My song today is ‘Many Rivers to Cross’. This song in the reggae genre was written and recorded in 1969 by Jimmy Cliff. It has since been recorded by many musicians, including Harry Nilsson: John Lennon: Joe Cocker: Percy Sledge: Desmond Dekker: UB40: Cher: Eric Burdon & The Animals: The Walker Brothers: Linda Ronstadt: Annie Lennox: and Bryan Adams, etc.
Jimmy Cliff was aged 21 when he wrote and recorded the song in 1969. Cliff stated he wrote the song due to the trouble he was having making it as a successful musical artist after originally finding success in his home of Jamaica, beginning at age 14, before moving to the United Kingdom. He commented upon how hard it was to ‘make it’ and referred to the numerous struggles he faced and bridges of hardship he crossed along the way. He said, “That song came out of my own experience."
This is one of the few Cliff tracks to use an organ, which helps to supplement the ‘gospel’ feeling provided by the backing vocalist on the track. Jimmy Cliff released the song on his 1969 album, ‘Jimmy Cliff’. It was also released on the 1972 soundtrack album for the film ‘The Harder They Come’, in which Cliff also starred. ‘Rolling Stone’ ranked it Number 325 on their list of the ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’.
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PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS POST IS ONE OF THE LONGEST, BUT ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT WHICH I HAVE WRITTEN OVER MY YEARS ON FACEBOOK. IT ADDRESSES THE RACISM PRESENT AND PRACTISED IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA OVER THE CENTURIES AND ATTEMPTS TO OFFER A DISPATIONATE APPRAISAL. MY LENGTHY POST ALSO RAISES OTHER MATTERS LIKE MASS PROTESTERS, UNACCEPTABLE PUBLIC STATUES AND SUGGESTS ALTERNATIVE ACTION WHICH COULD BE TAKEN IN ADDITION OR PREFERENTIAL ORDER. (WRITTEN BY A WHITE, IRISH MAN AND MIGRANT TO ENGLAND 52 YEARS AGO).
Over the years, this song has been used as a kind of emblematic ‘rites of passage song’ that many ‘Windrush’ Jamaicans coming to live in Great Britain brought with them as they sought a more prosperous way of life. Most migrants had experienced a harsh existence being brought up in a country that always had insufficient work for its young men and women joining the job market ever since many of its natural exports like sugar cane and coffee were priced out of the market by western economic practices. Even those who are fortunate enough to secure paid employment receive inadequately low wages (often as low as $1 a day in 2002 when I was last there in 2002). For many years now since establishing their independence, the only investment that enters Jamaica is the tourists who annually visit its shore, foreign aid, and the illegal trade in the exportation of drugs.
There is a cruel irony to be found in any country so beautiful with its clear-water seas, golden beaches, wonderous mountains, and breath-taking countryside, to see the other side of the coin show a much uglier picture. In its crime statistics, Jamaica has (more often than not) been the murder capital in the world over the past 40 years. It has a good education system despite its appallingly poor resource level, and teachers are highly respected and are applauded wherever they go, just as NHS nurses are in England.
Unfortunately, the country is totally lacking in prospects for its young teenager. Schooling drops off with acute regularity in their mid-teens and too many of the young Jamaican women too often become ‘the spare woman’ for their absent man and father of his child/children. As for gainful employment for young men leaving school, there isn’t anything ‘legal’ to be had! The only avenue that young men without the prospect of bona fide work have, is to join the gangs and to push drugs.
The most common dream of all young men and women born in Jamaica is that they can one day manage to find their way to either America or England. As many a lonely tourist widow has found on a holiday to the Caribbean, should she wish to pick up a ‘toyboy’ twenty years or more her junior, all she has to do is to lay there on the beach alone and she will be shortly approached by a man feigning interest. The woman may believe that she has found the man of her dreams on the golden sands of a Jamaican shoreline, without realising that what her Jamaican man friend wants much more than her, is a passport out of Jamaica to either America or England. As far as the Jamaican is concerned, these two countries have always been at the top of their ‘escape to list’.
