 Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Daniel Molugeta. I'm a lecturer of African politics and chair for Center for African Pan-African Studies. This is our first seminar. The Center for Pan-African Studies is a platform for interdisciplinary research on issues related to African continental politics and diaspora politics. This is also a hub for policy dialogue and public engagement. Today's event is just a demonstration of that. We are delighted to have Gary Young and Onikachi Wambu for a conversation about Gary and his book Dispatched from the diaspora from New Zealand to Black Lives Matter. So this conversation is being moderated by my colleague Dr Michal Woldu. I hand over to her. Thank you. Thank you Daniel for the introduction. My name is Dr Michal Woldu. I am one of the postdoctoral research fellow within the Center of Pan-African Studies and welcome to our first event today. We look forward to an insightful conversation. So just before we get started, in the unlikely event, there is a fire alarm. Our fire exit will be one over there and one over here. So try to make sure that you find your way out in the orderly manner. And yes, so we know for the due. Let me introduce you our speaker today. So Gary Young is an award winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a colonist at the Guardian. He is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine. The Alfred Nobel fellow for type media and winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Journalism. He has written six books, including the one that we're going to discuss today. Dispatched from the diaspora from Nassau Mandela to Black Lives Matter. The speech, the story behind Martin Luther King's dream. Who are we and should it matter in the 21st century. He has also written for the New York review of books, Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and the New Statement and made several radio and television documentary on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit. So welcome Gary. And I will discuss in today will be Onyakachere Wambu, who is Nigerian British journalist and writer. He has directed television documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and PBS. He has written widely on the African diaspora. His most recent publication is the Anthology Empire Windrush reflection on 75 years and more of the Black British experience. He's currently the director of a special project at the African Foundation for Development, also known as AFR, an international organization that aims to expand and announce the contribution the African diaspora make to African development. So with no further ado, I will give Pastor Mike to Gary and Onyakachere to lead the discussion and later we will have some time for a Q&A as well. So thank you very much for the kind introduction Mikhail and for inviting me. I'm just going to talk for about 15 minutes to tell you what is that we're going to talk about. And it is really a collection of my journalism and essays mostly but not exclusively in the Guardian from the Black diaspora. So Britain, America, Africa, Caribbean, elsewhere in Europe, wherever there are Black people basically. But I spent 12 years as US correspondent for the Guardian in America and mostly the rest of the time here but did quite a lot of work in Africa and the Caribbean. I want to start with the category because it was the category that I was warned off of when I started journalism. I was basically told by senior colleagues who were also white colleagues, they were mostly the only senior colleagues who were around either that I should never write about race because I would be quote-unquote pigeonholed. You will be seen as a Black journalist which I would answer I am a Black journalist. Or I would be told you can only write about race. The first column I did for the Guardian was about Bosnia and it was spiked because the editor of that section said we don't really need you for that. There are other people who can do that. And so the struggle was always to be able to write about race and other things. And of course race is generally not just about race, it is generally also about other things. And yes, where necessary or where I was interested to do the things that I thought I had some either passion for or expertise for. And it starts with Nelson Mandela because that was the piece that got me my job. When I was 24, 25, I'm sent to South Africa because as a liberal institution, the Guardian is wise enough to understand that there are many stories that it's all white team cannot get. But not sufficiently progressive or advanced who have actually employed the Black journalists that they would want to send there so that they can cover it. And so they'd look around for somebody young, Black and cheap in the office and I was very young and Black and very cheap. So I was sent to South Africa to find out what I could find out. I could not drive. As a result of me not being able to drive, I would get lifts from different people. It's a very long story short. I'm left at a gas station. Other people are going to come and they're going to pick you up. Those people are Mandela's bodyguards. I amuse them during the trip back. I've studied in the Soviet Union as had they, my first degree was in French and Russian. I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. I had flirted with the communist movement, many of those in the communist party. And so we get on that I haven't been around. They call me sometimes say we're going here. Do you want to come with us? And I stumble at this young age, not really knowing what I'm doing, very inexperienced into Mandela's entourage, basically. You have to imagine it's 2008 and you stumble into Obama's avocade. And the piece I wrote at the end of that period gets me my job. Now, the book comes in, there are five chapters, each one with one exception. Four of them are lean on some kind of black cultural artistic trope. So the first is change is going to come. Those are the more positive stories. The stories that, you know, generally speaking would give you warm fuzzy. So the Mandela election, the Obama election, not the shooting of Michael Brown certainly, but the uprisings in Ferguson. Even Mandela's funeral is a kind of a festival of kinds. And it also looks at a treats, and this is true throughout the book, there's a lot of repertoire. So that's one of the ways in, if you like, is I was there. I was there for the Mandela election. I was on the South Side of Chicago for the Obama election. I was in New Orleans just days after Katrina happened. I was there on the night that Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin and so on. Quite often, they're not necessarily the best pieces of writing that I've done, but they are in a crucial moment. The next chapter is called Things for a Part. And I go back to South Africa five years after Mandela's election. These are the less hopeful, more critical moments where it's important to kind of stand back from the euphoria that existed at a certain point and look at what we've got. I go to Zimbabwe as it's falling apart to look at what happened to Mugabe and how he went from the hope of the continent to the disaster that Zimbabwe was at a certain point. I do gun deaths in America. I look at a boy, the boy who killed and a mum who tried to stop him which is set here, where I interviewed the mother of a boy who stabbed another boy to death and look at issues of knife crime. Eight years after Obama's tenure, I write a piece called Yes He Tried, as opposed to Yes He Can, and look at the equivocal, as I see it, verdict, somewhat ambivalent verdict on his presidency. The third chapter is called Ways of Seeing. That's draws on Joan Berger, so not the Black Cultural Trump, which is mostly essays, really, and thought experiments, where I kind of use my lens, which I guess I'm always using my lens, but this is kind of more specific, one might say, to examine certain phenomena. So I ask, what would a White History Month look like? Every time Black History Month comes around, there's always someone, what if we did that? Okay, well, what if we did do that? What would that be? In the wake of George Floyd, I ask, what does Black America actually mean to Europe, the place that Black America holds in European imaginary? I write about Uncle Tom in defense of him, not the racial slur, but the literary character. Most people haven't read the book, they just use the slur. And actually, Uncle Tom, while he's not a revolutionary, he's definitely, he is in many ways quite heroic. He won't run when the other slaves run, but he'd rather die, and he does die, than tell the master where the slaves have run to. He would rather pick another slave's cotton than risk getting beaten for it, than watch them suffer. He refuses to beat other slaves. But also, in that piece, I look at, like, I have an issue with the term, Uncle Tom, the essentializing nature of it, the de-blacking of it, the way in which the issue that I have with a certain, I think, actually unfounded expectations that, well, they're black, and so they should do this, or they should do that. And every identity has it, I think, people who police its borders, West Brits, who are Irish, but not quite Irish enough. One person described, one Jewish person described to me anti-Zionist Jews as being people of Jewish extractors have had all the Jewishness extracted from them. These are, this is all the same kind of politics to me, and a very dangerous kind of politics. I raise issues about Bridgerton. I also make an argument, once again, a thought experiment, for why one could argue that we should just take all statues now, not just the ones of the people that we don't like, but the ones of people that we do, that they are very poor ways to remember people. Chapter four, Express Yourself, is a series of interviews with a range of people, Andrea