okwonga

[okwonga]

I owe Eusebius McKaiser a lot.

I owe Eusebius McKaiser a lot. I owe him an incalculable debt that I can never repay. There is a period of my life that it is still too traumatic for me to write about in full - maybe it always will be. It was a three-and-a-half year stretch from the end of my time at university to the end of my time as a solicitor, a time where each new year was so painful that my only consolation every December was that the next year could not contain so much agony: and where, somehow, each year still managed to be worse than the last.  It was utterly devastating, and thankfully Eusebius was my friend through all of it. He provided a level of support, of comradeship, that was almost overwhelming in its kindness. Without him, I am not sure how I would have come through that time. I would certainly not be as happy as I am today.

I should explain. My early twenties were a source of almost continuous horror, because that is the moment when I was dealing with the realisation that I was bisexual, and was struggling to imagine what kind of life I would now have. Uganda, the country of my heritage, has some of the most repressive anti-homosexuality legislation on the the planet, and as I write this their new and particularly hateful anti-gay law is only two days old. I was very lucky, then, that I had just befriended Eusebius, who was at university with me and who was grappling with similar issues. A gay man, he had been accepted as one of our institution’s leading scholars, and was an astonishing intellectual talent. It was no surprise to me that he would go on to become a world debating champion, and to host one of South Africa’s leading radio shows. He was an elite writer, talker and thinker. 

Most of all, though, he was someone in whom you could confide, and in whose company you could always find comfort. Because, make no mistake, we were both terrified of the future that lay ahead of us. We had come to university as respected members of our communities and were now afraid - not without reason - that we might now be outcasts. We spoke for hours about everything - our hopes, our anxieties, what we wanted to achieve in the world, who and how we wanted to love. I will never forget the strength that I drew from those conversations. Through him, with him, I found a new sense of pride and purpose. It is bewildering to know that he is now gone.

He is - he was - just forty-five years old. He died having enjoyed a wonderful partnership of many years with Nduduzo Nyanda. He had one of the toughest paths imaginable in this life, and yet he walked it with so much dignity. I don’t know how he did it, and I think I am writing this not only for selfish reasons - because he was dear to me, and has left us - but also because I want everyone who was familiar with his exceptional work to understand that, for all his brilliance as a professional, he was somehow an even better human being. An extraordinary force for good has left the world, a soul so potent that when he passed I am sure the planet shifted a little on its axis. To paraphrase that poem by the legendary Maya Angelou, a great tree has fallen. To close, I should also quote the end of her poem:

when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly. Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed. They existed.

We can be. Be and be

better. For they existed. 

[okwonga]

How to save the world.

The other day I read the news that the Ugandan president had called on Africa to save the world from homosexuality, and I thought: that's interesting. I thought this because if the world is under threat from anything right now, homosexuality is not on the list. But of course the president knows that. He also knows it's easier talking about that than about the huge social inequalities in Ugandan society, many of which have emerged under his watch - and it's not as if he has not had plenty of time to do something about that, he has been in power since 1986. 

I wasn’t going to write about the Ugandan president - mainly because I didn’t have anything new to say, there’s nothing new about his lethal levels of hatred for gay people or about the evangelical Christian movement pumping even more hatred of gay people into Africa - but then I thought, you’re being too calm about this. I am not calm because I don’t care but because I have come not to expect anything more from this area of my life, and I think that’s bad for me, in the end. I don’t think it is good to be numb to a country where I still have loved ones, a country my family comes from, a country where to identify as queer can carry a life sentence and to act upon that identity can result in a death sentence.

Here is the thing about being bisexual, which is how I identify: I have made a life in spite of the hatred for people like me. I came out when I was twenty-two, having just navigated some pretty grim racism in my hometown and at school but still having come out victorious. My life was going very well, and coming out shattered everything. It was such a brutal experience that I still can’t fully write about it in proper detail. That five-year period - from the age of twenty-two to the age of twenty-seven, when I found a measure of self-acceptance - was absolutely harrowing and I nearly didn’t survive it. And I was never harassed by gay or bisexual men, never attacked or assaulted by them. All of the horror came from heterosexuality - from its rules, its expectations, its disappointment, its loathing. The most painful thing I was ever told during that time was that it would have been better if I had never achieved anything academically or professionally, so long as I could have been heterosexual. That family member and I are now permanently estranged. It is sentiments like this which almost killed me, and I wonder how many black men those sentiments are still killing as I type this.