The information that I provide here is gleaned from my personal knowledge of having visited Jamaica a few times during early 2000 and having worked in collaboration with the Jamaican ‘Minister for Education, Youth and Culture’ in an educational trans-Atlantic pen-pal project between thirty-two English schools and all thirty-two schools in the Parish of Trelawney over a three year period (2000-2003). The aim of this project was fourfold:
(1) First and foremost, we wanted to help reduce racial prejudice between black Jamaican pupils aged 6-16 years in Falmouth, Trelawney (the old slave capital of Jamaica) and white English pupils in Yorkshire.
(2) Through the pen-pal process of writing letters to each other monthly, we wanted to increase the black and white pupil’s awareness and a better understanding of their different cultures and way of life. The thirty-two Yorkshire schools undertook to fund the whole postal cost for the trans-Atlantic pen-pal project, as even the purchase of postal stamps was an economic cost that the poorer Jamaicans was unable to personally meet. They also raised the necessary funding cost to publish thousands of copies of two books with Jamaican and African story themes that I specifically wrote to advance the trans-Atlantic project.
(3) To raise funds for Jamaican school projects and the supply of much-needed educational resources. The monies raised from the writing and sales of four of my books with Jamaican and West African themes (which were shipped to Falmouth in their thousands of copies), helped to stock depleted school libraries, as well as being sold to raise the necessary money to buy vital school resources. The conditions experienced by Jamaican junior school pupils were hard to believe as we entered a New Millennium when compared to pupils in English schools. The Jamaican boys and girls had half a pencil each with which to write. They wrote on both sides of a sheet of paper, and also in between the lines. Textbooks were shared between four pupils, and the floor they walked on in class was often the earth beneath one’s feet. The Jamaican stories that I wrote helped to promote the positive aspects of Jamaican life as well as those aspects which were far from acceptable.
The late Nelson Mandela read three of my African/Jamaican books and phoned me personally at my home in Mirfield, West Yorkshire (through a three-way Home Office telephone call) in the year 2000 to praise these stories. After the South African President had praised my work and the news was carried around the world on the television ‘News 24 Channel’, the Jamaicans (who regarded Nelson Mandela as being one of the greatest men alive) could not get enough of me. Their view was simply one that said, ‘If Bill is good enough for Mandela, then he is good enough for us!’
The books which I had written for the Jamaican market and schools were shipped across to Jamaica in their many thousands. Many hundreds of copies were placed on depleted school library shelves in Falmouth schools, and many thousands were sold to raise money that was used by the thirty-two Falmouth schools to replenish educational stock. I was ever so proud when Basil Smith (the educational co-ordinator on the Jamaican side of the trans-Atlantic project) informed me that the headteachers of every one of the thirty-two schools in Falmouth had placed my books on their educational curriculum; a decision that had been heartedly endorsed by the ‘Jamaican Minister of Education.’
Over my years of contact with the Jamaican Educational Minister, and the Mayor (Custos) of Falmouth, and the thirty-two Falmouth schools and their Heads, many good friends were made. Unfortunately, I had to withdraw my heavy involvement during the early 2000s when I incurred two heart attacks within the space of one week; the last one which left me unconscious for four days.
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I love Jamaica and I love its people. Every year, hurricanes destroy many of their humble dwellings where most of the people live; many in make-do shacks and wooden huts. The torrential storms and hurricanes tear up their roads and destroy their bridges which connect one parish with another neighbouring parish. But, does the now homeless Jamaican throw their hands up in the air and become wholly inactive with severe bouts of depression? No! When their homes and shops have been destroyed, do they lay down and die in response to such yearly devastation and tragedy? No! Instead, they stand up proud, determined more than ever to rebuild their poor-quality dwellings and places of business. When their shops are destroyed, until re-built, the Jamaican trader sells their produce from market stalls and on the roadside. They repair their roads, re-build new bridges, and get on with living their life the best way they can. Special characteristics of a typical Jamaican is that they are always positive and forward-looking, and are usually smiling, dancing, and singing!
Let any English stranger walk into the poorest of households in Jamaica today and there is a 90 percent chance of being warmly welcomed and offered something to eat and drink. Whatever the Jamaicans have in the house to eat and drink as a family, they are always willing to share with a stranger. This is Jamaica which I experienced and grew to love. This is Jamaica which enjoins constant struggle with happy music, rebellious songs, sexy dancing, and reggae promises of good times to come once Jamaica can move forward from its enslaved past.
