1. “Judge not!” I said, “Deep sorrow, not bigotry, may be speaking. Remember: sinking deep into decrepitude in old age, abandoned by both friends and family, is not easy.” This was nearly 10 years ago. It was at the height of the Major Financial Crisis of 2008. I remember bumping into an African man in Milton Keynes, a refugee from an African country whose name I cannot remember and, I cannot for the life of me remember even the man’s name. But I do vividly recall his sudden outburst; it was full of rage and sorrow, every word that tripped off his tongue was laced with bitterness. A qualified dentist in his native African country, he had risked life and limb to escape his homeland to get to England on the promise of a better life, including the ability to practice dentistry unmolested. Alas, when he arrived in the UK, those who had previously encouraged and promised him help were nowhere to be seen; all he found were insurmountable barriers largely on account of want of money, the colour of his skin and age. I think he was around 55 years old.
2. The long and short of it: he was reduced to earning his keep by working as a care assistant in a poorly managed old people’s home in one of the home counties in England; wiping “white folks’ backsides,” as he so disparagingly put it, for a measly pea nuts. Pouring his raw bitterness into my ear as it were, he said: “Worst of all, without a doubt, are the English. I absolutely hate them. They want my cheap labour, but resent my presence here. I am a doctor for heaven’s sake! They keep telling me, ‘Go home! You coloured African bastard…we don’t want the likes of you here!’” All I could do was to sympathize with him in complete silence; there was nothing I could do for him, but to give ear to his sorrowful words and consider them.
Seeming bigotry sometimes masks genuine sorrow
3. In these strange and vacillating times of Brexit and identity politics, in which every tribe in England takes solace in the familiar, I think it is important for us to cut each other a little slack when speaking words of woe. We should be very slow to judge; for we may not know who it is that is actually speaking, as the voice of the seeming bigot may in fact be the voice carrying in its dark strains the emotions of great sorrow. Now I am not naïve as to imagine that every bigot screaming obscenities at me, asking me to catch the nearest aeroplane to fly back to where I came from is not a racist. Hell no! I have had my fair share of xenophobic encounters and mean-spiritedness to know the difference.
4. Still, while we may generously accept that real differences which divide peoples and cultures do in fact exist, it is equally true that we are all united by our basic needs and aspirations: a good job, a loving family, a better life for ourselves and our children, and a country we can call ‘my own’ and yes, a comfortable old age. Frustrate these and you are in deep trouble! W. B Yeats’ ‘[T]read softly for you tread upon my dreams’ evidently comes to mind. The reality is that not many people get to experience all these things even though they may be ‘native-born’ English men and women. People, be they refugees or aggrieved English natives, are wont to speak offensively when frustrated in their desires; giving vent to raw anger as a means of protesting against genuine injustice, and at the terrible hand which life may have dealt them – especially in old age. I am here speaking feelingly. A particular incident I personally experienced years ago may now be mentioned.
A complete stranger having a meltdown before my very eyes
5. It was one of those silky Indian-summer’s day in the autumn of the 1990s. Walking along the banks of the river Great Ouse in Buckingham, as I often did after a session of heavy private study, during those tough years when I continued long in a state of limbo, I happened upon a couple who had come into their sear and yellow leaf. They were in their late 70s and looked remarkably well for their age. As was my habit, I said “Good afternoon” to the couple intending no offence to them whatsoever, and the next thing I knew was the lady suddenly erupted into an extraordinary passion like Mount Vesuvius, giving vent to sorrow which appeared to have lain dormant for a very, very long time. I at once knew that this was probably not her normal self; and I did not begrudge her in the least for what she said to me, I simply listened to her rant patiently and in silence. The gentleman, whom I correctly supposed to be her husband, looked on with a pained look of utter disbelief, astonishment and embarrassment. He apologized profusely, saying: “Please believe me, my wife is not always like this, she is not a bigot! I have no idea what has got into her, she is a gentle soul really. Please do not take this personally. I apologize for any offence caused.”
6. Exhibiting a strange nervousness and embarrassment, more for them than for me, I quickly responded: “Oh, please! Have no fear! No offence is taken. I have been called worse things in my life before!” And not wishing to make a bad situation worse, I started to carry on with my walk as it were, but the gentleman would not let me, pressing me to stay a little while longer. Introducing himself and his wife, he said: “My name is Jack, and this is Jill!” Jack continued: “I used to work for the Colonial Office. I was one of the District Officers in the Northern Nigerian Protectorate, and after the Second Great War, I was roped in to help prepare the foundations for the equivalent of the English National Health Service in the years leading up to Nigeria’s Independence in 1960. Where are you from and what’s your name?”