You know how, as a freelancer, you kind of get taxed twice? As in, not only do you get taxed for last year’s tax, but you also get asked to pay some of next year’s tax in advance? Well, being bisexual is a bit like being a freelancer: in social terms, you get often taxed twice. You get a lot of the hatred for being homosexual and you also get the suspicion that you’re in denial about being homosexual - a dilemma so wild that I have occasionally joked, with varying degrees of success, that if people don’t believe I am who I say that I am then I can ask most of my exes to provide references. (At time of writing, the other exes cannot be reached for comment.) 

This week, as I think about some of the hatred I receive for being homosexual, I think: if only people knew, or cared, about the reality of the existence of people like me. Because they don’t care, not really. They are too busy trying to make us into demons to distract themselves from the miseries of their own lives. Meanwhile I look at the life I have somehow made for myself, and I think how emotionally exhausting it has been to get here. I am fully aware that I am not the child that my family expected, that I am not the man my culture or community expected, and that is a knowledge that for a long time has placed me in a kind of spiritual exile. As I have made more of a success of my unexpected life, that exile has only become more intense, because I sometimes sense an embarrassment that the malfunctioning human has actually turned out to be quite functional. 

I find it almost impossible to write about my mid-twenties and I find it almost as hard to write about Uganda. It feels like revisiting one of my most painful relationships, one of my most devastating breakups: those ones where your heart is still smeared across the walls of that restaurant where it happened. Emotionally, I can’t go there: but that is a privilege, because millions of queer Ugandans wake up every morning in their own country and have no choice but to go there. So I will write about it properly one day. For now, though, I want to close by reminding myself queer pride is about. It is looking in the mirror each month, sometimes each morning, and saying, there aren’t many roadmaps ahead for the day that I am going to have, but I am going to make something good of it. Something that I can maybe even remember fondly, even if much of my generation still looks at me with bewilderment or hostility. This is how I save my world.

[okwonga]

Living in two Europes.

There are two Europes and every morning I wake up in both of them.  The first Europe is the Europe in which I give another reading in my slowly-but-steadily-returning German, in which I meet a friend for afternoon meal after recording another joyous podcast, in which I sample the latest flavour of soup at one of my favourite cafes. That's an innocent continent, where I sit in bars with dear friends till well after dark, exchanging successful and disastrous tales of dating alike with honesty and hilarity. 

The second Europe is the Europe in which I attend a protest where the speakers read out the names of those murdered by the German far-right in just the last thirty years, a list so extensive that it takes well over ten minutes to complete; this is the Europe in which a plan to meet with refugee accommodation is met with hundreds of angry right-wing voters taking to the streets and whose local mayor must be put under extra protection, where I look at a train timetable on my way to another city and the first thing I think is that so many of these towns are famous for being places where people were killed for looking like me, kicked to death while walking home or burned alive in their prison cells. This is the Europe on whose shores dozens of people wash up dead overnight, whose leaders do nothing with their abundant resources to rescue them, the Europe which blames African nations for corruption but at the same time happily banks all of their money. I can hardly bear the second Europe and wherever possible I escape into the first. The truly strong among us are those who live in the second Europe every single day. I envy their strength even as I am terrified by the scale of their struggle, even as I fear on days like today that the second Europe is rapidly devouring the first. 

Days like today, when I sit with that friend during that afternoon meal and say, this fascism is everywhere; when I look at the list of places in this continent just fifteen years ago, just ten, where I would happily travel, and now think that such a destination is out of the question; where the presence of Ukrainians at the local bus terminal remind us that if we catch the right coach we can find ourselves under missile fire. Countless of us, but not enough of us, are trying to ensure that we will not all one day be citizens of the second Europe: others far braver than me are, unlike me, doing everything they can. I only hope that, collectively, we are doing enough. 

