse by the sea called Blue Harbour where he hosted major public figures such as Errol Flynn and Sir Winston Churchill. Author Ian Fleming’s 15-acre Goldeneye estate was also in St Mary. As a teenager in the fifties, my mother, Magnore, would ride her bike from Galina to Goldeneye to deliver Fleming’s groceries. It was not until my mother moved to England in 1961, a year after my father, that she found out that Fleming had been famous.

At an age when I was studying for my GCSE exams, my father had already left school, lived alone, and had been earning money by selling stones and limes by the side of Galina’s dusty main road. His one-room shack had no running water, no toilet. My mother during her school years had been doing the books and shopkeeping for her uncle Frank or ‘thumbing’ a lift to go to the places where she could sell fabrics.

For my father, his childhood had been full of little ventures to earn money. He would go ‘crabbing’ at night, hoping that a little rain would entice the crabs to emerge from their burrows. Without a torch, my father made a light by filling a bottle three-quarters full of kerosene oil. He then wrapped a sardine tin lid round an eight-inch string of crocus, leaving about an inch exposed. My father dipped the tin covered crocus into the bottle leaving the inch-exposed crocus hanging outside of the bottle. To prevent kerosene leakage, he covered the bottle lid in soap and lit the exposed crocus to provide enough light to view and catch the crabs.

By morning, he would sell the crabs to people in the district or to local hotels. Once he’d made enough money, he bought a small rowing boat with his friend Jack Johnson to catch more fish to sell. They made wire fish pots (holes on either side) and used stale mackerel as bait. The method worked, but the only problem had been my father’s limited tolerance for inhaling stale fish while moving back and forth on a boat. He aborted the scheme and turned to selling bananas. He would go to the port in Oracabessa to scrounge for bruised or small bananas. Then he’d load them into a wheelbarrow, wheel it four miles back to Galina and sell the fruit by the roadside.

None of these ventures were particularly lucrative, but my father never went without food. He’d also pick mangoes, sweetsop, soursop, paw or custard apples; he’d drink coconut water and eat the white jelly of the coconut with some sugar if he had no money to buy food. If he wanted a hot meal, he’d pick ackees and breadfruit or he’d dig up yams or plantain from the fields to cook in the bushes. He’d also play competitive games of dominoes for a loaf of bread or something to eat. My parents worked hard, living off their wits and imagination.

Cricket had given my father some conception of a world beyond Galina. He had been one of the best cricketers in the district, nicknamed ‘HH’ after bowler HH Hines Johnson and then ‘Collie’ after batsman O’Neil ‘Collie’ Smith. HH only played three times for the West Indies, all coming against England, when he was 37 years of age. Despite his advanced years, he had taken 13 wickets in those Tests. Collie was nearly as good a batsman as Sir Garfield Sobers. Sobers is universally regarded as the greatest all-round cricketer in the history of the sport. Smith and Sobers were good friends. Sadly, Smith died aged 26 in 1959 when a car driven by Sobers on the A34 near Staffordshire crashed into a 10-ton cattle truck. Jamaica was in shock. They took Smith’s body back to Jamaica where an estimated 30,000 people mourned his death.¹

Galina had no cricket coaches or scouts fawning over young talent because it was such a small district. Fantasies remained fantasies when you had to worry about what you were going to eat the following day. Cricket represented something much purer. The British elite had the money, the resources and the facilities. My father and his friends could not even afford cricket bats. They would cut a coconut branch and, when it dried, shape it into a bat. They did not have professional cricket balls (made of cork, wound by string and coated with leather) so they used tennis balls. There were no cricket grounds or even-surfaced pitches, so they played in the street, on the sidewalk or on any patch of open land, private or not. It would be those same qualities – enterprise, hard work, toughness, pride, resilience – that would underpin the West Indian cricket team’s success and their determination not to hide. ‘Cricket was a part of you,’ my father would say. ‘We played it every day, rain or shine.’

