Society
Our youngsters don't need these saviours
Published 15 May 2008
As inter-necine strife is at its most vicious when it is nearing its end, I am sure we are on the cusp of a new era
Within hours of becoming Mayor of London, Boris Johnson announced his first appointment - a deputy mayor for young people. Guyanese-born Ray Lewis will tackle the problem of kids killing kids with guns and knives. In short, he will be targeting black youths of African and Caribbean descent. Lewis was elevated from the Borough of Newham in east London, where he performed miracles (so they say) in the rehabilitation of black youths recruited from local schools to his "young leaders' academy".
He was inspired to form his organisation after seeing an Oprah Winfrey television programme on a boot camp in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the Deep South of the United States. He flew off at once to learn how to reproduce the format here.
Now, Baton Rouge is perhaps one of the most brutal corners of America. It was Ku Klux Klan territory, where brutalisation of black sharecroppers was the norm. Hardly surprising that black folk in Louisiana internalised the brutishness of their white peers, only to revisit identical methods of disciplined brutality on their own people.
Boot camps in black communities in the United States are run by staff who drive terror into youngsters who have strayed. Their steroid-pumped guardians scream and shout at their charges, aiming at total humiliation.
But Lewis and Boris may well be unaware that gangs have been a feature of urban life since the end of the Second World War. Postwar America exported gang life around the western world under such exotic names as the Diggers and the Stompers. As a young teenager, I served loyally in two gangs in Trinidad, the Renegades and the Lawbreakers, before leaving in a hurry, having decided that the way of the transgressor was extremely difficult. Within days of my arrival in England, I was severely beaten by a gang of Rockers outside a cinema in Swiss Cottage in north-west London. That particular gang rocked and rolled in the Notting Hill riots.
They were soon to discover another enemy: the Mods. Both gangs were moved by the pop music of the day, Rockers by rock'n'roll and Mods by Jamaican blue beat. Hundreds of these young men met by prior appointment on south-coast beaches on bank holiday weekends, bringing terror to the local citizenry.
At the time, young black people in the UK had their own divisions: Brixton youths against those from Ladbroke Grove, Ladbroke Grove against Harlesden. But a new, mass political movement deemed them irrelevant. Gangs became history as the Sixties generation swarmed all over Europe demanding a reinvented social order.
For a while, America ceased to export gang warfare and replaced it with the idea of revolt against the established order. This inspired movement introduced black people internationally to the concept of Black Power. Fratricide was replaced by revolutionary aspirations, a collective demand for change internationally.
But then America once more resurrected the traditional export. From the black and Latino communities, gangs prevailed from the east coast to the west. They swept through the Caribbean, leaving hundreds of young men dead in their wake. Hardly a major African city south of the Equator was spared. We in the inner cities in the UK were perhaps least affected, due to the unstinting resistance of black parents to such murderous antisocial behaviour.
Without a historical perspective of the gang phenomenon, charlatans like Lewis can do nothing but thrash about in the darkness. As inter-necine strife is at its most vicious when it is nearing its end, I am sure we are on the cusp of a new era. So Boris and Lewis need not put themselves forward as our saviours.
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