7. Jack spoke with a paternal look about him, and as a man who was accustomed to speaking to subordinates. I suppose that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the fact that in his previous life he had served as a District Officer. He gave the air of a man comfortable with exercising authority. I took no offence to him, and I replied: “I’m Stephen. Just call me Stephen! And I am originally from Uganda…well sort of…born in Uganda anyway, but I am in some spot of bother right now.” With a look of surprised shock on Jack’s face, he asked: “What kind of bother?” And thus begun a friendship that would last until he died suddenly from a heart attack in 2000; and my relationship with his widow continued until I relocated to Taiwan in 2013, she was well into her 90s.
Non-white people are bigots too!
8. The reason I did not take umbrage at Jill’s sudden outburst is the little appreciated fact that we, the black African people, are also bigoted. And experience has taught me to be very slow to call out racism in others (especially when in England) because I know for a fact that xenophobia is rife on the continent of Africa. Prejudice is not just a white man’s disease; it’s a disease that affects all races the world over. African bigotry and chauvinism is a terrifying reality. I first experienced it when I was a little boy of about 4 and 5 years old. I and a group of little boys were playing football on the equivalent of a village green in the parish of Buloba, in the Wakisso Sub-county of Buganda, Uganda; my grandfather was the local parish priest in the Church of Uganda. I wasn’t very good at it, and I remember playing another small boy, not the ball, a little too enthusiastically.
9. And the next thing I remember was all the boys were ganging up on me and started yelling obscenities, calling me a son of a bloody foreigner and that I should go home, to where my father came from. It was the first time I discovered that I was in fact a bastard child and, on account of my father being a foreigner, I was according to those little boys a bloody foreigner, not one of them; and, that I should go and seek out my father and return to his ancestral home, that my mother was a traitor to her people. To say that I was shocked would be the understatement of a century! In great pain, I immediately ran to my mother crying my eyes out, demanding answers urgently. The poor woman had much to explain. The long and short of the saga was that I found out who my father was; and, in the subsequent years, I got to understand the genesis of the terrifying hostilities sweeping the country at the time of my birth, which only surfaced from a falling out among small boys playing football on the village green. It always astonishes me how little children pick up and seize upon very sensitive and explosive things; children know a lot more than adults dare credit them.
A beam and a speck
10. This little understood fact may be the best explanation as to why some parts of Africa are wholly ungovernable and, from time to time experience outbreaks of terrifying internecine wars in which much loss of life and property occurs. The most notorious of these internecine conflicts is the one which resulted in the Rwandan genocide. But there are many other less known such conflicts, the best example I can cite here was the long running conflict in Northern Uganda in which great devastation was visited upon the Acholi and Langi people, under the colour of the Ugandan government prosecuting a war against Joseph Kony and his Lord’s army. The most remarkable aspect of this war was the astonishing silence which accompanied it – both at home and abroad. It was as if the two tribes in Northern Uganda that suffered appalling atrocities had ceased to belong in the family of human beings, and therefore their plight accounted for very little. Until we the black African people have the courage to look ourselves in the mirror, and remove the great big beam in our collective eye, I feel I have no business playing a surgeon removing a tiny speck lodged in the collective eye of white Europeans. And if it should fall upon me to play an eye surgeon, then it is my sincere prayer that God would grant me the wisdom to undertake the operation sensitively; for we are all of us guilty of prejudice in some form or other.
Racism defined
11. What is racism anyway? I could be mistaken, but I would define racism as a belief that all members of a particular race or tribe exhibit characteristics, abilities or qualities specific to that particular race or tribe – thus distinguishing them from other races or tribes as either superior or inferior. In other words, there is a general acceptance that there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between races. This acceptance was, for example, the justification for the great Atlantic slave trade which begun in the 17th century. Instances of institutional racism include the Holocaust in Europe, the Apartheid regime of South Africa, slavery and segregation in the USA, and slavery in Latin America. Alas, the legacy of this general acceptance is very much with us to this day. You only have to look at the continuing plight of the Rohingya people or Donald Trump’s response to the migration question by proposing a wall, in order to appreciate that bigotry is alive and well today.