Levy, Stormzy, John Carlos, one of the guys who raised his fist in the 68 Olympics, Lewis Hamilton, Bishop Tutu, my Angela Davis, my favorite, not certainly my favorite piece, but my favorite experience being interviewing my Angelou, where we had, we were supposed to have 45 minutes, and 13 hours later, I roll out of her limo drunk, her being only slightly less drunk, and then finally me, myself, I, which are series of personal essays about traveling through Europe, about leaving America, about my first experience of being in America for any period of time, and I'm going to end the introduction with the last piece that I wrote for The Guardian, the last column that I wrote for The Guardian, I should say, which was shortly after, as in just over a month after the last election, which did not quite go the way I wanted it to. When I was a child, my mom used to put on the song Young Gifted in Black by Bob and Marcia, put my feet on hers, and then dance as both around the living room. They're playing our song, should say. It was the early 70s, she was barely 30, and I was the youngest of three children she was raising alone. Struggling to believe there was a viable future for her children in a country where racism was on the rise and the economy was in the tank, she'd danced with us around the living room, singing ourselves up, imagining a world in which we would thrive for which we had no evidence that we did have great expectations. Much of the politics that's informed my writing in these columns came from my mum. It's partly rooted in her experience. She came to Britain just a month after the Commonwealth Immigrant Immigrants Act of 1962. She came because the then Health Minister, Enoch Powell, had embarked on a colossal programme of NHS restructuring that required more nurses. As such, she was living proof of the immigrants that the British economy needs, but that its political culture is too toxic to embrace. For her, sex, race, and class were not abstract identities but forces that converged to keep her wages low and her life stressful. But my politics is also rooted in what she made of those experiences. She was an anti-colonialist and an anti-racist, an internationalist, and a humanist who would never have used any of those words to describe herself. Race-conscious as she was, most of her community activism, youth clubs, literacy classes, discos in the church hall, took place in the working class white community. They were her people too. When I was 10, she made me stay up and watch the Holocaust mini-series, which freaked me out. And when I was 14, she took me to watch Gandhi during the holidays, which was way too long. Both times she told me, this is your story too. She believed the world she wanted to create was never going to come to her, so she would have to take the fight to it. I saw her confront the local national front candidate, the police, and her union to name but a few. She took me on my first rally, helped the aged when I was four, my first demonstration, CMD when I was 14, and my first picket, the South African Embassy, at 17. I sign off from this column at a dispiriting time, with racism, cynicism and intolerance on the rise, wages stagnant, and faith the progressive change is possible, declining even as resistance grows. Things look bleak. The propensity to despair is strong but should not be indulged. Sing yourself up. Imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there may be no evidence, and then fight for it. Thank you. Thanks Gary and I think that final quote is so powerful because a little bit of what I guess we've been doing over the last 500 years is singing that song and there's no evidence for it but triumphant nevertheless. I'll just return from a reparations conference in Ghana which I think before we came in I was saying to you it reminded me a little bit of the 1958 or Africa conference that in Krumac called to begin the process of decolonisation. Everybody was there Ghanaian president I guess is looking for some kind of legacy but he called everybody together. The African Union were involved and Caracom interestingly were involved and they're going to establish a committee but we'll come to that later. But these issues of diaspora are very much on my mind as you can imagine at the moment and in many ways your book deals with that unresolved business of what I now choose to call the African Atlantic slavery empire and colonisation. But before we delve into some of those issues I just wanted to look at the process of putting together the book and you know you output over that period of time as it must be immense you were doing a weekly column. So how did you get to choose the pieces that you did eventually choose for the book and organise them into those under those headings that you chose? Yeah so can you hear me? So first of all there were the moments so there had to be something from Katrina there had to be something from Obama there had to be something from the Mandela election you know so there were inflection points if you like and then more than you think in terms of you know some of the ones I didn't mention at McPherson or the Windrush scandal or so on so there were those so then you would look through the pieces of the time and you would kind of be getting what you thought were the best ones but also the ones that were most evocative because sometimes a piece might be really evocative of a moment but that moment is not particularly memorable you know and then there are then there would be others that were kind of too long I was quite determined to try and keep the book to a hundred thousand words more or less which is a kind of average size of a book and not over-indulge myself. Were those the nation pieces the very long pieces? Some of them but also the New York Review of Books piece there were a couple of pieces there was there was one piece that I spent a long time on and I was really proud of which was a year after Hurricane Katrina and I spent a lot of time in New Orleans and it was about the jazz players of New Orleans but it was about four and a half thousand words and then I'd have had to take something else out there were pieces that in terms of ones that hit the counter on the floor there were pieces that I remembered as being about race and that they were about about the Black diaspora but mainly they were they they centered on the Muslim experience and it's not that that is irrelevant to the Black experience it was just that there were some of them where the issue was really hinged around kind of religiosity and there were particularly in the wake of 9-11 and 7-7 there were things that they were saying about Islam and Muslims that they were not saying about Black people and so you know there were a few pieces which I thought well that's got to go in and then when I reread it I thought oh yeah no that was about it was about usually it was about white people in contradiction to the way that they were describing Muslims not you know so I did one piece called they called let's have an open and honest conversation about white people because they kept saying this is New Labour we need to have an open and honest conversation about Muslims and that meant that the conversation was neither going to be open nor honest and that they were just going to repeat the same old racist tropes and you know we can't be afraid to say and then they'll say the thing that like every racist was saying and so then I was like okay well let's just talk about white people like that you know why don't you keep murdering everybody what you know how do you equate Christianity with with how do you balance the fact that you're Christians with all of the genocide that's been done in the name of Christianity you know how do you this how do you that like and then I did another one which was very similar which was questions white people don't get asked you know this is fresh color that kind of thing and but when I reread them they were more about Islam so I took them out um there was one that I kind of um uh there was an issue of uh geographical dispersion so um and I think it falls down in that front I think there aren't enough pieces from the Caribbean and there could have been more I did an interview with me and Motley for Vogue but they're asking quite a lot of money to reprint it and um I didn't want to give them um there was um uh there were some pieces about a piece about returnees there was a piece about gay life in Jamaica all of these kind of might have gone in but just uh and there was a piece from Haiti um so a lot of that's you know why the pieces didn't with the pieces didn't go in but those are the choices that uh I was it was under under that criteria and then once I chose the pieces then I um decided the interview section was easily decided the personal essay section was easily decided the issue of whether things are going up or going down is quite difficult right Ferguson a boy is killed or a young man and then there are uprisings is that positive I think the uprising is positive to the thing that came out of is um the Notting Hill Carnival it comes out of the pogroms of the 1958 pogroms but then it's a celebrate you know so um with those categories one could argue the toss about quite a few of them did you um I guess look at sort of if you obviously looked at issues of topicality and what was also uh relevant um were there many that you know they say when you do those columns it's the kind of first draft of history and people get things wrong in terms of whether where they think things are going where there are many instances where you wrote something and you were reading back over your material you thought oh my god I got that completely wrong or you know not really but here's why um I I tend to not really make a lot of predictions if you don't make a lot of predictions you can't get them wrong and um and there's a reason for that which