Butterfly Magazine - Issue 46 - 9th July 2021

A Black Adoptee Speaks

The Harder They Fall

Vol. 2 Issue 46, 9th – 15th July 2021

Professor

William ‘Lez’ in conjunction with

Henry

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From the

Jamaica Wants Slavery Reparations From the Queen

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Story

Professor

William ‘Lez’

Henry’

The MA Global Black Studies, Decolonisation, and Social Justice.

(Part One)

BM: Professor William’ Lez’ Henry has created, along with his colleagues from the University of West London, an MA in Global Black Studies, Decolonisation and Social Justice. How did it come about?

WH: Greetings, everyone. My name is Professor William Lez Henry, also known as Lezlee Lyrix original mic man, dan’, just in case you don’t know. The idea for the MA has been floating around in my head for probably over a decade. I say that because I know I discussed it in your wonderful Butterfly Magazine last year when explaining that I didn’t have a great experience at school. I got expelled at 15, with no qualifications. I got expelled from college at 16, with no qualifications. My twin brother didn’t! I have to own that, but more importantly, I was kind of rescued/salvaged in 1972 by doing Black studies Moonshot Youth Club, New Cross. I’ve always had an interest in counter cultures, African diasporic cultures from our perspective.

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By Beverley Cooper-Chambers

The idea of Black studies always resonated with me because that’s what introduced me to myself as a person of African ancestry. It’s always sustained me. People say I am self-educated. I don’t know what that means. I don’t believe that. We’re products of our environment. What I will say is for most of my life, before this academic life, I was a tradesman. I did industrial pipe fitting, plumbing and central heating, so I always had disposable income, and I used to buy books. Funnily enough when I got expelled from school I used to live between Forest Hill, Crofton Park, and Lewisham libraries.

I’ve always been interested in African history and so-called Black history and world history, global history. I refused to accept that White people were the only movers and shakers from when I was at school.

I got expelled from school because of my mental withdrawal from what I was being taught, especially when I started to learn Black History studies at Moonshot Club in New Cross. So, at school, they were telling us about the ancient Egyptians using examples of actors like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on TV in Cleopatra or suchlike. But at Moonshot, they introduced us to Pharaohs who looked like us; Kings and Queens, literally who looked like us, and not just from ancient Egypt, from across Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, so-called West Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, kingdoms of Mali, and Songhai. We were getting exposed.

So obviously, I’m going into school, and one of my teachers is talking one thing, and I’m saying to them, but hold on a second what about this.

It’s interesting because I have sympathy for them because they didn’t know what they taught was perhaps what they had learned which was false.

However, many of our teachers were racist, and at that moment, it was intended to control not just Black children but White children too. It was a class-based dynamic as many of our teachers were ex-army. I started school in 1962, so we’re only talking 17 years after the war. They intended to control as most were bastions and supporters of the British Empire. So, at age 11, I’d say to my teachers, “so, are you telling me I’m the only Black person who can think?” It used to bother me. I’ve always been interested in what we do and what we bring to the table. Before I knew what a degree was in sociology or anthropology, I was ‘Lezlee Lyrix’ on various Sound Systems; an educator spreading Black history. If people are familiar with me from 1982 when I first started chatting on Saxon, Ghettotone, Frontline and Diamonds The Girls Best Friend, people will know that 90% of what I chat about is exactly the same as what I write about today. And in fact, yesterday I found a video of an old track of mine called the ‘Time’, which I did with the wonderful producer Simon Harris when I was with ‘Music of Life - Living Beat Records’ and shared it on Twitter.

Some of the comments that came back were, “you’ve always been conscious Lez.” This was from a 1990 performance on Channel 4’s ‘DanceDaze’

Simon Harris and Leslie Lyrix – Time Live On Dance Daze (Channel 4 1990)

music programme I did with this sister called Cheryl who sang with me at the time, who was my little sister June’s, peace be upon her, best friend. And I was looking at this performance and thought it wasn’t too bad as I don’t like to revisit a lot of what I’ve done, produced, written etc. And it’s not some kind of; whatever it is. I just, in fact, Chinua Achebe our wonderful ancestor summed it up when he more or less said, an aspect of Igbo culture is you don’t just claim everything as totally your own work, which makes perfect sense to me because there are no self-generated people.

We’re products of what we know. What we produce is based on what we’ve been taught, and what we’ve been encouraged in, et cetera. So, to me, when I’ve done that piece of work, it’s done, move on. It’s not false modesty. It’s literally that.

