BABYLON’S BURNING
Another struggle we had was against the ‘sus’ laws, or the law of suspicion. Police officers could arrest you merely if they thought you were suspicious. She or he didn’t need a witness or a victim, a complaint or an order from above – an officer just needed to not like the way you looked and you could be arrested. It was supposed to be used for crime prevention, but the police used it as a way to discriminate against our community, and they didn’t hide the fact that they used it in a racist way. I remember one officer saying that, as far as he was concerned, every Rastafarian was suspicious. If he wasn’t wearing a hat and his locks were out, he was probably high on marijuana, and if he was wearing a hat, he was probably concealing a gun up there.
I’m proud to say I took part in political actions against this law. Yes, I did a few awareness-raising concerts and performances at demonstrations but, it has to be said, our most effective action was rioting. But we didn’t call it rioting; we called it uprising.
In 1981 uprisings spread across the UK, and I travelled all over the country to be a part of the action. In St Paul’s, Bristol, in Brixton, London, in Toxteth, Liverpool, in Chapeltown, Leeds, in Handsworth, Birmingham, and many more towns in many more cities, people had had enough of the injustice, racism and subjugation that was entrenched in police and state.
Tensions between the black community and the police had been a fact of life from the mid-1970s (well, they had been a fact of my life since then), but black history tells us they went back way before then – to the Notting Hill riots of 1958, for example – but when my generation rose up in the early ’80s, the whole country sat up and took notice. The soundtrack of 1981 was provided by the Specials, who had a number-one hit with the brilliant ‘Ghost Town’ – and it still sounds fresh over thirty-five years later.
My first major uprising could be seen coming very clearly months in advance. The police would drive around London in SPG (Special Patrol Group) vans, shouting insults and taunting us. Or they would stop their vans then surround and search us. One night, I was in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, and I heard somebody shout that the talking was over; the time had come for war. We were playing pool in the Atlantic, the big pub on the corner of Railton Road, when we heard some commotion. Somebody ran in and shouted, ‘Man! Babylon’s burning!’ So we went out and were soon caught up in it.
The frontline in Brixton was a community under siege. There was corrugated iron everywhere, poor housing, and something like 50 per cent of black youth was unemployed. Constant police harassment and Thatcher (along with the then Home Secretary, the aptly named William Whitelaw) talking about people feeling ‘swamped’ only ratcheted up the tension.
I still have a very strong sense of the smell of that uprising. I wrote a poem with the line: ‘Bonfire night in the middle of summer; fireworks smell like burning rubber’. And that’s what I remember – the smell. And the sound of the police sirens, which were different back then – more of a drone and not as high-pitched as they are now.
The air was hot and sticky and the youth were out on the streets arming themselves with bricks. There were so many of us. I remember wondering where all these young people had come from. They just appeared. In those days, if you walked past another black person, you tended to nod to each other. It was like an unspoken knowledge that in the future you might need to rely on that person. Well, that time had come. There was no question over whose side you were on; and in an uprising you found yourself working in co-operation with someone you’d never met before.
There was real solidarity. Me and another guy rescued a youth from the clutches of the police. They almost got me, but there was so much excitement going on that I evaded capture. I got hit in the mouth by another guy aiming at a cop, who immediately apologised, saying, ‘Sorry, brother.’ Basically, when you’re in the thick of it you don’t analyse it, but looking back it was about venting years and years of pent-up anger.
People in the media would have their cosy debates in TV studios, not understanding the reality of life on the frontline. We were angry; we wanted to hit back at Babylon and burn it down. Some people asked, ‘Why downtown?’ as in, ‘Why riot in our own neighbourhoods?’ The truth is we had nowhere else to go. The police had come to us using constant intimidation tactics and racism, and those areas of those cities where the uprisings happened were our space. We couldn’t say, ‘We’re gonna pool a load of people together and go to another part of the city’ – uprisings are not organised like that. If Babylon was going to come into our area, using state-sanctioned brutality, we were going to fight back. People were sick of being beaten down, beaten up and picked on.
When I look at what people have to put up with from their governments, I’m surprised they don’t rise up more often. When you live in a community under pressure, where the living is hard and the policing racist and uneven, you can feel the tension build and build, and it can take just one incident for it all to kick off. The most recent uprising in August 2011 started because of police being cleared of shooting dead yet another black man, but it quickly descended into looting. I never looted, but I can see how disadvantaged and unpoliticised young people might see an uprising as a chance to accumulate stuff any which way they can, especially if it has a label on it. I think it’s all part of the legacy of Thatcherite greed – the privileged class will do their tax swindles and shady banking but the people on the streets, that’s their version of it.
But back in the 1980s, after all the times we’d been stopped and searched and slapped in the face by the police, this was our opportunity to let it all out. We wanted to get back; we wanted to vent our anger. After the riots of April 1981 the government was forced to set up an inquiry, which was headed by Lord Scarman – a judge and fully signed-up member of the establishment – who found that the sus law, and the way we were being stopped and searched, were just two of the contributory factors that caused the uprisings.
We had to rise up. Conversations and inquiries weren’t going to do it; debates on television and paying educated black people to tell us to calm down weren’t going to do it; we had to protest, and take ‘actions’ on the street to get this law abolished, so that’s what we did, and that’s how we won.
We rose up again in September 1985 after police shot Cherry Groce in her home in Brixton. They were trying to arrest her son, my friend Michael Groce, on firearms charges. Michael wasn’t there when they raided, but the way they brutalised his mother meant that she was left crippled and spent the rest of her days in a wheelchair. When this uprising started I was in the East End, but the message got to me via some political activists.
A couple of friends and I jumped into a car and drove to Brixton. We were stopped on the way by police who said we couldn’t go any further, so we parked the car and went by underground. In order not to bring attention to ourselves, we bought return tickets, but when we reached Brixton station the ticket office had been abandoned. As soon as we hit the streets the police hit us, and we resisted.
On another occasion I was arrested and taken in for questioning before I was able to reach the frontline. The police said they had intelligence and they knew that I knew who had organised the riot (their words). I didn’t know, of course, and the uprising was not organised, but as a way of making me talk a policeman put me in the corridor and said, ‘Would you wait there for a moment, please?’ Then these other policemen came past and, one by one, they stamped on my feet. It was torture; they would say things like, ‘Sorry, young man’ or ‘I didn’t smell your feet there’, but every one of them did it.
At one point I saw a woman coming towards me in civilian clothes and I thought she must be a probation officer or a visiting magistrate. She looked so innocent, so I thought she wouldn’t do anything, but then, crunch, her stiletto came down on my toes. It hurt more than the men’s shoes and, unlike the men, she stayed in position for a while and twisted her heel. She looked right at me and said, ‘Is it true what they say about the size of men’s feet?’ and ‘Is it true what they say about the size of black men’s feet?’ I could hear the other officers laughing in rooms off the corridor. I stayed silent.
She went, and a few minutes later I was called into the interview room and was asked if I was ready to talk. I couldn’t talk, I knew nothing, but every time they stepped on my toes or slapped my face I stored up the anger and, when they let me out, I went downtown and let all that anger out.
The problem was that the more ‘famous’ I got, the less I could actually do. One night in Brixton a policeman was coming towards me; he had pulled out his truncheon and his whole demeanor told me he didn’t want to stop for a chat. I looked around for a brick or some kind of weapon with which to defend myself, but there was nothing, and then he shouted, ‘What are you going to do now, read a poem to me?’ At that moment I realised that when it came to actions on the streets I had to know my limitations and understand that I couldn’t disappear into the night anymore.