is a journalist particularly columnists and there's a higher proportion of columnists that come from private school in Oxbridge than people who went to private school in Oxbridge and then become lords so that's how posh they are in that category they think they can see the future uh actually they think that they make the future and so they're and I don't think it is a journalist's job to predict the future particularly when the present is so engaging and interesting we can just describe the present and we can from the present we can say well it it looks like these are the things that we should look at but um yeah I remember coming back from the states and I came back about a month before Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and I met this woman who said like well Labour have already no Corbyn's already lost the election and I said I thought he he just won the election to be leader and she said um oh I mean 2020 it was 2015 I said why are you talking about 2020 in the past tense like as and and he said yeah but everybody knows he's gonna lose and I said well did you know he was gonna win and she said no nobody did and I said did you know that Cameron was gonna win in 2015 because but and she was like no and I said well so maybe you're not very good at predicting you know maybe maybe maybe that's not working for you uh so I um so you won't find in there many like you know this way this is where it's going so the Mandela one I talk about like could this be a disappointment could be you know that's a possibility um um with the Obama's election I say that there's lots of questions that we can ask on the night of the election there's lots of questions that can be asked about his political trajectory and so on so let's ask him tomorrow and tonight people are partying tonight it's a celebration and tomorrow they can do that but that um um but yeah that one one good one sure fire way not to get things wrong it's not to claim that you could you're getting them right but then if if you're looking sort of trajectories and and how things repeat themselves I mean I remember the night Obama was elected it wasn't to say that he was gonna be a disappointment but we were have you know having conversation with with friends and everybody said well if you look at what happened after emancipation um it only took 10 years and then there was a massive um you know response and the Ku Klux Klan and and then you spend another 100 years or so well 50 years or sorry 75 years or so under Jim Crow so we all sat down and we predicted that there would be we didn't know how it would come we didn't know it would be the tea party but it was almost clear that something was going to come back that was going to be vicious but but everybody just celebrated obviously you know the party was great and it was a huge symbolic moment but there were kind of undercurrents that something vicious was going to come well yeah first of all I don't think there's anything wrong in saying well um there are precedents to this but actually kind of the the challenge that I would have there is that because because my reading of Obama and this became didn't become contentious but it was irritating to a lot of people was this is a great symbolic importance but substantially actually it's not emancipation it's not that at all that he was not offering anything very much different apart from looking different um I still would disappoint him against Hillary if I had about because he was against war and Hillary wasn't and that was a major test and um and he was hearing a group of a progressive group that Hillary Clinton wasn't and so on but that actually never promised to do much and so it was like a fan of pregnancy or something it wasn't emancipation you know and and um uh and so in the realm of not predicting but describing an example would be um uh you know I was saying well if what he has they were describing it as a movement this Obama movement and I wrote well it's not a movement it's an election campaign and once he's elected then that it has there is no reason for it to exist but if he is going to succeed in doing anything there will have to be a movement because someone is going to have to make him do things and um um and that was me not saying there will be a movement or there won't be a movement but um but like let's not misdescribe this but in the end what we got was a backlash without the lash there was no lash I mean he came in um folded on the banks um assisted in the bail out um negotiated with himself before negotiated with anybody else and um and then met his enemies halfway when they hadn't moved anywhere so and destroyed Libyan yeah well and that too well that was what one of my friends said the one thing we know is that if he becomes president he will kill black people like that that is part of the job description so how much room then do you have I mean perhaps in a nation you're able to go further but so within the Guardian and others to talk about that room for for an alternative take on Obama or the room for you know talking about the the movement and and what would be involved in constructing that how much room is there to talk about that and and I wanted to talk about that particularly in relation to say Mandela and Mugabe who you do um some really interesting and great portraits of but not necessarily what they were dealing with I mean again it was clear from the deal that had been done but just to get everybody who was out of work back into work the economy would have had to have grown by about five percent and it was never going to do that so to a certain extent there is an assessment that you have to make that I think we all in whatever intellectual endeavors we are making we all make which is where where are we at where is this conversation at what where if you're going to devise um some kind of intervention then you have to assess the point of intervention um and that's different from indulging it but actually assessing where are people at and what do I want to do with this conversation what do I what and what can I do in 1200 words or 3000 words what is possible um and that's um you know if you get it if if you if you get it wrong it can be quite embarrassing if you kind of make an assessment that actually that's not where people are at all but same with with Mugabe writing for the guardian I was dealing with a readership many of whom hadn't really thought much about Mugabe for about 20 years and that he had returned as this wanton opportunistic record of his economy and so the aim was to say look there's actually a story to this this is not who he has always been and arguably it's not entirely who he is and this has come this comes through a certain lens and um you know I just want to broaden the lens there um with Obama the second piece I write about Obama yes he tried you were coming to the end of Obama's tenure with the likelihood or the possibility of a trump presidency and so just saying Obama didn't do this and didn't do that people are like yeah Jesus do you know what I mean he didn't do any of that either and so the whole time you were trying to um say look I think the Obama the Obama piece I start with the boy the young boy going into his office uh to uh with his dad and the two kids are allowed to ask a question and and his brother asks about some military jet murderous piece of weaponry and this other little black boy says is your hair like mine and Obama says touch it and the boy is kind of reticent and Obama bends over and this is great picture in the White House of the Obama burning over and the boy touching his hair and so it speaks to like the symbolic importance of this moment it's a it's a vignette and then I can go from the symbol and then I can start peeling it away and say actually his life chances aren't better now he may feel better about himself but his life chances aren't there and this isn't better and this isn't better but you know what it's better than that and it's better than this and so and so I like that constantly throughout the book um you revive people about that uh and the statistics and you know and you avoid some of those conversations that we're quite guilty of I mean I remember about around Libya having a conversation with an African-American woman and pointing out some of the disasters that were there um as a result of that action as she said to me don't take that away from me because he made me feel good and I'm like well you're feeling good yeah has destroyed Mali and and you know given Baka Haram all these arms and you know and so to my son African president um but it's it's very hard to calibrate how you deal with the symbolic first that are important but also real politics about whether our life chances are actually changed as a result of the symbolism well I think that there is something to be said for honoring the symbolism saying yes this is symbolically important but let's not mistake it for substance symbols are not insubstantial but they're not substance and that I hope because I did you know just irritate like I said I irritated people over Obama because I wouldn't get excited and particularly in America like that's a national sport getting excited so um that people would say like this will be my son was born the weekend that Obama declared and people would say this will be great for your son and I'd say why and it was just like you know don't do that and I'd say no I'd say you know um is he gonna improve his chances of going to university is he gonna improve his chances of getting a job is he gonna decrease his chances of getting shot dead or going to jail because if he's not going to do any of those things why you know I'm gonna be black president it'll be great and I said okay so then it would be great if Condoleezza Rice became president maybe like no I'd be like well why not she's black I'd be like well that's different and I'm like