Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the Uganda-born broadcaster and columnist for The Independent, told a packed Greencoat Forum, on 15 March, 2005, that Britain needed to ‘go further and be bolder’ in building a multiracial society.
‘Our lives are not as connected as we want them to be in this age of globalisation,’ she said, speaking at the Initiatives of Change centre in London. She felt there had been two examples recently of how ordinary people were ahead of the politicians in this—the ‘very spontaneous response’ to the suffering caused by the tsunami and the demonstrations against the war in Iraq, where something was tying people of every class and colour together. (‘I met my first viscount,’ she joked.) ‘Human beings are born with this quite primeval connection to others,’ she suggested. 'We need to seek out the ties which bind us, rather than celebrate what divides us.' After all, diversity was not just an issue of colour: the white community too was hugely diverse.
Britain was ‘a strange country’ she said. If you compare the UK with the USA in terms of opportunities for black and Asian people, the UK picture is ‘utterly depressing’. They are excluded from the top 10 per cent of jobs with very few exceptions. Yet, if you look at the ‘interweaving’ of society, we (in the UK) are doing much better, she claimed. Fifty-six per cent of Afro-Caribbean children have at least one white parent or grandparent; and the figure for Asians is over 30 per cent. ‘But it is not enough… Countries need to change the power situation, and it certainly hasn’t happened.’ As much as her words, it was Alibhai-Brown’s feisty spirit that came across. This vibrant mother, small in stature, who had come to Britain to escape the oppression of Idi Amin, lives under police protection because she dares to speak out against both white supremacists and Muslims who are not true to the core values of their faith.
She told how her English mother-in-law from Sussex, who had never met a black person, welcomed her and her 10-year-old son from her first marriage wholeheartedly. ‘She and her husband immediately embraced him.’
She spoke movingly of the time in her Ugandan schooldays when she had played Juliet to an African boy’s Romeo in a school production of Shakespeare’s play. Her father had been so enraged that he never spoke to her again before he died—an experience that had given her passion, she said. 'I can't swallow a morsel if I feel injustice is being done.' She has recently dramatised her Ugandan experience in her one-woman show, ‘Nowhere to belong’, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s assessment of Britain today was sobering: ‘The last three or four years have seen a surge of racism that hasn’t been seen for a long time…. It is the young who hate each other the most and I think we’ve failed them.’ She emphasised the need to examine history. ‘Contact between Europe and Islam is not just the crusades,’ she said, listing various ways in which Islamic culture and learning had enriched European civilisation. ‘How can we talk about a clash of civilisations when we are completely intertwined?’ she challenged.
Islamaphobia was terrible, but such religious phobia was an issue for all of us. ‘It is Muslims today but it will be another group tomorrow.’ There were aspects of Western culture which she hated. ‘I worry about my daughter being subjected to [explicit] TV and binge drinking.’ Yet, ‘there is so much I have learned from living in the West—such as how to treat disabled people.’ It would be a shame, she added, if the next generation grew up ‘with the hatred we have had’. Possibly her most imaginative—if controversial—suggestion was that all immigrants in Britain should go on a one-day strike, which would highlight the contribution they make to British society.
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