It is Saturday, the 18th of July.
Jazz FM is playing tracks from “Sledge Sings Simone”, a just-released reworking of Nina Simone’s biggest songs.
I am trying to keep the sadness at bay, trying to enjoy the ongoing table tennis game.
It is a sad day for “Our People”, because John Lewis died yesterday.
He was eighty years old.
Debbie Sledge is singing “Four Women”
“My skin is black…my arms are long…
What do they call me…My name is Anserra…
My skin is yellow…my hair is yellow…Between two worlds…
My father was rich and white… he forced my mother late one night…
My name is Tuphonia…
My skin is tan…my hair is fine…
My hips invite you…
Whose girl am I…yours if you have money to buy…
What do they call me…My name is ‘Sweet Thing…”
My skin is brown…my manner is hot…I’ll kill the first mother*** ****I see…
My life has been rough…because my parents were slaves…
What do they call me…my name is Peaches…
Debbie Sledge has taken the liberty to add a fifth “WOMAN” to Simone’s song.
“My skin is black…my passion is strong…
my music tells another story as I sing my song…
The story of my people…
So that everyman can see as I sing my song that everyman has the right live free…
What do they call me…my name is Nina…”
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No race is ever at peace in diaspora without a Homeland they can proudly point at. Nigeria, the biggest black nation on earth, was always going to be the Black Homeland. But Nigeria is suffering from pre-installed structural flaws, and a primordial conflict in which unlettered herdsmen, living in the Dark Ages, believe they own the nation and are ready to kill for it
The “Nina” in the song is a metaphor for all the African women – and men, who poured out onto the streets of America and Europe in the past few weeks flying the banner of “Black Lives Matter”. They have “taken a knee”. They have toppled monuments. They have faced arrest.
The real Nina, the dark-voiced diva, long since dead, regularly reduced grown men to tears with the lyrics of such songs as “Why?” – which graphically captured the pathos of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Before his death yesterday, John Lewis, Member of Congress, joined the Mayor of Washington to pose for pictures where the yellow letters “BLACK LIVES MATTER” are painted on the road leading to the White House.
A documentary on his life, titled “John Lewis: Good Trouble” premiered a few weeks ago, at the height of the worldwide ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests. A high point of that life occurred in 2011, when he visited the White House to receive the nation’s highest civilian honour – the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from Barack Obama, the first black President. Obama, at his inauguration two years earlier, had hugged the older man and told him, “I am only here because of the sacrifices you made”.
He was a twenty-year-old student activist when he was arrested by police in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1960, at a sit-in protest in support of black students who sat down at “whites-only” lunch counters.
“If it hadn’t been for Nashville, I would not be the person I am now,” he would say later.
John Lewis became the youngest, and up till yesterday the only surviving member of the “Big Six” leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in America, the others being Martin Luther King Junior, James Farmer, Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.
At only twenty-three years old, he helped organise the March on Washington that has since gone into the annals of American History.
He would be in front of the “Bloody Sunday” march that crossed the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. State troopers attacked demonstrators with tear gas and billy clubs. Lewis’ skull was broken. It was all captured on national television. America was so appalled by the images of its own barbarity that the Voting Rights Act was subsequently passed.
“My greatest fear” Lewis would say recently, “is that one day we may wake up and our Democracy is gone”.
The Black Lives Matter protests offered him reassurance in his last days that that was not about to happen.
But the next stage of the struggle of “Our People” is infinitely more complex than the one led by John Lewis and the Big Six. It requires strategic leadership and a firm grip, so the struggle is not “hijacked”. Is “Black Lives Matter” the same as “Black Lives and Trans Matter”? The Big Six are all dead. Who will lead and chart the course, so that the cause is not railroaded into unrelated causes by powerful “sympathizers”, such as Ellen DeGeneres?
Is support for “Black Lives” the same as support for LGBTQ? Is the argument for Black Responsibility and the need to face down drug-dealing criminal gangs in black neighbourhoods and cut black-on-black gun violence in Chicago fundamentally irreconcilable with “Get Your Knee Off My Back” and the call for Reparations for four hundred years of black suffering? Can “Our People” build a “Big Tent” that will help them to see off the nuisance of a historically minor irritation such as Donald Trump? Or will they be stuck in a rut because they have failed to define their boundaries and unify their ‘left’ and “right”?
Black achievers of the past had a secret. They kept themselves mentally strong in the face of horrible racial prejudice by repeating the mantra “Not a jot of my self-esteem depends on your acceptance of me”.
No race is ever at peace in diaspora without a Homeland they can proudly point at. Nigeria, the biggest black nation on earth, was always going to be the Black Homeland. But Nigeria is suffering from pre-installed structural flaws, and a primordial conflict in which unlettered herdsmen, living in the Dark Ages, believe they own the nation and are ready to kill for it. Nigeria will come to rights someday, perhaps. But until then “Our People” are on their own.
I try to clear these matters off my mind and concentrate on the table tennis. My opponent heaves a mighty loop to the backhand. I can only watch the ball fly past. The game is not going well.