But I remembered this track yesterday, and people were feeding back to me. So, I watched it, all of it, and I thought to myself, I’ve never changed, which is why often, when I have these kinds of conversations, I talk about my post degree self and my pre-degree self because there are similarities and parallels there. My thinking, my pride, and my indomitable spirit as an African person have just moved from my lyricism into what I write as an academic. So, one of the crucial differences about this MA is going to be the fact that we, myself and you, and those of us in the UK, are going to be prominent; we’re going to be visible. And what I mean by that is no disrespect to my African-American brothers and sisters, but there’s a collapsing and a conflation of Black history as African-American history.

You go into schools in the UK during Black History Month (BHM). It’s dominated by African American representation and iconography. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we also have a story that needs to be not just told, but utilised to create more inclusive Black studies, which is why we’ve called ours Global Black Studies. It’s not just a Masters that you can do full-time and part-time. It’s also got continuous professional development factored in. This is one reason I was adamant that this course is Global Black studies, Decolonisation, and Social Justice. Those are three crucial parts that, as people of African ancestry, we need to strive towards. And I’m not talking about pandering to anyone for acceptance or begging anyone for crumbs off their table. This is our table, so we’ll feast on what we feel like on it.

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Have you noticed that while Africa is rising, the Caribbean gets left out; it’s always at the bottom?

Absolutely. And we’re going to readdress that imbalance because the point that I’m making is this. We know that there are more brothers and sisters from the African continent than there are from the African Caribbean community in the UK, we know that. And that has happened since probably the late ‘80s, ‘90s, whatever, fine.

However, one of my major concerns with the collapsing into the African American experience is the brothers and sisters from the Caribbean and the continent are invisible, which is important to consider. However, our stories, in some ways, are central to the African American experience. I’ll give you an example. When Molefi Kete Asante put out his book Afrocentricity, a good book, I read it and thought, I’m not in there. We’re invisible. This was me, my pre-degree self, this is Leslie Lyrix, writing, researching in reading, whatever, but it really bothered me.

One of the main reasons it bothered me is that we know that African Chattel Enslavement (ACE) is what we experienced, globally, and that is what we will call it on this course. The only time you’re going to read about something called slavery on the course is when you’re reading it in a book, but our critical point of engagement is ACE, because that is what Europeans did to us. It was not slavery because, in slavery, there are many ways to buy your way out of it. And I’m not saying it isn’t a system of human degradation, et cetera. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is what happened to us was qualitatively different. Those of us from the Caribbean, and I’ve written about this and argued it, are 100% a part of the African American experience. I’ll give you some examples.

Firstly, we know that Queen Elizabeth I and the British established the most recognizable Institutionalised chattel enslavement system to which we were subjected. We know what the other Europeans were doing; whatever they were doing, but she Institutionalised it in this sense. The British colonised the Americans with their brothers and sisters; whether they were the disenfranchised, disaffected, scum of the British streets doesn’t matter. Just like they did in Australia and other places. This becomes crucial because once the people here caught on, realising the amount of money and financial wealth they could 6 Transform your viewing...

accrue, they invested in plantations in America and invested in plantations in the Caribbean.

And one of the things that we know is the reason why you’ll have people in America called Henry, and have people in Jamaica called Henry, and people in Barbados called Henry, and Trinidad and Grenada and everywhere is because often they were owned by the same families. Secondly, the other thing that used to happen is let’s say you were a plantation owner in Virginia, and something happened and you had 100 enslaved Africans, and 30 of them “just dead so so soh”, and you needed to replace your chattels, you go to a family member or your business partner, or you’re going to go to your estates in the Caribbean to get them shipped over and vice versa. That, for me, has been deleted, and it’s pretty invisible.

The last and most crucial thing is, take away Garvey and Mary Seacole, the obvious representations of the Caribbean during BHM and see what’s left. Look at Malcolm X, Grenadian mother, look at Langston Hughes, CLR James, look at all of these people who were crucial to those systems of thought, yet often they are not in there. And we haven’t even started to speak about Claudia Jones, Sylvia Wynter, and all the wonderful people from the Caribbean, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney. We haven’t even started to think about them. And then if we shift over to the continent, where are people like Chinweizu or even my mentor peace be upon him, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe? Where’s Miriama Ba? Where are all the people we can use from South Africa like Bessie Head who wrote about being maddened by that apartheid system? On this course you’ll witness what happened to us in many places on this planet in the Americas, in Brazil, in the Caribbean.

You’ll see the same thing our Aboriginal brothers and sisters in Australia, our first nation family in the Americas, because many of them are at the forefront of the struggles against nonblack aggression.

I know this for a fact because these are the people I’ve been conversating with for years.

