Introduction
Towards the end of last month, July, an obviously mentally disturbed person stabbed to death three children in the town of Stockport in England. All girls, their ages ranged from six to nine.
The following evening a vigil was held in the town to mourn the loss of the three girls and express sympathy towards the eight other children and two adults who were injured.
When the people came out of the vigil, they started attacking a nearby mosque as well as the police officers who were standing by to ensure an atmosphere of peace. 27 of these officers had to be taken to hospital for treatment and had one of their vehicles set on fire.
This outburst of anger in Stockport was driven by the story spread through the social media that the murderer of the three girls was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived illegally on a small boat.
To the contrary, police investigations had established that the culprit was a 17-year-old boy of parents who had legally migrated from Rwanda.
This information did not stop the riots which raged for a few days.
This was despite the heartfelt appeal by HM King Charles III who called for the nation to unite around ‘shared values of mutual respect and understanding’.
Mosques and others targeted
Spreading to many parts of the country, the riots targeted mosques and hotels accommodating asylum seekers. They set cars and buildings on fire and looted shops.
The fact that the riots were widespread was confirmed by the fact that the resulting arrests by the police took place in 36 of the 43 police areas in England and Wales.
Role of the far right
Justifiably, the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, condemned what he described as ‘far-right thuggery’. He said there would be charges and convictions against the rioters, and those participating in violence, including those “whipping up this action online”, would regret it.
Prime Minister Starmer took this position because indeed the right-wing was very active in inciting the racist, ethno-sectarian, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and lawless disturbances. Thanks to its abuse of the social media, the hashtag “#EnoughIsEnough” was trending within hours of the girls’ murder being reported.
On 14 August 2024, the journal ‘The New Statesman’ published an article by Jason Cowley entitled ‘England in pieces’, which discussed the riots which had started in Stockport the previous month.
In the article, Cowley expressed support for the stance taken by the government to enforce law and order relating to the riots, writing that Prime Minister Starmer ‘will have to hit the far right hard’.
This approach was confirmed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, who said:
“We understand the deterrence impact of a swift and robust response from law enforcement. Our aim is to make immediate charging decisions where we can, to enable courts to sentence within days.”
People’s opposition to racism
However, in addition to this, the population had decided to oppose the riots. Widespread demonstrations took place to denounce the racism and the mayhem conveyed and perpetrated by the riots.
Commenting on these demonstrations, Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council said:
“While the previous two nights have been a welcome break from the appalling scenes of the last week, and may have reached a turning point, we are by no means complacent.
“The strong message that communities sent on Wednesday evening that they don’t tolerate hate and racism and violence also, was potentially the start of a turning point in this whole thing. So, I think the mood is different as a consequence of all that.”
And, indeed, the riots stopped.
What the racist rioting exposed
Jason Cowley wrote that:
“The harrowing ethno-sectarian violence and racist attacks of recent weeks on mosques and hotels sheltering asylum seekers in provincial towns have revealed something dark and shocking: an England atomised, an England in pieces…
“The riots, occurring in some of the most deprived areas of the country, towns where people believe they are without political representation, have revealed intractable class, social and geographic divisions…
“(When the riots broke out, they revealed) an urban nightmare of division and hatred, a high-summer descent into what Saul Bellow called the moronic inferno…
“(The clashes between the right-wing provocateurs and Muslims have occurred) in the racially segregated former mill towns of the post-industrial north-west and in the Midlands…
“(There is) smouldering resentment about mass migration and porous borders – as well as run-down high streets, broken community services, sub-standard housing and long-standing economic neglect…
“People have lost confidence in democracy, (and) trust in British politics and elected politicians is at an all-time low…
“Forty per cent of those eligible to vote in the (July 2024) election chose not to.”
The far right lives on
Although the UK riots have stopped, confronted both by strict law enforcement and mass anti-racist opposition, Jason Cowley warns:
“But the far right is not defeated…Its networks and belligerents are active on social media, and mobilising.”
What is to be done?
Jason Cowley recalled what a French author, Christophe Guilluy, had said five years earlier, in 2019, after some conflicts in France, that the country had been “smashed into tiny, atomised pieces – there is no class solidarity only ‘issues’ and ‘identity politics’…”
However, Guilluy had gone on and said:
“The problem is, though, that even if there is no such thing as society as an abstract entity, there are still people – you can call them the working class, immigrants, the poor or whatever – and they are real and their suffering is real… You can’t just wish away a whole group of people and their way of life, a whole class.”
Cowley himself agreed that the riots had revealed an “England atomised, an England in pieces.”
Echoing the view expressed by Christophe Guilluy, Jason Cowley advised Prime Minister Kier Starmer that:
“(He must) find ways to include those who feel excluded and abandoned by (the British government based in London) in a new national story. These are not the far right but the people of peripheral England for whom democratic politics is not working, who don’t vote for Labour or any other party: the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous. What do you do about these people and their anger, suffering and despair?”