I too have played the bigot!
12. I am ashamed to place on the record that I too have behaved in a manner, which is consistent to the above definition of racism. Soon after my world had turned upside down in 1988, I was in a state of great confusion, and things were not helped when my younger half-sister, the late Ms. Lydia Kamugasa, followed in my footsteps to take up her place at Cliff College towards the latter end of 1988. I never really got to know the full story as to what was going on at home in Kampala, Uganda, it is sufficient to know that father’s fortunes had gone from bad to worse; I completely trusted my father’s judgement in the management of all things, it would never have occurred to me to gainsay him. And if he felt it appropriate to send Lydia after me, it was not my place to quibble. Naturally, things got a whole lot more complicated once Lydia was in England and it fell to me to play the man as it were, seeing as it was that I was the older of the two. Thus it was that on one fateful Saturday morning in 1989, as it happened, I received a desperately urgent phone call from Lydia demand that I go up to Leicester to see her immediately; she had by now joined the University of Leicester, thanks to the good offices of my Old Testament tutor at Cliff College, who had taken cognizance of our awful situation and stepped in with offers of help, she could only financially support one of us and I proposed Lydia ahead of myself.
13. We know from experience that it is a fraud and a deceit not only to violate our engagements to our friends (especially those to whom we are related), but to frustrate their just expectations from us, especially the expectations we have raised. Lydia had a legitimate expectation for an answer from me when she cried out for help, even though I was barely in the position to afford it. At that time, I had secured a little job of flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s restaurant at number 224/226 High Street in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire; this was long before the authorities started to harass me with possible deportation, as I had no status in England. It was my very first job in England, and I absolutely hated it, but I needed the money. We sometimes have to do things we don’t like or enjoy. It was a case of starting somewhere! Working at McDonalds was a rude awakening for me in particular; as I got to see for the first time the underbelly of English society, which tended to come into life in the small hours of the night, I worked mostly late-night shifts as I was determined to press on with my education, I studied in the Cheltenham Public Library along Clarence Street by day. Thus, in answer to Lydia’s cry for help, I dropped everything and went up to Leicester on the National Express coach that very day.
14. It is well said that those that are sick and in sorrow are apt to take things very ill, and be jealous of a slight, and to lay to heart the least unkindness done to them. Lydia’s crisis was a major shock; professional discretion prohibits me from naming it, those were the days when her medical condition was little understood in the medical world; it was extremely distressing to both of us, making our common idiom that troubles come not in single spies but in battalions, all the more true. It is sufficient to place it on the record that the trouble in question was the equivalent to a death sentence to Lydia. It’s a remarkable blessing that she went on to enjoy a full life for more than 20 years afterwards. But at the time, I for one was totally overwhelmed by the situation, and was at a loss as to what to do, not knowing which way to turn, let alone how to proceed about asking for help. However, in the meantime, we needed to lay our hands on cash, which necessitated a short trip to the local bank for me to withdraw some cash. Thus we set out to the bank on the High Street of Leicester and as we walked, my head was at war with all manner of issues; I was like a ticking bomb, ready to go off at the slightest provocation.
All it took was a little spark for the bigot in me to come forth!
15. So when we got to the bank, I joined a long queue of customers waiting to go about their lawful business; those were the days before ATMs were as ubiquitous as they are today; one had to speak to a human bank teller. Thus, when it was Bergin’s turn as it were, I stepped forward and a fresh-faced young man behind a glass screen asked me a number of questions, routine really, but it was the tone of his patronizing voice which set me exploding. All those repressed emotions came flooding out in a torrent of abuse directed at the poor young man. I was beside myself with rage – totally out of character I must confess – I was a completely different man from my usual self, leaving my poor sister utterly embarrassed and ashamed.
16. “Who do you think you are?” I screamed at the poor teller. “I suppose you think I am one of those black refugee bastards come here to rob your bank….do you!??” I continued shouting at the poor man, by this time a little crowd had started to form trying to work out whether to call the police or not. “I have news for the lot of you!” I yelled out to the gathered crowd, “Where I come from, people pay me respect…. they treat me with dignity… Oh yes, they do! We are not your poor refugees…come here to beg for little scraps…” And the next thing I knew Lydia was grabbing hold of me and quite literally shoved me out of the bank. We did not complete the transaction. We stomped off back to her student flat and while there, we both collapsed in a heap, in each other’s arms, and sobbed with a sob of despair. It was a very embarrassing episode in my life, I can see the young man’s look of shock and terror, tears well up in my eyes merely thinking about it as I write; I regret it bitterly. I shudder to think that I could ever have acted thus.