okay so then let's talk about that why so it's not just that he's black. Oh Cruella becomes yeah well exactly that like if you if you're not careful then you open the door to you know imagining somebody shamed to a you know a airplane seat heading through Wanda saying thank god an asian woman did this you know because that's real progress and so we have to kind of think critically about what we want from these moments of representation and better to start better to start with him than to start with these and then at least you have some consistency and that does start with saying I understand that there may be symbolic importance to having Rishi Shunak or Pretty Patello had symbolic importance to them being and so I'm not going to say we're not going to spend so much time arguing for greater non-white representation and then when it comes in the form that we don't like say well it doesn't count but we have to think about how it can you know and there's a great quote in there from Angela Davis one of you here when she talks about diversity 21st century diversity in particular as being the difference that brings no difference and the change that makes no change and that we you know that we need a different system not just different coloured hands pulling the levers in the same system every time I visited South Africa over the last 20 years the constant refrain the country where everything changed and nothing changed so I think ordinary people get that very profoundly I was struck just on that point with Angela Davis that you know the the interviews that you did you know were around I guess were they personal heroes well they seem to be me to be about people who were both symbolically important whether Lewis Hamilton or others but who had a bit of substance was was that kind of deliberate or were you going for other things when you when you went to meet your heroes if there were heroes um a lot of them were not all of them you know I wouldn't I like Lewis Hamilton I wouldn't call him a hero exactly I was very impressed by Stormzy that's more of a man crush really than a hero heroism and I didn't know when I was going to see him that I would crush on him um uh and that's the nature of the that's the nature of the organ that I was writing for to be honest that quite often they say I'm the interviews anyway the Guardian would say oh Bishop Tutu's intact will you go interview him um and the Guardian isn't just going to interview someone because well I might actually but like they're not going to send me to just interview someone because they're pretty or because they're fast or because they're like that's to be that's to be something else about them um and actually um yeah so so usually there was this something there was this this element and there might be something actually entirely commercially might be a book coming out or something like that but then you're trying to you're trying to expand the um uh the games I mean the interview that I'm most proud of and actually the piece in our collection that I'm most proud of is of Claudette Colvin who um for those who don't know Claudette Colvin was she um she was a 15 year old girl in Montgomery who was kicked off the bus and who pleaded not guilty and they were going with her she was going to be the one that they were and then she was very dark-skinned wrong side of town she got pregnant and so they just dropped him and at any civil rise book they mentioned Claudette Colvin and that's all they do they mention her most less it's different now than it was and I I I sincerely hope that my piece has something to do with why it's different now um because I hadn't read an interview with her and it took me two years to find her just going from relative to relative and she'd moved she was a nurse's aide in the Bronx and it's it's first of all it's a story about her and it's an amazing story it's also a story that complicates our understanding of the civil rise movement which of course I'm glad for but it wasn't without its problems it was male-led church-led quite conservative culturally the kind of movement that would drop a 15 year old who became pregnant and say we can't desegregate but as if her pregnant says anything to do with desegregating buses now obviously and Claudette says this like yeah politically it was probably going to be really hard in the 50s to run with me but they didn't just not back me on that they just just dropped me out of everything but also in that story you see how they mistreated Rosa Parks and that Rosa Parks and how history is mistreated Rosa Parks that Rosa Parks you get a sense on the way that these stories are told if they're told at all which they weren't really when I was at school that you know Rosa Parks was this kind of quite old lady first of all she was a male who um you know she was tired one day she left work and like and her feet were herring and so it's like if she had a better pair of shoes there wouldn't have been a civil rise movement when in fact Rosa Parks had been like kicked off loads of buses she was a menace she was an activist she was a feminist she didn't believe in non-violence and so they the local civil rights yeah the local civil rights establishment kind of got sick of her because she wouldn't just turn up and look like an old lady with a bun in her hair she had things to say which is why she moved to Detroit she's like I've turned it up for you you like feckless media command so um it was a really Claudette story opened up a route to understanding how we misunderstand willfully and wantonly misunderstand history thanks for that um the the final area and I know all of you are really waiting to ask and Gary additional questions a final area I wanted to kind of discuss with you was just about this diaspora that you're sending the dispatchers for from and how you conceptualize it and and also um kind of issues of your identity I mean I was struck by all your travels in the book you go to to across Europe you go to America and you return for America and each time at the end you kind of say well um it's important I return you seem uncomfortable and then you say let me return to racism I understand in the UK which is which is um because all those other racism's are you know a little bit different and so I wondered what how you can conceptualize that diasporic space and where you think you know comfort lies I mean is it in the end in kind of racist out blighting because we've made the struggles here and we know what it is we're we're kind of dealing with and everywhere else it's a little bit a different kind of racism so just some thoughts on on that so I guess the diaspora is one that I'm willing into being right because the truth is certainly in America none of them have heard of us in Britain do you know me they're not talking about us you know we might be talking about Michael Brown or or George Furbill they're not talking about Stephen Lawrence um and in America they don't talk much about Africa either apart from as a kind of an element of the past there's a kind of uh um you know a kind of uh almost a mythical what kind of roots yeah what kind of yeah um and um and then it's not like in the Caribbean until relatively recently they're really talking about Africa or I mean they talk about America quite a lot and African-Americans they weren't talking about us much either there uh to be honest Britain uh black people in Britain because of the position of Britain and because of our ties to elsewhere had a more cosmopolitan diasporic feel but generally speaking it was us thinking about them it wasn't them thinking about us so um this is me kind of almost instinctively and the kind of the articles I write about black people are a third of um I thought that was wine yeah I was like I didn't know was that kind of pie did you see that open mark yeah I know I know um um um and so thank you um so it's a diaspora that's willed into being and it's willed into being through in my life like I um you know I grow up not defining myself as British until I'm kind of 17 18 because it didn't feel like I was away through British I realized I'm British when I go to Sudan to work in a refugee school I come back and study French and Russian but when I go to Paris I study the black French novel I'm kind of um you know South Africa anti-apartheid movement and I'm constantly looking for black people and and I mean in that politically black people I'm looking for the Roma and um further you know uh the people who are catching hell um who uh frankly may not always be black I do not a lot but a fair amount of columns from the north and the south of Ireland so um so it's kind of I mean it is a black diaspora it's also kind of the world that I've built for myself that by chance I get to visit um there was a funny thing happened when I left America in 2015 which is that people would say are you uh are you leaving because of the racism and I say yes I'm going back to Hackney to avoid racism there's no racism there and um British British racism did me a great service in a way because I grew up with people telling me I wasn't from here and actually in a different way my mother telling me I wasn't from here like your barbarian you know out there with your English friends you could you could step in here you went Barbados you know so um so um I never had the challenge of the love of the soil you you know I did that thing I went to Barbados when I was 17 thinking oh I'm home and then you know everybody says like who are you and you know you're English and you think oh I saw this going a different way and so really having to work on okay what where am I from what is that was what my first book you know no place like home was really you know how is this going to work and for myself coming to the conclusion that my home my comfort as you put it is where my values are it's where and other people share my values and um