When the West Indies’ matches were broadcast on the wireless, all the kids in Galina would gather round at Mr Reuben’s grocery store to listen to the likes of HH, Collie and Sobers play. Those early West Indian teams were pioneers but also children of the colonial era. They played with pride and with passion, but there was little they could do to combat the history, the stereotypes and the infrastructure that governed their every move. The West Indies players were treated more like subjects than peers. They had some respect because of their sporting prowess. Not quite like other blacks. Beyond black. But not equal.

Cricket had been brought over to the Caribbean in part to demonstrate English dominance. The early West Indian players were pioneers, the first black players to break through internationally. The cricketing authorities admired them. Not only their brilliance and their resilience, but the way in which they conducted themselves. Compliant. Integrative. Rarely did they overtly challenge. This served to appease cricket’s overwhelmingly white-led authorities, as they didn’t perceive the growing presence of blacks in international cricket as a threat to the existing power structures of the game. In Simon Lister’s book Fire in Babylon, he quotes what former England cricket captain Sir Pelham Warner said in 1950: ‘The West Indies are among the oldest of our possessions, and the Caribbean Sea resounds to the exploits of the British Navy. Nowhere in the world is there a greater loyalty to, love of, and admiration for England.’

As such, those early West Indian teams endured stereotypes with little recourse to counter such views. They were regarded as subservient, ill-disciplined, likeable but a little lazy, jovial, enthusiastic. ‘The erratic quality of West Indian cricket is surely true to racial type. At one moment these players are eager, confident and quite masterful; then as circumstances go against them you can see them losing heart.’² They were known throughout the world as ‘Calypso Cricketers’, a team that played for fun, a team that played to entertain.

West Indian cricket had also been governed as if a colony. There would not be a black president of the West Indies cricket board until the eighties. Black players were not allowed or indeed trusted to captain the team until 1959, when Sir Frank Worrell, after years of lobbying by writer, activist and historian C L R James, became the first black captain of the West Indies. James had been supported in his efforts by Sir Learie Constantine, a cricketer, lawyer and politician who fought against racial discrimination during his years living in England and a man who would become the UK’s first black peer.

There had also likely been a quota system in the West Indian team too, which meant that a certain percentage of the side had to be white. It’s unlikely that the white West Indians earned their place on merit. From 1928, when the West Indies played their first Test match to 1960, when Worrell became captain, against the England team, white players only had a minor impact on the team in comparison to their black counterparts. A look at the batting and bowling averages during this period illustrates the point that black Test cricketers outperformed their white peers.³

These early black and brown West Indian players put the Caribbean on the map long before Bob Marley. And nothing was as sweet as a victory over England. Jamaica did not become ‘independent’ of British rule until 1962. So, every victory had been significant. Defeating the rulers went beyond national pride. It caused mayhem, hysteria. Galina would have a street party. The cricket team were the soldiers; cricket had been the tool to undermine the rulers.

By the time my father arrived in England in 1960, the West Indian team served another purpose; they incubated him and his peers from the hostile reception of English folks. Caribbean immigrants huddled together, sharing houses, jobs, money and resources to survive. For sure, my father attempted to fit in. Like the many workers from the Caribbean who arrived between 1948, when the SS Empire Windrush docked, through to the sixties, my father had arrived from a country in Jamaica that had been like a little Britain, with brown faces. He learnt more about the Empire than anything else. Black history obsolete. He had no major anxieties about being black in England. This was the mother country. Another country. He would be as much a citizen in England as he had been in Jamaica. He felt a great sense of loyalty before he had arrived on these shores. It was only in cricket where he felt any resentment towards his new homeland. Cricket had been the platform where England flexed its authority, epitomising its supremacy. A platform where, more than any sport, colonial attitudes had been reinforced.

Against this backdrop, it had been no surprise that my father started a cricket team in Balham on his arrival. It had been no surprise that he put a cricket bat and ball in my hands at such an early age. Couldn’t say I liked cricket that much. But cricket soon became a part of me. The West Indies became a part of me. When I played cricket, I was not pretending to be Ian Botham. I was Michael Holding, Joel Garner or Malcolm Marshall.

If the West Indian teams that my father grew up listening to in the fifties were more compliant, the seventies’ teams set the tone for the squad that toured England in 1984.