[okwonga]

Perfect World, a poem.

Blades of grass stab weakly at my ankles;

Thankful for the angle of my cap, 

Which catches some of this sun’s scornful rays

I make my way through these famous ancient acres

This London park’s called Regents

And within its abundant regions I wander

As the recent achievements of Mankind wander across my mind;

Half-blinded by the skyline’s angry light,

Forward I shuffle, scuffed shoes shovelling gravel,

Leaving small quarries of stone behind me;

I’m not the only man stumbling blindly

A father sights me, hides his son from walking near me -

His fear is the one thing I see clearly -

As I pass, I see him watch me closely,

Wide eyes of his fixed upon my goatee:

See, he thinks that I’m Islamic

So he’s panicking: so be it:

See, it’s now the Muslim’s turn 

To bear the burden of urgent stop-searches;

Not since Salman Rushdie’s Verses

Have they seen such media circus,

Have they suffered muttered curses,

Made grown men utterly nervous

Each time they see girls in burqas;

Burger wrappers dance around my toes,

Discarded in these gardens which are in bloom far too soon -

Now summer starts in March, not June -

Due to the globe’s slowly growing warmth

The sun’s a blowtorch, scorching orchards,

Heatwaves causing water’s shortage,

Temperatures rising fast and high

As the price of a Hackney mortgage;

See, our use of oil’s not cautious;

We’ve used it in planes, trains, Porsches,

Making Greenpeace members nauseous

But now we’ve stormed Nature’s fortress

One too many times, and now the signs are that the climate’s changing 

At amazing rates; it’s so impatient now,

The climate’s so high-maintenance now;

Walking down this park’s parched path

Whose surface, hot as blazing hearth,

Simmers away beneath my feet

I meet a man selling hard, wholeheartedly;

See, his job is selling God;

He yells at us, telling us not to sin

Since sinners are incinerated in a hotter place than this,

An offer I can’t miss, he says, pointing at me:

And so I stop and talk to him

As most walk by and gawp at him;

He tells me this world tortures him,

That he’d been made an orphan in his teens 

And now his only father is the Lord, who rules us all

But still the Devil screws us all -

I say “Well, yes. That’s usual” - 

He asks: “Are you religious?”

I say: “I was, but then I checked the figures;

Realised life’s equations were blatantly imbalanced,

Favouring Caucasians from wealthy nations,

So I packed away my Bible,

And all its eye-for-an-eyeful,

Tooth-for-a-tooth, and truthfully

I haven’t read it since” -

He sees that I can’t be convinced 

And lets me walk on; honestly 

I envy men like this; you see

They all live somewhat blissfully,

Believing there’s a perfect world beyond this messy globe we live upon;

But still my optimism isn’t gone,

Because just now I’ve seen

A van that sells perfect ice-cream

Which I’ll buy, sit down on this bench

Just inside this park’s perfect fence

And spend some perfect moments hence.

[okwonga]

“We Must Free Our Imaginations.”

Here is the text of a short address I gave at the start of an evening of tribute to the late Binyavanga Wainaina, one of the greatest literary voices of our generation. The event, at Berlin’s HAU Theatre on 27.09.2020, was part of a programme called “Radical Mutations: On The Ruins of Rising Suns.”

----

This is a very special weekend. Long before it was chosen to pay tribute to Binyavanga, it was a weekend reserved for dreamers, for bringing unimaginable good into reality. Yesterday would have been the 88th birthday of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, one of the architects of the destruction of apartheid. Yesterday was also the United Nations’ International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Yesterday was also the first day of the rest of my life.

Like my father, Binyavanga was a revolutionary. Like Binyavanga, my father died in his fifth decade, far before his time, long before his best work was to be done. Like Binyavanga, he was born in East Africa: in the neighbouring Uganda which is so present in much of Binyavanga’s brilliant memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place. He fled his country from Idi Amin, a man who was too often mocked by those who should have been busy trying to stop him, a man who ended up feeding his enemies to crocodiles. He was killed at the age of forty years and three hundred and forty seven days, and I have been counting down to yesterday for most of my adult life. 