Lessons for South Africa
It is exactly this image of those “who feel excluded and abandoned” which resonates strongly with our own reality.
Whereas forty percent of these boycotted the July 4 Elections in the UK, in our case the number was sixty percent during the 29 May Elections!
As in the UK, these are not right-wing people. However, they feel that democratic politics is not working for them. In many instances in the past, they did not vote for the ANC or any other party. They continue to belong among ‘the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous’.
In the UK it took the propagation of a false story about the murder of three English girl-children by an illegal Muslim migrant to drive these neglected and ignored people into a riotous rampage.
Surely, the deeply troubling question must arise in our own minds – what ‘issue’ or ‘identity politics’ might be used by some negative forces to incite a similar riotous rampage among our own people!
Given the sordid response to the Miss South Africa candidacy of Miss Chidimma Adetshina, it could easily happen that such negative forces in our country could use xenophobic Afrophobia to engage in the moronic inferno to which Jason Cowley referred.
They would be encouraged in this regard because those who take great pride in demanding “Mabahambe!”, and others of their ilk, are now sitting in both our Parliament and Government. Here we must also underline that the xenophobic Afrophobia as an important part of the political agenda of the counter revolution.
The black excluded and abandoned in the US
In 1999, Vintage Books published a book by the well-known American, Robert D. Kaplan entitled ‘An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future’. Among others, Kaplan discusses the racially segregated towns and cities of the US, while, as we have seen, Jason Cowley pointed to similarly racially segregated towns in the UK.
One of the towns Kaplan writes about is East St. Loius, Illinois. Here is part of what he says:
“As in north St. Louis, (another black ghetto), there were few high-rises here. Instead, I saw a city of boarded-up storefronts and simple brick houses in ruins. Uncut grass and weeds were taller here than in north St. Louis, so that the term “lawn” was meaningless…Many roofs had collapsed. A tree had grown through the open roof of one house…I passed a baroque fountain and a public swimming pool, both dry and caked with greenish mold. Manhole covers were missing…Milford (a guide) told me that the manholes had been stolen and sold for scrap metal. East St. Louis was largely a ghost town…(Milford) mentioned the school system which several experts had told me was rife with nepotism: there were more administrators and teachers than children.”
This is a vivid account of the decay of a black ghetto in a US conurbation twenty-five years ago, occupied by the ‘excluded and abandoned’ who had been led in the UK to participate in a racist riot.
Last year, 2023, East St. Louis was described as ‘the most depressed city in the US’! Still a black ghetto, its population of over 80 thousand in the 1960s has dropped to below 17 thousand in 2024.
We can see the urban decay Robert Kaplan writes about in some of our major cities like Johannesburg. As in the US, it affects mainly our black African population – our country’s excluded and abandoned.
Kaplan writes that when he saw a wealthy white suburb in “juxtaposition…with a wasteland of wrecked buildings and streets (in the north St. Louis black ghetto), as ominous as any I had seen in the war-torn Third World had come about when working-class whites fled and wealthy whites in luxury homes hired private security services to protect their investments. It made me shout the phrase “policy vacuum” at (my guide) Hawkins. “It’s as if the government were never here,” I said. “What you are showing me through this car window are cruel social and economic forces that have overrun urban policy.”
A black police officer who lives and works in East St. Louis commented:
“We’re an underdeveloped colony ruled by a class of administrators…who drive to work here each morning from the outer world. Burglary increases, and it’s costing me more and more just to live here because the value of my property goes down. My kids are badly educated. I never intended to get my kids used to uncollected trash, burglaries, and so on. I’ve learnt that there is only one strategy for realising the American Dream: You make it by leaving others behind.”
What happens to a dream deferred?
These remarks by the black police officer bring to mind the famous poem by that other black American, Langston Hughes – “Harlem” whose opening line is ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
As recently as this month, August 2024, the deferred dream of the excluded and abandoned in the UK – the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous – exploded, leaving “England atomised, an England in pieces.”!
As Robert Kaplan had cried out about the failure of government to support the black communities in the US towns and cities, pointing to an urban policy vacuum which allowed “cruel social and economic forces that have overrun urban policy”, Jason Cowley has called on Prime Minister Starmer – the British government – to “find ways to include those who feel excluded and abandoned by (the British government based in London) in a new national story.”
While fully understanding the reality expressed by the black police officer in East St. Louis about blacks accessing the American Dream by leaving other black people behind, Kaplan and Cowley, like us, would insist that – No one must be left behind!
The neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous in our country are knocking at democracy’s door.
As the French author, Christophe Guilluy said, ‘these are real people and their suffering is real…They cannot be wished away.’
For his part, Jason Cowley spoke with passion, asking – “What do you do about these people and their anger, suffering and despair?”
We, for our part, know very well that if circumstances in our country continue to oblige these masses to continue deferring their dream – it will explode!