people who aren't too pompous and who um like to talk about politics and like to do politics and um don't talk down to people who are less fortunate or poorer than them but can make very off-color jokes uh in the hope that no one will repeat them and um who um live our livers of life and lovers of life and who like food and you know there's a range of things that are important to me um uh and that's where my comfort is and I can it's not tied to a place and a combination of racism and migration um disconnected place from that comfort there's nothing wrong with having comfort in place I wish I could have in a way that I could have comfort in a place when I see when I go to the Lake District or the Darbyshire Dales or kind of you know Arizona or in the desert or anywhere I think wow what would it be like I came from Stevenage you know which there was um which doesn't give a lot in sense of place so um that's where my comfort is you produce uh um motor motor racing great yeah which is amazing with anyone here from Stevenage from Stevenage it's built with roundabouts so you cannot drive fast in Stevenage yeah so I used to go I used to go clubbing up there when I was young in the 70s and you know terrible time I think uh Hamilton said the same thing and got into trouble didn't he he called it he said he was coming from the slums which is you know didn't go down very well so in terms of that Black British identity what um you've talked about the kind of western part of that well what how do you see the connection with the continent when you're there in South Africa and Sudan how that part of Black British identity well that part of diasporic identity because I mean it's a it's a diaspora it's a double diaspora isn't it from the Caribbean to here but yeah initially from Africa and I guess I I saw certainly my relationship with southern Africa was through politics um it was either the Mandela scholars or fellows or whatever who would come when my mum died um uh some of the money this was in 1988 some of the money went to the Sonoma Klangu Freedom College in Zambia I think so that was kind of where our interests and our affections were where West Africa I feel is more is more of a lived experience for me in terms of its engagement with the with the Black diaspora with the Black community here and um uh and central and eastern Africa feels virtually um for me virtually absent from for me from Black British culture not from Black British culture just in terms of my experience of it beyond Ethiopian food um I don't have much experience of it but I know that if I lived in Ealing or um uh in other parts of the country that those communities tend to be quite concentrated and I said that as someone who lived for a year in Sudan and so kind of keeps a bit of an ear out for it and was working with them people who wrote around descent but I was quite intrigued in my interview with Stormzy the degree to which Stormzy whose folks are Ghanaian first of all has very little interest in America really he considers himself very much Black British but also culturally very African so the second interview I did with him which is not in there and it's actually not in the interview but during the second interview I'd just been doing some work with Linton Quacy Johnson and I have a fantasy of a conversation between Linton and Stormzy which I think would be a wonderful interview and so um the very small my very small kind of effort to kind of egg this on was that I got Linton to sign a book of his to Stormzy and then I gave it to Stormzy and what was interesting to me and no shade on Linton at all it's just an issue of intergenerational transmission and ethnic transmission is that Stormzy hadn't heard of it and you know he's a bright young man and he was really glad to have the book and there were two people in the room who were like oh yeah you're gonna like that so it wasn't like don't know don't care but that hadn't come his way and um I don't think if Stormzy had been from the Caribbean I don't think that would have been true yeah yeah it's really weird about some some of as you say that intergenerational knowledge that is passed on but also some of the strange conversations I just had a wind rush book out recently and on the promotional tour somebody says stands up and in all seriousness you know wind rush is great you know should our new identity now be wind rush should we be called wind rush instead of so weird I know I was kind of said well I think that would be a bad idea but but but anyway um just ending on on the subject of reparations I've come in from Ghana as I said you know Paracom and the African Union now want to position this it's gaining momentum you've written on aspects of that there's one essay in the book about the statues and how you think that um you know that we should you argue against erecting statues to anybody and what's your broad position on on this issue of reparations and the way that you know we're beginning to look at it as a way it's kind of closing some of the issues from the past from about 500 years and the legacies that you deal with throughout your book yeah um I'm going to be honest I I I mean I was never against it because um there is a clear logic to it and um and also because it would be an odd thing to be against really um but I never embraced it um and I'm changing and I never embraced it because for a few reasons one and this speaks against my imagined world in which you with it but I thought it's never going to happen and there are other things that are slightly more likely to happen and I and in a different way and I don't think this is unproblematic I'm just sharing my journey about it with you um um of kind of saying I don't know how that conversation how to start that conversation I'm not equipped to start that conversation there was also a worry for me and it's still a worry that if mishandled then what you could have is people say okay how much do you want okay here you go now shut up shut up about racism shut up about right you've paid you off and so it couldn't just be a conversation about money money and resources and I didn't I didn't see which doesn't mean that the conversations didn't exist I didn't see the conversations taking place that went beyond like we need some of that back you need to give us something back I just didn't see it developed more recently because other people have done a lot of work that I didn't do I can see and because there is a firm grounding or a firmer grounding around decolonization and so on it feels like we are almost I couldn't think as I have to start this conversation but somebody else has started this conversation in a way that feels like it can galvanize people's imaginations including mine and so um I am more receptive to it I was never hostile to it but I'm I'm more receptive to it and it has involved quite radical shift so caracom which to be almost barely bloody existed they could never for islands that are so small that you can fit most of them in a phone book they could never get on about anything I mean Nevis tried to secede from some kids you know I mean crazy so um even with Windrush um in in the Windrush scandal right up until the vital moment they were kind of different countries just stabbing each other in the night so there is a material reality now which is partly around the end of the Cold War American indifference which has forced a collective kind of conversation in the Caribbean there is also the issue of climate change which actually evokes a question around reparations in a different way which the damage and loss yeah yeah which kick starts a conversation of how it might be had and um um of course the more it becomes part of statecraft as opposed to campaigning work I think the more likely it will be and the worse it will get like the the more water down the least the less kind of um the least you you know the more it's about states getting things the less it will be shaped by popular demands and needs which doesn't mean it's bad just means it's not going to go the way well it was great that there was a large civil society involvement the rest there's another who will hold their feet in a fire hopefully in terms of the state we're going to come to the audience thanks Gary for the initial conversation so please put up your hand say who you are and say whether it's a question or a comment so who wants to go first okay we can hear you um so I'm due to see nature calls I'm a PTR um candidate here at seras hello um I um I was quite um sort of pleased that the uh that you mentioned the black atlantic um Dr. Wambu and um it sounds to me uh Gary young that you have you have positioned yourself your your your comfortable place is in the black atlantic and we're talking about a conceptual of space that there was I didn't actually have a spatial location but all these good feelings were there and you could share them and you could feel them and there was that sort of chance mission and mutual feeling of of comfortableness sounded like the black atlantic to me is that a comment okay right no I just I'm just going to do anything else no okay because I'm getting the ball rolling sort of sort of that kind of truth is that until I grew up around a lot white people right and then I went to sit down for a year and then I went to Edinburgh and Russia and Paris and so my initial political inculcation was through Marxism and class and I didn't it's not true that I didn't think about race I had to think about it all the time just to get through the day but I didn't really have a critical um framework for it until I was kind of well into my early 20s and so the only qualifier I would I would say that is that class is there too class is really there and that kind of I do you know Stevenage people are also kind of my people they are the people I grew up with and I kind of I get them and there is uh and that's not