If anyone understood the importance of imagination, it was Binyavanga. He had the guts to be openly and happily homosexual in his home country, and to be openly and happily queer for many of us is to escape the gravitational pull of centuries of oppression. Many of us have had to tear ourselves free from friends, from family, and most of all from ourselves. To accept oneself as homosexual is often an act of spiritual resilience which, above all, requires imagination. It is the bravery to dream of a better world, even as every voice in your life and every cell in your body tells to resist who you are, tells you that you should not exist. Beyond the magnificence of his prose, which skipped off the page like free jazz, Binyavinga had that bravery. 

If anyone understood the importance of imagination, it was my father, Lieutenant Colonel Wilson Okwonga. He was killed in an attempt to resist the insurgency of Uganda’s current president, Yoweri Museveni. He was killed in that conflict because he was able to imagine a world where, if he lost that conflict, hundreds of thousands of people from his region would be slaughtered in revenge. Tragically, he was correct. 

If anyone is just beginning to understand the importance of imagination, it is me. On Friday, my life as I knew it came to an end. That is when I reached the age of forty years and three hundred and forty-seven days, the same age as my father. No man from my bloodline has made it this far in over eighty years. I never had the guts to imagine what would come after this moment; I was too busy trying to get here. And now I am standing at the edge of a ten- thousand-foot cliff, ready to sky-dive down through the clouds. This weekend my new life began. It is mine now and so are all of the dreams that come with it. Those dreams are now my responsibility, and I will guard them as fiercely as I guard anything in this world.

We must imagine, every one of us in this audience. We must be vigilant enough to imagine the threat of what is coming. We must not be like those public figures in Uganda who scoffed and giggled as they dismissed the rising threat of Idi Amin. We must not be like those public figures in America who laughed when it was suggested that Donald Trump was a threat to American democracy. We must not be like those public figures in the United Kingdom who, even now, still sneer when it is suggested that the current British government is acting entirely in its own interests. We must not be guilty of a failure of imagination. We must understand the full extent of what it is that they intend to do. We must free our imaginations. Not because it is fun, but because our futures depend upon it.

Yet we must be especially brave in our dreams, because it is far harder to envisage love than it is to envisage horror. Against the frightening backdrop of our current social, political and ecological moment, we must still somehow find a vision of joy. It is vital to resist. It is yet more vital to insist upon a better future for all of us. Last night I was reading the Twitter feed of Mariame Kaba, the African-American prison abolitionist, as she shared her thoughts on the upcoming American election. “These two political parties act as constraints on so much of people's imaginations”, she wrote. “That's the thing that I just hate the most. Your desires for something better are being shrunken every single minute...I feel continuously sad and furious about the deliberate suffocation of people's aspirations”, continued Kaba. “People who constantly scream about *realism* and try to foreclose even *THINKING* about something else, something different than the current order. This suffocation is spirit-murder.” 

We should not merely vote for those people who uphold the basic principles of democracy. In our daily lives, we must demand the unimaginable. In The Black Jacobins, his exceptional history of the Haitian Revolution, CLR James wrote that “slavery seemed eternal”: but thanks to the vision of countless enslaved people, slavery ended. There must have been a time when apartheid seemed eternal, but then the concept was introduced to Winnie Mandela. We are now at a point in human history where our civilisation faces the twin threats of fascism and ecological collapse: where, one by one, it can seem as if the lights of resistance are quietly being snuffed out.

It is at such times that I turn to the words of Benjamin Ferencz. Ferencz, at the age of 27, became a lead prosecutor at Nuremburg, overseeing the trial of men responsible for the murders of over one million Jewish people. Over one million human beings. Ferencz, who is himself Jewish, is the last surviving prosecutor of those trials, and he is now a hundred years old. In a recent interview, he spoke of the importance of imagination. “People get discouraged”, he said. “They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged." When he was reminded that genocides are still happening, even as we speak, he nodded. And then he also pointed out that, thanks to all those dreamers out there, there have been vast advances in his own lifetime for women, for queer people. “We’re on a roll”, he said, interrupting his interviewer. “We’re marching forwards.” 