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For centuries now, black people across the world have experienced, racism, and discrimination in every walk of life, including (social, religious, political, educational, health, housing, and legal). It took centuries of having been treated as second-class citizens before mass black protest won the rights of the black infant to be born ‘out of slavery’. It took another century to establish the right of the black citizen to vote and appreciate the human and civil rights such as non-segregation in all public venues and spheres of everyday life.
These important developments, however, are not enough, and the wheel of equal justice for the black citizen has yet to turn full circle. The cycle will not be complete until all countries across the world rid its institutions and many of its peoples and customs of traces of racism against dark-skinned people; racism that is deeply ingrained by ‘white insensitivity’ and ‘white ignorance’, and on many occasions, ‘white intolerance’, coupled with ‘white blindness’ (of not seeing the same thing the same way as most of our black sisters and brothers). It is as though while we may be looking at the same statue, image, situation, or event, we are having a different experience, and seeing something different to each other. I will never forget the words of a West African friend of mine forty years ago telling me that until I can accept the twin-concept of looking at life with ‘black eyes’ and ‘white eyes’, the black and the white citizen will always see what we both look at differently! He then said that unless we accept the twin-concept of a ‘black heart’ and a ‘white heart’ within one body, we will never feel things precisely the same.
I don’t have to look across the Atlantic Ocean towards the blatant killing of George Floyd and many other black citizens by the police establishments or to hear the clear presence of racism from the mouth of their President, Donald Trump. I can also evidence deaths in this country of black citizens which represented police brutality and replay words spoken by our own Prime Minister, Boris Johnson about black citizens which were indisputably racist. The most recent English act of judicial racism being ‘called out’ was evident in ‘The Windrush Scandal’ of 2018 which concerned people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and, in at least 83 cases, wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office.
Institutional racism against black people is in today’s spotlight after the recent killing of George Floyd by the New York police officer. The death of George Floyd effectively lit a touch fuse that ignited the world’s indignation, and pent up repressed anger has exploded into mass protests which have mushroomed across the world to condemn racism practised against its black citizens, as it loudly advocates the message ‘Black lives matter’.
The prosperity of many white nations (like America and England) was built on the backs and the profits of slavery, colonialism, and empire expansion which resulted in the deaths of countless blacks along with other colonised natives, there is a growing desire for these two countries, in particular, to get rid of every statue, image, and vestige of any person ‘who was associated with slavery, colonialism, and the deaths of black people’. With England having once ruled a quarter of the world through Queen Victoria’s Empire, these monuments which were originally erected in honour and memory of prominent men and women of the time, are now seen (where racist associations are being currently drawn) to represent wholly unacceptable images of 2020 positive recognition within any civil society that purports to uphold ‘equality for all in all things’.
The mass protesters are determined to rid England and America of every aspect that represented the colonialism and the enslavement of many peoples over past centuries. However, I do not believe that this eradication of offensive monuments, images, and street names ought to be done by the wanton destruction in the heat of the moment, as this carries the probable risk of a justifiable movement being hijacked by extremist protesters from both the Right and the Left, who have different political agendas to pursue. What is required more than ever now is much wider discussion and decision making by community groups reaching consensus by more civilised means, which does not attempt to obliterate all knowledge of ‘ the historical fact’ (both good and bad), but one that involves finding a way where society can more accurately interpret and contexualise past events and the prominent people in them, to the satisfaction of all its citizens; both black and white.
I remember well a wise Jamaican friend I knew called Basil Smith, and with whom I worked on ‘our project’ as he called our English and Jamaican pen-pal collaboration. Interestingly, everything Basil engaged in he would term as being ‘a project’. I remember thinking at the time that anyone who used the term ‘project’ tended to focus on the future instead of dwelling on the past.
I have never been a ‘blatant accuser’ or a ‘token apologist’ in my life for past acts of enslavement, colonial expansion, or empire building committed by any nation since the Romans ruled parts of England, and I do not intend to be one now. Being Irish by birth, I know only too well of the great harm that the English Army and the English aristocratic farm settlers did during the 17th, 18th, and 19th century in Ireland. Being a student of English and American and European History all of my life, I am well able to reach a balanced view relating to probable cause and subsequent circumstances, along with the various actions by different parties, despite the fact that it is often said that ‘history is written by the victors’(slanted through their contexualisation and skewed interpretation of events, which is always ‘subjective at best’ and ‘inaccurately detailed at worse’.