Remember the spinsters of Old Salem
17. For a person who takes personal integrity seriously as my friend Jill clearly did, she would have been justified in considering the suggestion that she were a racist as offensive as the spinsters of Old Salem must have found it when the citizens told them they would be dunked in water to prove they were not witches. Jill was a very proud working-class Englishwoman. I write of her in the past tense, because I think she has most probably passed away by now; she was 93 years old when I relocated to Taiwan and very frail indeed, we were not able to keep up a correspondence with each other for obvious reasons. Born in 1920 at the time when the British working class was still divided into three layers, namely: the ‘working men’ or ‘labourer’, the intelligent ‘artisan’, and the ‘educated working man’; and at the time when many working class people in London lived in extreme poverty, slum dwellings were a common feature, still in existence in areas of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, and Bethnal Green; Jill appears not have known her real parents as she was brought up by relatives who took pity on her, thus entering into domestic service at a very young age to earn her keep. Jill’s early life was, quite simply, very hard.
18. Jill married young. I think she married when she was barely 14 years old; at common law and by canon law a person who had attained the legal age of puberty could contract a valid marriage. The legal age of puberty was fourteen for boys and twelves for girls. But Jill’s marriage was a disaster from day one, and the worst of it, she could not get out of it easily as the dictates of the conservative puritanical climate at the time meant that marriage was for life, giving a whole new meaning to the common proverb, when one makes one’s bed and one must lie in it. I discovered years later after our first meeting that Jill endured more than forty years of grave domestic abuse – so extreme that had she suffered the same in modern Britain of the 21st century, her husband would have been sent to prison for a very long time. In addition to remaining in the marriage in keeping with social expectations at the time, she dared not leave her husband for fear what he might do to her four young children, three girls and a son.
19. Those were the days when the comprehensive social services infrastructure enjoyed by many Britons today, however imperfect, simply did not exist. She took sole responsibility for supporting her family out of the meagre income she earned as a domestic cleaner, cleaning houses for the big people in London. Often enough, her first husband used to beat her up to force her to surrender whatever was left of her earnings, in order to spend it in the pubs and on prostitutes. In her own words: “He was a very nasty piece of work.” Her release came when she woke up one day to find the man she so despised had died, having chocked on his own vomit in his sleep, no doubt after a heavy drinking session at a nearby pub with friends. She vowed never to get married again, and lived for many years as a widow until, that is, she ran into Jack, a widower. After several years of Jack wooing her, Jill finally gave in, and agreed to the union, marrying at a Registry Office somewhere in London, before relocating to Buckingham, where they enjoyed 8 years of married happiness until he died; those short 8 years were the happiest years of her entire life, she once said.
Haunted by the memory of a much-loved son
20. To bear a great weight for an hour or two is nothing compared with carrying a load for many a day, nay, for many a decade. The letting out of those offensive words: “You darkie go home… We have nothing in common with coloured people like you… A golliwog you are…” Were like the letting forth of water that had lain long bottled up in the depth of Jill’s heart. I later discovered that as I walked towards her and her husband, the light of the setting sun fell on me in such a way as to create a silhouette that in that split second, I apparently reminded her of her dead son. Her son, the only son of her old years, was the darling of her soul. She had high hopes for him and wanted to do everything she could to help him navigate a very hostile environment in the East-end of London; for she had known from day one that her boy was gay. “We women know these things,” she said. And she continued: “It’s a woman’s intuition…I knew right early that my boy would grow up to be a homosexual and, I wanted to shield him because in those days being a homosexual in my neck of the woods was the equivalent to a death sentence.”