Somehow, we must be able to imagine the most thrilling of futures: to imagine love, imagine peace, imagine happiness. Binyavanga wrote that “working in a creative field, I have to use all the resources I have”: and I think that is what we should all begin or continue to do. Today is the first weekend of the rest of my life, and it is the first weekend of the rest of yours. In order to pay tribute to Binyavanga, let’s get to work. 

[okwonga]

“How To Get Respect, Should You Die In The Public Eye.”

Don’t be Syrian,

Don’t be a working-class black teen;

Be a middle-class kid, preferably white, from a two-parent home.

Don’t live within reach of a drone.

Don’t be pictured with a joint while alive,

Don’t let your fingers be seen anywhere near a gang sign.

Don’t date a man who hates you with all the breath in his breast

Since, when he eventually kills you, they’ll just say

“You should have left”.

(On which note,

Don’t die at the hands of a male celebrity –

that never ends well.)

Don’t be Syrian –

you heard us the first time.

If you’re Syrian,

Your problem is that you may die in a conflict too complex for people to understand,

Or so monotonous in its gore

That they’ll merely throw up their hands.

Don’t die a dull Third World death,

Failed by healthcare,

In a land where diarrhoea is lethal as Ebola.

Don’t die a death that fascinates people,

Or your existence will be chopped up and podcasted,

Fed back to us as pop culture.

Don’t die a death where we risk getting distracted

By the fact your suspected killers

Are particularly attractive.

When you die,

Make sure we can relate to you.

Do some charity or some public service.

We’re busy. We need to know quickly

That you weren’t worthless.

If you don’t die how we like

Then you’ll be killed twice:

The first time, when you lose your life

And the second time, when the world destroys your memory as well –

You see, our affections abandon nothing more swiftly

Than a story that’s not easy to tell.

[okwonga]

For #Gamergate, a message: "Invisible Men."

Dear invisible men,

Who tweet women endless threats of rape, Who are you? Are you married fathers of two? Are you teens crowded round a friend’s phone in a canteen or KFC? Are you pausing between texting your first love, To set yourself up as an egg, And post fresh hate? Where are you as you type this? Is your girlfriend asleep in your arms, As you peer over her shoulder at your phone? How did this become your sport? You are not proud of what you do; If you were, you would not care who knew. This is strange: You loudly announce pride in your prejudice But your invisibility suggests your shame. There is such an anger in you That it cannot be cloaked with jokes. I pity the mirror that has to reflect your misery, Since it must see so much. Because the women are everywhere now, Aren’t they? They weren’t just content in your beds, Now they’re not just in your clubs, Or in the eyes and hearts of other men; The women are in your classrooms, boardrooms and DJ booths, They are obstructing you, or ignoring you, Not needing you to improve. Swiftly, they are sweeping you from every stage, And the only place you feel safe Is in one-hundred and forty characters of rage. I doubt that, as you type, you will ever pause To think that, while you promise terror, The greatest fear is yours.

[okwonga]

On David Starkey and the misuse of Question Time.

I wasn't going to write about David Starkey's appearance on BBC Question Time but I'd just thought I'd put down something very quick.

I debated against David Starkey once. Two things struck me about him. The first was how ill-prepared he was - we were debating the nature of Britishness, yet his knowledge of several areas of this country's history was very, very thin. The second was how much of an act it all was.  The person who was sneering and boorish during debate was scrupulously courteous afterwards, even gentle.

There was something ultimately a little depressing and even demeaning about our debate, almost made worse by his demeanour afterwards.  I felt as though the whole thing had ultimately been a pantomime in which I was unwittingly complicit.

There are so many conservative commentators - principled, smart, engaging - who actually do their homework, who are truly committed to improving Britain and aren't just chasing the next soundbite - and David Starkey keeps taking up their panel space. It means that we can't have serious adult conversations about the things that truly matter because everyone is just waiting to see what awful thing Starkey will say next.

BBC Question Time is potentially a very good platform and the UK doesn't have time to waste. There are pretty severe societal, economic and ecological threats not too far in the future, and it would be great if we could spend this premium airtime having some in-depth adult conversations that really help us to make some progress. Instead of this, though, we get the Starkey Show, which gives us nothing but a further hour of frustration.