The English took much from my Irish ancestors. They acted abominably, with little regard to human feelings, life, and without any semblance of ‘natural justice’. The blight which caused ‘The Potato Famine’ of 1845 was caused by fungi and not the English landlord or their occupying army per se. But because the tenants and their families relied heavily on the potato as the main source of food, the infestation had a catastrophic impact on Ireland and its population, and not one hand by the landlords or the English was raised to support the people dying from starvation and related causes in their millions. At least another million people were forced to leave their homeland as refugees.
Despite the cruel, inhuman and despicable part that the English played in much unhappiness, starvation and death caused to many of my Irish ancestries, and in spite of anything England ever took from the country of my birth during its reign of occupation, England has served me well for over 70 years of my life!
As far as the Forde family of the 20th century is concerned, England took us in as immigrants during the ‘Second World War’ years and provided us with everything we ever had. England gave us good housing, constant employment for my father and six siblings, a good education for all seven children (with three siblings educated to degree standard, plus almost all the Forde grandchildren of my parents attending universities and holding down well-paid professional jobs today). Along with access to the world’s best Health Service that is free at the point of delivery ( made possible only through its black and ethnic minority staffing levels), and a good pension in our old age, we were provided with much more than we expected as migrants to a new land.
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After Great Britain relinquished its empire in the 1950s,(more a consequence of circumstance than one of choice), England opened wide its immigration doors and offered lives of hope and prosperity to millions of migrants annually. It accepted all the refugees from Uganda in 1972 when General Amin expelled them and allowed them yo keep only £10 of their assets. England kept its doors for immigrants open until the latter decade, during which, the neediest of citizens, were placed at top of the housing ladder of every council in the land. Most people who were regarded as being of ‘highest priority’ in England were invariably the black immigrants and their families. This policy was often seen by white Englanders as having been ‘queue jumped’, and while these expressed sentiments could be seen by the black migrant as reflecting ‘intolerance’ of white people waiting on the housing list, very little of this response would be viewed as being ‘blatantly racist’ by any impartial observer. Only recently, because of China's colonialist policies towards Hong Kong, Great Britain has announced that any migrant from Hong Kong is welcome to live in Great Britain and adopt citizenship.
England is, and always has been (alongside America), the preferred country of choice to migrate to by most non-white migrants around the world today. If England is such ‘a bad place to live’, and if England is such ‘an intolerant country,’ and if England is considered to be ‘more institutionally racist’ than any other European country, why then, oh why, is England still the country which is most preferred by immigrants seeking a better life for themselves and their families? Just consider how many countries that ‘illegal migrants’ travel across and pass through to get to their preferred destination and then ask yourself, ‘Why is this so? Why do they choose to come to England above all other countries?” The answer is simple. However intolerant, discriminatory, and racist England still remains towards black migrants and its British born black citizens (and there is no doubt that we still are to some large degree), we are infinitely less so than most, if not all, predominantly white populated countries in the world!
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The history of any nation is a matter of ‘what happened’. These facts can be accurately verified by impartial historians with no ax to grind. ‘Why’, ‘how’, and ‘to what degree’, and with ‘what intent’ such things happened is always a subjective matter of human interpretation and contexualisation. I willingly accept that ‘every nation’ slants the history of any event, or any chain of events, in favour of its own people and government (either marginally or significantly, and either accidentally or deliberately). The history of any country, religion, or race should contain all relevant events and actions, whether good or bad, and whether ‘racist’ or ‘non-racist’. The late Nelson Mandela believed so when he said, “Hiding our history is not the route to enlightenment. We have to understand our history and we have to confront it.”
The presence of racism in any society should not be a question for debate, but rather the indication for immediate action to be taken to correct the situation! Having said all this, there is a wider and ongoing discussion to be had, and there are decisions to be consensually arrived at, and positive action to be mutually taken which places the black person on an equal footing in every respect with their white neighbour. No public statue should honour past racists and past colonialists, no citizen (black or white) should seek to eliminate their presence at the time they lived and full account of their total actions (good and bad) from our history books. Even men and women who did bad things do not deserve to have any good things they ever did forever disregarded. I have always held the view that ’The Scales of Justice’ has two sides which it should accurately weigh in balance (although this is clearly not the case in respect of all its citizens).