uncomplicated because they're not uncomplicated you know when um the closest the people you are close to who could be very racially unpredictable and vituperative and kind of I mean you learn this I think of racism like a language with many dialects and you learn a dialogue you learn your dialect that's why I remember I'm back to a race and I understand I speak fluent English racism when somebody my wife's African American and when she sometimes will be somewhere and we'll be chatting and then you know come away and I'll be like dick and she'll be like what what what happened what did they say and because she doesn't speak the language you know and um um and likewise in in America you know there'll be moments where I'll be like oh that was funny she'll be like no it wasn't and um so um so I look yeah so I speak English like I speak English racism really well I understand it really well and um and that's because I grew up with her and that would seem a weird thing to feel comfortable around but not all of the people who speak that language actually um believe everything that comes from that language that's how they rank okay it and I you know what can I say I learned to I learned that dialect and I remember at the end of my time in South Africa that first election bearing mind I'm 25 like being away on the on the company dime is still like a big treat staying in a hotel you know eating out and they say you can stay out for another couple of weeks you can do another story and I'm in a uh supermarket this white lady this is in Johannesburg just walks in front of me I said excuse me she's that sad act I've only got a couple of things hey and I said okay how many things you got you're behind me don't worry I won't be long and I said well you're gonna be a bit longer you're gonna be after me and she says don't get so upset it's all and I said just can't get behind me I'm gonna say I came away and I just thought oh man now you're showing that old ladies in the supermarket you weren't even in a rush like in a different framework I would have said to someone I knew this all the time I'd do the Saturday shop it's like go ahead like I've got loads you know but it was and it's not like South Africans would black South Africans would just accept it but to get through the day there's a you navigate the kind of racism that you're used to and I just thought I've got to go home then because I can't speak this I can't speak this language and I don't want to learn a new I don't want to learn a new language of racism and so anyway all of which is to say that classes is embedded in there I do I don't feel that comfortable around posh black people actually sorry sorry what are you are you posh and so yeah like you know class class class is a thing like in in America where there are lots of very wealthy African Americans there are times when I you know I feel like yeah this isn't this isn't my scene at all not your crowd thank you um just a couple of corrections no no Dr Wambu just Mr Wambu and then secondly I I'm making a distinction between the black Atlantic and the African Atlantic but that's a whole other lecture thank you good evening um apologies for being late um if I I would love to have a five-minute rant about the state of public transport in the UK but let's leave this one at a time um love the book I love this discussion I'm a fan of all of your work or three um but two questions just looking at the current situation Sudan and reflecting back on how people perceived you in Sudan in terms of identities how what do you think if you get the chance to go to Sudan well the current state of play but how would they view you do you think the second part is something we don't often talk about which is we talk about racism from outside against black people regardless of you know from the Caribbean and Africa but we don't talk about what's happening within our own houses the racism within the you know within black people themselves um you know uh if you're African-American how uh you know more recent African migrants in the States would view them here in the UK um you might not have a lot of East Africans and West Africans mixing as often um you know the specific localities so there is a lot of uh something also internalised so I just wanted to hear your thoughts about that thank you yeah um so the first one oh yeah so um when I was in when I was in Sudan I was 17 I left when I was 18 I was teaching in a refugee school in the east in Kasala and um I mean what's interesting about this question is it's partly about Sudan right but it's also partly about me is that thing if you never cross the same river twice because you're different and the river's different so I when I was there when I was 17 I did not admit that I was English and that got tricky right because people say where are you from and uh unless you're gonna you say you're from Barbados well what's that like I've been there once when I was four for six weeks um and so you know and this is like the stories that we tell ourselves I don't think this is kind of unique if you think of the stories that say English people tell themselves about what England is or what Britain is and you're like well you know well these people come over here arranged marriages and you're like that's a royal family arranged marriages to foreigners that's what the royal family does and uh but they're talking about Muslims right so I don't think it's unique to me but um it was the election of four black MPs and a man because people would just say you're not from England because Englishness and whiteness were highly connoted so either I was American or I was just African but I couldn't neither which I could really pull off you know and it was the election of four black MPs which was reported in the Sudanese press and a man coming to me and saying it's true it's true and I've been there about nine months and said and I was like what are you talking about and she's like he was like your compatriots and there was a picture and Bernie Grant was in his regalia and it was validating and it was the start of it wasn't damaging right but it was the start of a journey about like right I'm working with refugees who have no passport I'm working with Sudanese people in this incredibly poor country I have a passport from a rich country and why am I spending so much effort saying that this country only country I really know but I'm not from there it's not plausible so then I'm going to have to work out how I am from there which then took another kind of 10 15 years but it was the it was the beginning of that if I went back to Sudan now I'm a tubby 54 year old man do you know what I mean like um I I'm not sure there'd be that bothered and I'd be and there'd be a way of be a range of ways of exhibiting probably my westernness which didn't exist at the time um in the same way when I was in the Soviet Union there was this weird thing where the Africans were catching hell I was in Leningrad as was the Africans were catching hell but somehow with my sort of jeans and sneakers and plats I had at the time they knew I was an African and so they assumed I was American so for the only time in my life people looked at me and thought here comes money ours seriously cars stopped and turned into cabs where are you going I do you have dollars I had to vouch for white people to get into like hotels and things I know I know it's has to be true and that kind of it's because of where I was in that moment and so I think that I go back you know if I go back to Sudan I will be going in a professional capacity I won't be riding around on a lorry full of onions I will be taking cars I will have my own interpreter I will be there in a way that will project uh uh and I will be talking to the kind of people who either will accept that or don't really care and 2023 isn't a in a a 1986-87 so there have been lots of black football players there has been Rishi Sunak they have we you know you don't need to run with the thing anymore saying it's true it's true so there's that too um and then the question of internal conflict there's one thing that is kind of quite interesting about the challenges when there are very few black journalists which is these are things that you want there are lots of things that you want to talk about and each time I have a column I have to think what is the most useful thing for me to talk about and very rarely has there been the political space I I've perceived to talk in a mainstream paper that's going out to mostly white people to talk about the internal challenges of colorism and interethnic dispute because someone's getting shot somewhere someone's getting killed somewhere someone's being denied the right to vote or so on and so um that that space to be critical within your community I would have to be writing for which I did at times for black organs you know organs that would go to black people who where you could start your point of intervention from a different place you know of like look we've all got that uncle who speaks like this right well here's why I think that this is a problem and blah blah blah um but if you're talking in a more general space then it's like well what uncle you know what what are you talking about um so I've just um uh through most of the time that I was writing I didn't have the luxury it felt like it would have been a luxury of that of that space and that in to do that would have been first one to seed ground somewhere else and secondly to have someone say see they're just as bad as us it's just it's just all it's all the same and um uh but even then in the book there's the uncle Tom piece there's um the piece about Claudette so when it's urgent and necessary or I think it's necessary I I try not to ignore it just to follow up on that point quickly and it was a question I had but I run out of time did you think very carefully before giving up the column