And the similarities are that often they know the only way they can tune into a universal voice that represents what they’re fighting is under the context of a global black experience and reggae music does that. You think about reggae, and there is no place on this planet you can go that you won’t hear reggae, nowhere.

You could go to places on this planet now and ask if they’ve heard of Madonna or Puff Daddy or 50 Cent. They often don’t have a clue who you’re talking about, but you say reggae music, Bob Marley, Rastafari and they’re going to sing a tune. And to me, that’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to broaden the horizons. We’re going to look at the indentureship system, especially in places like Trinidad and Tobago and some of the other islands, because there’s that fascinating relationship there where brothers and sisters from Asia came over to be indentured. And many people don’t know why they ended up there or why they were trapped there. And the interesting thing is one of my colleagues, Dr Tricia Tikasingh, who is Trini, is going to look at is that whole notion of indentureship. What Khal Torabully calls ‘coolitude’ because we remember Negritude was created by Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas and there are parallels there for our students to consider. This brother came up with coolitude because what he’s basically looking at is that really interesting relationship between the enslaved Africans and the Indian indentured, that is often hidden and seldom discussed, yet we know it when we come from the Caribbean. Okay. Like, let’s say so you’re from Barbados, I’m from Jamaica. That’s my parentage, and we know that many of the so-called coolies Indians are Black. In fact, some are blacker than loads of the people of African ancestry physically and consciously. Who is more African centred than Super Cat the Jamaican deejay? Now the point is we have these kinds of really interesting mixings that are not often represented, and they are not acknowledged because people create this dichotomy that you’ve got

Black. And say in Trinidad, you’ve got African, you’ve got Black what about the duglas? Some Caribbean people are of mixed African and South Asian descent.

Don’t you find that as people we start to categorise people. They’ll talk about one is small island people, another is coolie. So there is this division.

It’s really interesting because this is the salient point for me. We can have those conversations in the Caribbean. I’ve said it on record loads of times; my father would have beat us if we’d spoken about big island and small island or who is African from West Indian. He just never had that mentality.

He was one of those so-called swallow migrants who used to go to the States or wherever, as a farmer and go back to Jamaica. In fact, if it wasn’t for this thing called the MC Carran Walter Act, when America stopped 250,000 people from the Caribbean, swallow migrants who annually went up for farm work, from coming after WWII, we perhaps would not be here. That is why a lot of us ended up here. That’s why when I do my talks on Windrush, I factor that in. In fact, you know what?

I’ll take it right back to Sam Sharpe in Montego Bay and the Paul Bogle in the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. That’s why I bring it back to these events because people need to overstand and also the role of Haiti. It wasn’t coincidental that our parents ended up here with the five-year myth of return, exactly the same as what happened to our brothers and sisters from India and Pakistan because people didn’t want to stay here. Many of them knew this was a scornful mother country. So why would you want to invest your time in it?

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He said to me that he wanted to experience things when he left, and one of them was he wanted to meet someone from Barbados, because Barbados was like England. Barbados was where you sent your children to get that kind of education. You could send them to Eton, or you could send them to Barbados. They had the same standing. So often, it was brothers and sisters from Barbados, mostly brothers who were parachuted into African countries as the buffer.

And these conversations we’re having now are what we’re going to have on this degree. We’re going to look at the role of indentureship, because for instance, here’s an example. When you look at the political system now, so Hancock got dismissed. Who did they put in his place? Another Asian, there are no Black members of the senior cabinet to my knowledge. There might be one now, Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng, MP., Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.

My point is it is not coincidental that Sajid Javid, Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel, are all Asians because they were the buffer in the Caribbean and other places including China under British occupation. However, when the Indian indentured went to places in the Caribbean, just like when we came to the UK, en masse.

And we know now Africans have been here for thousands of years. But when we came here, the working class instantly had a class below them. It didn’t matter if we were bus drivers or mathematicians. That is what happened when a lot of the Indians went to the Caribbean. So as Africans, many of us looked and said, wow, people are living in even worse conditions than us. But something happened, and that state hasn’t changed and what that state is became representative of the British empire. You had White at the top; underneath White, you would have maybe the Raj Indians, Chinese, whoever else. At the bottom was us; Africans. So they use Asians as buffers, not just gatekeepers, but buffers. And that was explained to me wonderfully by my late mentor Prof Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe when he said to me as a student in Nigeria; he didn’t call it Nigeria; he was Igbo, from that part of the world, West Africa.

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Next week: Learn more about Professor Lez’s journey to create the MA in Global Black Studies, Decolonisation and Social Justice.

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