21. Stunned at the shocking revelation, I remember asking her whether she ever talked the matter over with her son. “No!” she said, and with tears in her eyes she went on to add: “I knew his father would never accept a gay son, but my first husband had a hunch that his son might be gay. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. I did my best to cover up for the boy, explaining away his seemingly strange mannerism and behaviour.” Jill continued to narrate her very sad tale: “Then one fateful day, as it happened, we were getting ready to celebrate my boy’s 18th birthday, he was called Steven just like you; his father came home in the morning after an all-night drinking session with his mates, and the next thing I knew he was going after our boy. Apparently, he had heard rumours that Steven was, as he put it, ‘A Bloody Poofter!’” Jill’s face now turned very dark like thunder, as she continued her tragic and sorrowful story: “An almighty row broke out in our flat, with much shouting and throwing of things, with me trying as hard as ever to get between our boy and his father, I feared his father might kill him in his drunken rage; the next things we knew Steven was storming out of the flat, it was the last time we ever laid eyes on him alive.”
Loss of a child is a loss like no other
22. Jill hoped against all hope that Steven would come home after he had calmed down, but he never did. “As the clock struck 9 o’clock in the evening, Steven had not come back home. I started to panic. I knew something was dreadfully wrong. It was unlike him. My children always came home for tea; we ate our tea anywhere between 7 and 8 o’clock in the evening. I had taught them well despite of everything.” Jill paused for a moment. And she continued: “Then, at around the 9.30 o’clock, there was a knock on the door. My heart sunk as I went to open the door, and when I opened it I saw two Police men standing there. There and then my knees buckled and I spilled onto the floor in a heap and I was out for the count. I have no recollection hearing anything they said, but the long and short of it, once I had come to, I learned that my son, my lovely boy, had committed suicide by throwing himself under the wheels of the underground train.”
Out of darkness comes light
23. That day in question, that is, the day we first met in Buckingham, was the anniversary of the day her beloved son committed suicide. She was in her annual black mood; she was in a sense grieving for her dead son. There was an awkward silence after Jill had shared with me her tragic tale. What on earth does one say! Nothing really, except to reach out and give her as I did, a bear hug; and, as I did so, she broke down and sobbed uncontrollably, there was nothing further to say. But it was the beginning of a powerful friendship in which we adopted each other; she was like a mother to me, well, perhaps something of a grandmother, and I a son or something of a grandson to her. It didn’t matter in the end. Our friendship continued even after her husband, Jack, had died; and after she had moved to a retirement home in the South-west of England. Every year, my wife and I would drive more than 270 miles to visit her at her retirement home in the summer. We considered it our filial duty to her, which we were very glad to perform with great joy.
Life is never black and white
24. But was Jill a bigot? To be very honest: I have no idea! And in the absence of explicit evidence to suggest to the contrary, I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she was just an ordinary woman caught up in the temper of our times. The 20th century in which Jill lived the majority of her years, saw breath-taking changes in the political, economic and social landscape of England; these changes accelerated to even greater speeds in the 21st century. These changes came against the background of new peoples becoming English by the power of an Act of Parliament as I was, and many of them were by turn compelled to compete for the same resources the working classes in England were competing for, and, alas, many working classes were not and are still not very successful in our increasingly atomized country Britain has become. The politicization of the movement of people is a grave indictment against our political leadership in particular.
25. Their lack of success in the general life’s endeavours, plus tragic personal circumstances such as those alluded to above; it is perfectly understandable that they should feel threatened by these changes. Therefore, if I were to stand in the shoes of Jill, I would argue that it is not racist to feel threatened by change, especially if that change comes in the form of people who are, on the face if, very different from me pressing in onto my little patch of ground. However, it is unfortunate that no British government in the last 40 to 60 years has been able to formulate a plausible explanation people like Jill would be capable of understanding very readily; because all they see from their point of view, massive change is to them the equivalent to a rising tide which appears unstoppable. Accordingly, in these days of po-faced ‘anti-racism’, Jill’s unfortunate outburst would most certainly be interpreted as reprehensible and racist. But, as we have seen above, her outburst was simply an expression of decades-old sorrow, which found an outlet at the slightest provocation of which none of us had any control, in the same way I went after that poor bank teller all those years ago. Truly, life is never black and white. We should all be slow to judge; for deep sorrow, not bigotry, may be speaking. We need to know the difference.
The Unloved is a British television film starring Molly Windsor, Robert Carlyle, Susan Lynch and Lauren Socha. It is about an eleven-year-old girl called Lucy (played by Molly Windsor) growing up in a children’s home in the UK’s care system, and shown through her perspective.
Editor’s Note: This blog-post was first published on 11 February 2019
- Apart from the author’s name, names used in this blog-post are not real; they have been changed in the interest of discretion.