in as much as you know there you were having that space every week or every other week to comment on all the big issues and you're one of the very few um black people who are doing that was that a consideration in you um taking so long to give it up or even thinking about not giving it up not really I mean like I I gave it up twice once when I was going just to America and then once again when I came back and then both times I started again I didn't give it up for very long and um and there were different considerations at each time so to be honest when I took it up again it was because um I got two kids they were quite small they were there was having a column meant that you could have a designated time in a week where you had to work and then the rest of the time you could be more available for child care so it was just like Thursdays out right so uh school meeting can't do Thursdays you know but otherwise you might be able to fit your life around it so that was uh because I didn't really want to do one but it fitted well with uh the challenges of parenting but the other thing um and we had this conversation uh when we came off the train is that I had to have an idea every Thursday that is harsh not Wednesday that's not good to you you know and not Friday that's too late you have to have an idea every Thursday like my bins go out on Thursday uh get connected all Thursday which means I've put them out on a Wednesday night and I equate putting the bins out on a Wednesday night with like you haven't got an idea yet you know hate putting out the bins for that reason and and you know it's incredibly angst-inducing and and also unnatural like because it can't just be that you have to have an idea of a Thursday that's me you can't have the same idea that you had last Thursday uh it can't be the same issue that you did last Thursday usually uh so you have to kind of find and you but you only know so much and you can only really unless you'll just kind of want to run off at the mouth so then you're you know after a while you find yourself cannibalizing your own work and thinking well I've said this before but I'll say it again in a different way and asking like what's the statute of limitations I remember asking this a couple of times with my analysis what's the statute of limitations about me on this subject like if I wrote about it like two years ago can I write about it again but sometimes a bit agg in another year so um no I was I was relieved to stop and I think I'd become my presence had become an obstacle to other people coming through so I we got black people covered Gary will do that um so when I leave then I have to find other people to do it I think um it was like they could become quite lazy um uh by which I mean the kind of editorial sort of um structures and I decided that I wanted to say less things in more depth and I mean I'm still working on that but that's what I wanted to do you're doing longer form stuff now yeah oh hello thanks I'm when during I teach african history yet so I used to think that um the sort of prevalence or visibility of black people and specifically with regards to the United States and specifically with regards to a kind of a right-wing black people I used to think that if you had a sort of substantial number of reactionary black people it was an indication of in the United States I thought was an indication of the success of affirmative action and a kind of indicator of how of the healthiness of race relations in that country and I'm not sure if I still believe that and I wanted just your thoughts on that and I was I wrong in thinking that all along um I guess I wouldn't frame it like that but my argument would be really passing your point in a way that and this speaks to my uncle Tom point like black people have the right to be as wrongheaded as anybody else and we all know and this comes back to the kind of we've all got that uncle we all have kind of right-wing people in our families who we know I think mostly um extended families and not immediate families and so it's never seemed to me that there's anything unnatural there's something perverse about black people who embrace racism there's nothing perverse about black people who who who embrace neoliberal policies or military policies that um that defend their privilege I kind of um it's ugly but it's it's a normal kind of ugly and so it doesn't the existence of a Suella Breverman or a pretty patelle uh original it doesn't complicate my understanding of the world at all um uh although interestingly all of them with with the slight exception of James Cavali who is also the sanest of all of them um all of them are the product not of a family of action but a massive privilege um and each of them with the exception of James Cavali kind of um uh complicate our understanding of race with regard to ethnicity because pretty patelle, Suella Breverman, Rishi Sunag, they are it's it doesn't help to say they're Indian actually they're they're Asians from Africa which is a kind of which is a particular ethnic experience which would be logical for them to be where they are now or more logical not inevitable not deterministic but um you could see how that could happen uh it is telling that the the black people in that area are from West Africa they're not from the Caribbean they're not from East Africa they're not from Southern Africa that's also logical if you look at the large bourgeoisies that exist there the amount of oil the amount of money the class structure that um has developed and so um I wouldn't say that they necessarily make that point but they certainly don't they don't refute it. I thought just for the first time I told them the power of deluging into the economy given the cold war um there seems to be a sort of final spot especially on the reaction of the black people. Yeah although but then you saw the kind of the limits didn't you with him and Sarah Palin uh um I mean I thought it was a very interesting moment uh I arrived in America just before the Iraq war that um the war beyond George Bush was being prosecuted by a Jamaican American Calden Powell and uh Condoleezza rise in african-american raised actually not very far from where Angela Davis was raised in Birmingham um and that it confirmed sort of CLR James's uh um conclusion but observation that african-americans in many ways not in every way but in many ways are as american as anybody else even more so they are more kind of they have an almost a grayer investment in the american project because most other people have some other directors in the lake of draw and an african-american stuff. Richard Wright said something very funny at the 19 the late 1950s writer's conference when they were all talking about negritude and people from the Caribbean and Africa were talking about how to fight France and England and he found it all really amusing because he turned around and said well we are the empire we're not the colonies um you had your hand up sorry and we'll it's uh 7 30 so we'll make that the last question unless there's somebody who's really burdened okay we'll okay there are two more but we complete the question short thanks yeah um my question actually uh kind of relates to the conversation that we're having now um and to that last question so it's this um so it's the the point that you made about uncle Tom and about the boundaries of identity and as you've just said the kind of um difficulties of kind of essentializing people's identity and expecting them to behave in a certain way um and I understand that there's a class issue at hand as well um but I mean but don't you think that um that actually you know the ethnic minorities who tend to be more right wing or who tend to kind of act more out of self-interest actually have it easier within a society that's already kind of white supremacist neoliberal capitalist that actually wants to kind of nurture that selfish side of human nature and so those minorities within that system then attain a certain capability or a certain recognition that becomes kind of disproportionate because they have greater proximity or greater acceptance by the structures of power that then elevate their voices disproportionately uh and allow them to kind of gaslight the struggles of um you know the majority of minorities who are not really having a very good time uh within these racist societies so um and then also you know the fact that nowadays uh you know I kind of wonder where are the inspirations there are no inspirational leaders anymore it seems that many of these people have gone and I feel as though the community is kind of drowning and fragmenting and so with the absence of leadership and then the favoring of ethnic minorities that sell out uh by the structures of power which disproportionately kind of help to reinforce their privilege enjoy dividing the society um what what do you feel is is the way forward like how how does how do we solve this situation well I think that I don't think they're necessarily selling out I think they're just being themselves I think that they are kind of ruthless selfish people and um uh that's you know who are they selling out what was the richest thing like went to Winchester he was a he was a hedge fund trader his wife is the sion of one of the wealthiest people in the world who is he selling out I don't think he's selling anyone out I think that's who he is I think he's a rich man he wants to be much richer uh and you know I can't really it's very difficult to speak to people's motivation or to speak to their experience you know how they are experiencing these things like you would have to be on on the couch as it were kind of talking to Peter Peter or someone but that but I can I speak for myself and I wouldn't find it very comfortable to be around people who are that racist and who are kind of just one adjectival slip away from saying something really