A couple of weeks ago, Channel 4 screened a programme on the internecine violence between young blacks in the inner cities of the UK. It was a tabloid piece that did little more than itemise who shot whom and where. It could easily have been made in the Bronx or Brooklyn, Los Angeles or Chicago, Port of Spain or Lagos.
In short, it is an international phenomenon involving an international underclass who dress alike, speak alike, eat alike, rap alike, bling alike and are led from the US. Governments have abandoned these young men in the cities of a changing world. They describe their lives in hip-hop music with an audience of millions who share their instincts, if not the penchant, for violence. They have been driven to this autonomous form of self-expression because no politician, social commentator or political activist knows with any intimacy what is taking place in these dark dungeons of humanity.
But the numbers involved in the UK are small in comparison with, let's say, Kingston (Jamaica) or Soweto. What is not small is the reportage of the trend in the UK. Plastered over every tabloid are dramatic reports of gun violence, all with a racial slant. You would think, on reading these, that there is a pogrom in the black community, that roving gangs of black boys traverse the cities, killing each other by the score. Not so. Young men discuss ceaselessly the pointlessness of all this violence. Groups of mothers have called on their young ones to bring it to an end. There is an immense moral pressure on the gun boys to curb this explosion of cordite.
But there is something else. Once, the call was for black power, and the Afro hairstyle blossomed on rebellious heads. Again, this took root in the US and spread throughout the western world. Malcolm X was king then. This movement drew the firepower of J Edgar Hoover's FBI. Several activists were executed. Out of this defeat a new generation arose, steeped in violence and aimless in its expression.
The movement in the UK was very small and did not draw the same level of violence from the state as its American counterpart. Hence the negative consequences have not visited this generation in the UK with any great intensity. I hope and expect that the current violence here will be replaced by a cultural and political movement worthy of its time.