I do not object against the presence of the protests regarding of all forms of racism, discrimination and the practice of slavery wherever it exists, but cannot approve of mass protests in the middle of a Coronavirus pandemic. The mass protests are illegal on the grounds of health because they place the lives of innocent non-protesters at risk as well as every protester taking part in them, because of the absence of social distancing measures being observed.
If the mass protests are to continue, however, against all the legal and health advice of the government, the scientist, the chief medical officers, and the police in the current Coronavirus pandemic which hovers close to the ‘r’ number of 1; and if mass protesters place their cause above all the lives that their actions will inadvertently bring about to innocent others, I would merely say this.
Regarding your current mass protests against all forms of racism, if you insist on marching today, I would ask you to march down a number of other streets also because I object to the limitation of the scope of your cause and the extent of its impact. While readily accepting that racism is still embedded in all our major institutions and way of life (including the Church, Society, and State), I would personally consider all forms of current 'enslavement' to be targeted instead of having the energy of the mass protesters disproportionately directed solely toward long-dead racists, past slave masters and their statue images instead of the current 'slave masters' who are alive and kicking.
If the mass protesters must march today, I believe that more benefit would be instantly received by honest society, were the protesters to also concern themselves with tearing down other devasting presences of modern-day ‘slavery’. Instead of seeing some policemen attacked and old statues defaced and pulled down, I would rather prefer to see thousands of protesters surround the hidden houses of trafficked ‘sex slaves’ until their capturers freed the women they sexually exploit? I would like to see thousands of protesters encircled the homes of known drug pushers throughout the land who ‘enslave’ the mind and body of their addicts until their pernicious drugs invariably kill him or her! I would ask the mass protesters to keep their drug baron captives in a siege position with all their deadly stash and deadly profits, until the police arrive, arrest them and prosecute them, and enable them to be and sentenced and imprisoned, whatever their colour!
Is it not as valid to protest in your thousands outside the homes of the industrial gentry who use ‘migrant economic slaves’ to work in their grand homes for the pittance of a weekly wage; and not forgetting your own humble cleaner who you may only pay a few pounds an hour ‘on the quiet’ to perform work that you would never consider doing yourself for such ‘slave wages’? Is it not as valid to protest outside every business and shop and works who pay their employees below living wage levels, and to remain there until the employer stumps up with an appropriate wage increase, or until their business goes bust? And not forgetting to marshal mass protest outside every shop, factory and business concern who either uses machinery and manufactures and sells products which uses the mineral products extracted from the earth by children earning pennies (elements which are necessary to make your watches, laptops, computers, and mobile phones etc) in the most intolerable of conditions.
Finally, not forgetting all the fashionable clothes and footwear which are produced in the sweat factories of the far east, and which many a mass protester daily wears as they comfortably march against a different type of ‘slavery’ than the ‘economic slavery’ their purchases probably continue to support and maintain today? Indeed, the very purchase of any cheaply produced item such as our supermarket food, and any manufactured imports that is only made profitable by the sweat of child labour or cheap adult labour, involves ‘a similar rationale’ in play that slave traders and colonialists brought to the consumer over centuries past.
Of course, none of these things can ever compare to the transportation and enslaving of black people, and the incurrence of their death through the search of profit, dominion, cheap labour, and discrimination. But if mass protesters feel morally compelled to march in public today (in spite of all legal and health advice not to do so), could not some of the energies spent pulling down statues also be diverted in shaming and ridding our society of all these other forms of physical, sexual, and economic dimensions of ‘slavery’ that are present in every city in Europe, England and America today?
I will never forget my Jamaican friend, Basil telling me, “Bill, passing a law against slavery and taking the leg manacles off an enslaved Jamaican didn’t set him free. Until and unless the Jamaican can move on with their future life without being governed by their past experience (however unjust and tragic that experience was), their minds and bodies shall always remain shackled to the past and they shall remain forever enslaved; not by ‘their white master’ but by their own thoughts and emotions they have not yet resolved, yet insist upon projecting onto others, sometimes rightly but also sometimes wrongly.”
I should tell you that Basil had two degrees which he obtained from an English university and that he worked within the Office of the Jamaican Educational and Youth Culture Ministry for the last twenty years of his working life. My recall of his words is those approximately spoken by him, but the message is conveyed was 100 percent accurate as recalled.
Love and peace Bill xxx