[okwonga]

Why Game of Thrones reminds me of climate change

I love Game of Thrones.  I love Game of Thrones even more now that I am re-watching it, which I began to do this Christmas. I love re-watching it because now I can brace myself for the horror that I know is coming. Now I can actually enjoy the story’s development and make peace with the demise of my favourite characters several episodes before they are bludgeoned, throttled or eviscerated.  Yes, it’s pathetic, but I can mourn Ygritte days before she dies.  I can say goodbye to the Red Viper.  I can console myself that, hey, the Starks really did have it coming, they were just never cunning enough to make it out of there with their throats intact.  But, above all else, I am realising that Game of Thrones reminds me of climate change.

The underlying premise of Game of Thrones is that, whilst the humans fight amongst themselves in alliances of increasingly bewildering complexity, they collectively face a threat so terrifying that most people are in denial about it.  Whilst the various kingdoms hack and claw away at each other, they neglect the reports of approaching dragons and White Walkers, refusing to believe that they might one day be consumed by fire or ice.  Dragons, after all, have not been seen for centuries, and White Walkers have long since passed into the realm beyond myth. Those who first warn of the resurgence of either are dismissed as lunatics: one of them is even beheaded.  The reality is either too numbing or too fantastical to be accepted.

Thankfully, the fate of the first people to flag up climate change as an existential threat was not quite as grisly.  However, those researchers and their successors have attracted a certain degree of ridicule.  Now, though, their work is receiving depressing vindication.  Today, I read an article in The Guardian, entitled “Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists”. In the words of one of the bearers of bad news, Professor Will Steffen:

“It’s fairly safe to say that we haven’t seen conditions in the past similar to ones we see today and there is strong evidence that there [are] tipping points we don’t want to cross..If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5-6C warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so and that won’t be good for large mammals like us. People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us."

He continued:

“Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem...It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive.  History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

Back in 2008, when I first became truly aware of the danger posed by climate change, there was a period where I read every paper and watched every video on the issue that I could find.  I attended a couple of conferences, and found the science so frightening in its implications that I remember sitting there and writing, during a particularly startling speech, “it feels like the autumn of the world”.  

Just as in Game of Thrones, it now seems that winter is coming.  I remember howling about environmental degradation to anyone who would listen, and performing a poem, ‘The Creep’, that really only seemed to shock people further.  I have never felt so impotent as I did then, as I tried to network with scientists and politicians, trying to nudge those wealthy philanthropists whom I had encountered in my work to embrace the issue.  And I felt that I had failed, that I could not convey the urgency of what I was reading and seeing.  And so, like a Game of Thrones episode that was just too gut-wrenching to watch, I found some way to tune out my fears of climate change, to change the channel.

And here we are, in 2014, with the environmental outlook increasingly bleak.  Unlike Game of Thrones, though, this will eventually be a screen whose unsettling images none of us can look away from.

[okwonga]

"Searching for Walter Tull"

Last December, as part of an event held by Philosophy Football to mark the role that football played during the Christmas truce in World War One, I performed the poem below.  “Searching for Walter Tull”, which I was commissioned to write for that event, reflects on the life of one of the first black professional footballers in the UK, and the first black man in the British Army ever to lead his white peers into battle. As the day of my reading drew closer, I found myself more and more moved by his story, and the reality that the best and the bravest of human beings too rarely get the lives that they deserve. The title of this piece refers to the fact that his body was never found; but, despite that, he still left a remarkable legacy behind.

————

“Searching for Walter Tull”

Walter Tull.

His life was the ink that stands out on history’s page.

The orphan, this mixed-race grandson of a slave,

The footballer slow in stride but swift of thought,

The soldier who survived the Somme

But who died in World War One’s injury time.

A few weeks from the end of that churning conflict,

In no-man’s land, as he was leading a charge,

Life handed him the red card.

Months earlier, in Italy, he had been the maker of history,

Going where no person of colour or Negro had been allowed to go before,

A black officer leading his white peers into the hungry mouth of War.

So loved was he by his men, that they risked their lives to recover his body after his death.