When Clive Lloyd captained the West Indies on its tour of Australia in 1975, they were humiliated by the pace and aggression of Aussie fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. The West Indies lost the series 5–1. Soon after that tour, Lloyd realised he needed to change tactics. He started employing four quick bowlers to keep batsmen under constant pressure.

India toured the West Indies in 1975–76 and Lloyd unleashed four fast bowlers in the final Test, much to the dismay of the visitors. On an uneven Sabina Park surface in Jamaica, Michael Holding, Wayne Daniel, Bernard Julien and Vanburn Holder terrorised India, injuring three batsmen. By the time the Indian team came out to bat for a second time, they were battered and bruised. With five wickets down and only 97 runs on the board, Indian captain Bishan Bedi surrendered and ended the innings, losing the match. Three of his players were still injured from the first innings, two more were suffering from injuries too, so Bedi could not put any more players out. The West Indies won the series in brutal fashion and a new era was about to begin.

Had there been any doubt that Lloyd would use the same tactics against England later that summer, it was all but erased when England’s South African born captain Tony Greig said: ‘I think people tend to forget it wasn’t that long ago they [the West Indies] were beaten 5–1 by the Australians and only just managed to keep their heads above water against the Indians just a short time ago as well … You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend, with the help of Closey and a few others, to make them grovel.’

Coming from a South African commenting on a team comprising black and Asian players, Greig’s statement carried racist connotations. The West Indies would make Greig grovel with one of the most brutal displays of fast bowling witnessed in England and one of the greatest batting performances by Viv Richards. During the Test matches in 1976, Richards scored 829 runs at an average of 118. The West Indian team won the five-match Test series 3–0 (two games were drawn) and all three one-day matches. The seventies version of the West Indies had been brought up in an independent Caribbean. They were more politicised, less willing to comply and keen, once and for all, to erase the image of Calypso Cricketers.

The West Indies’ ascendancy coincided with a period of increased activism by Britain’s black communities. The Windrush generation, the first set of Caribbean migrants to enter these shores en masse, were amenable. They had been ‘hunted’ down by the British. Post-war prosperity meant that Britain did not have enough workers, or at least enough willing workers to fulfil labour-market shortages in the new NHS, in transport. So, they sold the ‘British Dream’ to Caribbean citizens. The prospect of a new life, a better life. Britain did not have to pay for their schooling, their health or their housing up to that point. They were ‘ready-made workers’. But Britain was not prepared for its new arrivals. Didn’t think they needed to adjust. Wanted them to integrate. No questions asked. Shut up, be happy. All the run-down places and spaces that the now affluent white working-class people had vacated were now populated by the emergent Caribbean community.

For many of the Windrush generation, England had not been a dream. By the early seventies, opportunities and living conditions for their children had not vastly improved either. Jamaican-born poet Linton Kwesi Johnson encapsulated how many black people felt throughout the seventies when he sang ‘Inglan is a bitch’. Two generations were fed up. Fed up of being forced to integrate without a say, to de-colourise; fed up of poor working conditions, fed up of poor schooling, poor housing; fed up of having to minimise to progress.

By the seventies, it had become difficult for Britain to ignore the rising cultural and political presence of black Britain. This included cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, the rise of the Notting Hill Carnival, the continued wisdom, writing and leadership of C L R James, the activism of Darcus Howe and Althea Jones-Lecointe, the victory of the Mangrove Nine which led to the first acknowledgement of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police, the music of Aswad, Janet Kay and Steel Pulse.

Whether it was the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the rise of the Organisation for Women of Asian and African Descent and the Black Parents Movement, the proliferation of supplementary schools, the black publications that saw the light of day through Margaret Busby’s Allison & Busby and John La Rose’s New Beacon Books, or the Race Today Collective and the Institute of Race Relations holding power to account, black Britain had been gaining its identity, growing confident in its identity, creating platforms for self-knowledge and self-determination. So much of what these academics, artists, original intersectional feminists and activists fashioned had originally been ignored by mainstream institutions. We didn’t exist. Black didn’t exist. But these pioneers shoved their way through, often with minimal resource and against extreme opposition.