Saturday 8th August 2009

London

Stepping off the plane, making it through customs without getting stopped (wow!), jumping on the smooth Gatwick Express to Victoria - I thought about how different things may have been in this comparatively very, very, very rich country if the slave trade had simply never been; if the Europeans and the Africans had continued to trade on mutually beneficial terms as they had before enslaved Africans became commodities; if the slave trade and its attendant racist, ideological, faux-scientific ideas had never come to miseducate Africans and Europeans and Asians and … The wealth of the UK and the US (and many other countries) is underpinned on slavery. It's an uncomfortable truth (especially when folks start discussing reparations) but it is an undeniable truth. I read a lot of good science fiction and that - the story of our world minus the slave trade - would definitely make for great reading. I may just write a book like that one day.

The racial majority has changed on my journey home to the UK. No longer does everyone on the streets look like me - dark brown skin, dark eyes, lush lips, full nose, high forehead, tight curly hair. Granted, London is one of the most racially diverse cities in the world but not even 24 hours ago… (I'll say it again in case you missed it) EVERYONE looked like me! John Howard Griffin's book 'Black Like Me' (about how the white writer had his skin darkened so he could experience racism) sprung to mind. My reaction on reading the book when I was a teen was 'Umm, he could have just asked some black folk what was going on …' but of course - experiencing something for yourself is a different thing entirely.

D