But Walter Tull‘s slumbering form was never found;

And, a century after his death, we are still looking for him now.

Known for his calm when the world was aflame,

We need his memory at this time

When the humanity of Britain’s immigrants is being so furiously denied.

So sleep well, Walter Tull, and we’ll do what it takes

To ensure that, to your story,

The world remains awake.

[okwonga]

What do President Goodluck Jonathan and the Global Media have in common?

What do President Goodluck Jonathan and the Global Media have in common?

by Samantha Asumadu Follow @honestlyAbroad

I’ve been following the murderous exploits of Boko Haram , alongside Somalia’s Al-Shabaab for a number of years. I once tried to weigh them up, compare and contrast these two entities causing havoc throughout the regions in which they exist. Initially, bear with me here, I could comprehend the root causes of why Al-Shabaab began even having been in…

[okwonga]

Free speech is expensive.  It’s time to pay for it

Like many people in Europe this week, I was numbed by the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris and the subsequent murder of Jews, and then horrified at the latest rounds of bloodletting by Boko Haram in Nigeria.  The atrocities committed by both sets of extremists were, in a sense, acts of storytelling. They were attempts to tell the story of the supremacy of their ideology, and they were tales written in fear and blood.  Much has been expressed this week about the value of free speech, of having the courage to pose critiques of potentially lethal enemies: and I have begun to reflect again on just how expensive free speech actually is.

Most obviously, free speech can cost lives.  Journalists have had a particularly dangerous few years, with 1109 killed worldwide since 1992.  Many of them work under extraordinary pressure, and against extraordinary odds.  They are dying due to their desire to make vital revelations, so that fresh horrors by Al-Qaeda, ISIS and so on remain forever unscripted.  Less starkly, free speech costs money.  Even in those societies whose citizens are allowed to say largely whatever they like, the largest media platforms go most consistently to those who have the deepest pockets.  Press barons with a fleet of newspapers can pontificate either via their outlets’ headlines or on social media, secure in the fact that they have by far the biggest audience.  It is all very well having free speech, but it’s not so useful when you are talking without amplification and the other person has a megaphone. (Especially when, it must be said, they are such consistent engines of misinformation as Fox News.)

What, then, can be done?  Perhaps it is time for us to begin treating investigative journalism, one of our surest means of speaking truth to power, as seriously as we would any charitable cause.  The good health of this field, I think, is essential to a thriving civil society.  I was startled to receive an email at the start of this year from Mother Jones, an excellent nonprofit news organisation based in the USA, asking urgently for donations. That an outlet of their calibre, home to several scoops and with almost 500,000 followers on Twitter, should be struggling so much financially was something that worried me greatly.  It made me worry about all the stories that are going untold, due to a lack of networks and resources, in places like West Papua and the Central African Republic, where the world’s pens and cameras do not find it fashionable to linger too long.

If there is to be any positive legacy from the last week’s atrocities in Nigeria and France, I would like it to include a surge in funding towards journalists covering those areas of the world where free speech is under the greatest threat.  Where should this money come from?  Well, members of the public can help.  I actually think that much more could be done by those companies who pride themselves on providing a wider social benefit: companies, for example, working in the fields of clean energy.  I also believe that private donors have a role to play.  In my more idealistic moments, which are frequent, I imagine a group of a few dozen people - those, say, who’ve tech fortunes, and those who’ve inherited wealth - pooling their resources, and putting together an endowment of a couple of hundred million pounds.  That endowment would then be carefully managed, and then a group of journalists would be paid their salaries out of the interest earned on that endowment. Journalists could also be given fixed-term grants to work on a single story in depth.

Of course, there are already organisations with a similar kind of structure, and so it makes most immediate sense to seek them out, and see whether they need further financial assistance.  The ones I have found most useful, in my last couple of years of internet use, have been the aforementioned Mother Jones, Global Voices, Writers of Colour, Open Democracy, and Democracy Now. I hope that one day at least one of their names might be as readily on most people’s lips as, say, that of a large aid organisation.  Whilst I acknowledge the boundless optimism of this wish, I should only add that this is precisely what dreams are for.