awful about your mum or your sister or your you know your life that kind of um uh so these things come at a price and I think the psychic price is really high actually or it would be for me I also think that when these individual right wing people one of the reasons that they are one of the reasons that the right can elevate underrepresented people also women much faster than the left is because usually when people rise through the left they rise as a tribune of their identity in some way they are taking other people with them Diane Abbott saying you like Hackney is coming with me or or Tottenham is coming with me to Burning Ground and so they rise slower um uh and deeper that they well I don't know you can rise deeper but they rise with more substance but but if you believe in an individualist philosophy and if you're saying I don't care about there's no one coming after me it's just me then I want to come in and so you know Thatcher's rise does not mean the rise of women and she never claimed it did Rishi Sunak's rise does not mean the rise of brown-skinned people and to be fair I don't think he ever said he did um and of course that their race is instrumentalized I would argue Obama's race was instrumentalized in a way the question is who or what is it instrumentalized for and then the final point I would make regarding your question is the kind of the thing about you know there's there's no leaders and I get I kind of get that but I don't think that is unique to the black community look at this just look at the state of British political culture look at what we're left with do you know what I mean tractor porn Chris Pinscher these kind of very very mediocre people Liz trust do you remember there so when it comes to kind of standards of leadership and capacity to lead and engage I think we're in a sorry state I think the western world is in a sorry state and that um we are far from being immune from that we're embedded we are embedded in it okay we're going to take these two last questions very quickly but keep them short please and and Gary yes I would try and keep it short your response to because I want to try and show that everybody who wanted to to talk control hi how you doing thanks um I'll keep it short um I was very intrigued by your um talking on your journey finding English identity it's been a topical conversation that I've been having amongst friends uh recently and so my question is um do you think that there's enough malleability in the term Englishness to for us to live within that and do you think that the claiming of Englishness is a progressive if not um radical potentially radical act and my mind sprung to when I was thinking of the question the video that came out last week in a Victoria station during the Palestine marches of the like horrible far right guys and the one man in particular saying I was born in this country but actually the reality is you know for many Caribbean and West African descendants we have been born in this country and so what's our claim to Englishness what's your thoughts on that okay so we hold that so we can get the last question okay you you do both of them together so that we just um and we can finish she's over there thank you so malleability and this is yes I actually want to go back to the questioner before the last one and thinking of people like Kemi Badenok and Tony Sewell how do they fit into your analysis of um for example Badenok apparently has aspirations of being the leader of the Tory party at some stage well and it would seem that both she and Tony Sewell I don't think they ever actually look in the mirror and actually see what colour they are from the things that they actually say um and it is really quite discouraging that you've got two people who are in such positions but their contribution it's just like as you said of Margaret Thatcher she didn't actually claim she was doing anything for women so what would those two people be doing for society generally so the first question first and I don't doubt that I may have miss spoken because I do miss speak on this um uh as an English person would in interchanging Englishness and Britishness I only really realised I was English when I went to Scotland you know because you know because they told you um uh and and being English matters in this um in the entity that we're in um but mostly I think of myself as as British really and the time when Englishness comes to the fore is really England to me only exists as a football team you know that otherwise what is it it's where Scotland stops and Wales stops they have assemblies or parliaments we don't um English people only know themselves as English in contradistinction to the scots and the Welsh in the same way that straight people know themselves as straight because they're not gay that's the only way in which they think of themselves as being straight was gay people I think about being gay you to me constantly um um you know white people know themselves as being white when they go to a black country but otherwise they're kind of you know that they have no race and um but I do think the Britishness is quite moneyable actually that kind of um there is the benefit of not having a constitution of this kind of um of things not quite said that um that gives more space I think than in some ways than being American and or and certainly than being French good lord um so um uh and I think that we have in a range of ways race has been at the forefront of actually proving there of engaging that of kind of saying you know well what what about this and that I think there's a generation of British people that's not my generation a generation before may well be your generation who have an understanding of Britishness that is very very different to the one I grew up with where Britishness and whiteness were the same thing I don't think people under the age of 35 think that I don't think they face quite the same questions which is different a different argument from the argument that that could still not return in some different way that I think we're in an extended process of negotiation about what it means to be a part of this country and in that sense actually I think we're doing quite I think we're doing quite well in that negotiation but it's not over and it could be that it's never over it could be that it's a constant state of negotiation and maybe that speaks to a dynamic sense of what Britishness might be my kind of worldview does not find Tony Shill or Kenny bad nor complicated at all they are bad people who are black they look in the mirror and they see themselves and they think they are doing a great job they don't see any contradiction between who they are and what they do and Tony Shill I think is weirder because of his like you know well when you think about it you know racism did kind of bring us all together in a way you know I mean he said some stuff that like I do think how did you get there how did you get that is a kind of corrupted sense of who of your psyche I think I don't think that people have to think a certain way but I think it's unnatural for people to think that it's a good idea that they were enslaved or their ancestors were enslaved but the idea that like I want to I mean you know that they want to put people on boats or they want to kind of you know they want to start wars or that is consistent with all the awful black people that they've ever been it's not cut it's not a new thing what's new is that they're in power in Britain but the idea of them I mean it wasn't white people that hung Ken Sarawima it was black people with the contribution of Shale and you know and and so on and and if we think of the of the problem as being systemic then the color of the hands that turn the levers that work the system actually they can make the system work better they can make the system work better they could they're kind of oil in the machine if they can if the system is indifferent to and they can just extract wealth power and culture I don't know that the system really cares that you're black or whether you're right the system doesn't care it's just that that is the way that it's operated but you only have to look at the overwhelming white countries where people are massively impoverished and the places that are black where there are massive massive inequalities in economics and power to kind of realize that kind of there's nothing to stop black people doing that or look at the Holocaust that was white people doing that mostly to other white people so for me it doesn't turn on race it turns on power on that point where we will end I declare an interest I do I do actually I worked with Termi Surula the voice and over the years I think his position is a little bit more complicated than than I think we've discussed but we don't have time for that tonight. Gary thank you so much for such an amazing conversation going across continents talking about identity talking about our place in the UK and your voice that I think as I hinted here just before the last question I think we're missing terribly on a weekly basis at the Guardian so we hope you'll reconsider and come back again perhaps not the Guardian but somewhere else because those pieces that you've written over the last 30 years have been very important pieces for all of us and for me especially so thank you very much and thank you to the audience for coming out and thank you oh yes thank you Onyikachi and Gary for a very insightful conversation and thank you for everyone too for joining us for the first event of the Center for Product Development Studies please check our website we'll have more events coming up they'll be centered on diaspora on issues around Africa but also you know it's an ongoing conversation so that we'll have more events in the new year thank you thank you thank you so much for this evening today and yeah have a nice evening thank you