Life in remember it was early one 
summer's morning when I 
pottered out to the corner shop to 
find myself beset by ugly rumours 
of an Irish future. I stood under 
Mr. Khan's 'No Loitering' sign, 
scanning the newspapers and 
shaking my head. The National 
Office of Statistics study examining 
the ethnic breakdown of the '91 UK census returns had just been released and the 
news did not look good for some of my kind: 
Diran 
Adebayo , a 'One of the most telling ^erence differencess betwee betweenn th thee Caribbea Caribbeann an andd Asia Asiann settlement settlementss i inn Britain, Britain,'' wrot wrotee 
L social geographer and Oxford Professor Ceri Peach, in a widely quoted introduction, 'is that the Caribbean 
> Rumours 
of nn 
Irish 
Future 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA
face what I call An Irish Future, while the Asians face A 
Jewish Future.' 
A white-collar, blue-collar divide is emerging within 
Britain's ethnic communities, the study went on to explain, 
with growing numbers of Indians and Pakistanis enjoying 
rising prosperity, becoming owner-occupiers and joining 
the professional classes, while the Caribbean population 
remain marooned in the working-class, doing waged 
labour and council housed. 
Although someone of Nigerian parentage and thus 
not directly implicated in this part of the study, I knew that 
prognoses such as these have implications for all black 
folk resident here, whatever their background. And even 
if I had not wanted to be factored in, many of the 'papers' 
had already done this work for me, collapsing Black 
African and Black Caribbean into a swiftly digestible 
catch-all. 
'A hard-hitting report strips bare the taboos about 
race to reveal significant successes, but also glaring 
I 
white-collar, 
blue-collar divide 
is emerging within 
Britain's ethnic 
communities, the 
study went on to 
explain, with growing 
numbers of 
Indians and Paid' 
stanis enjoying 
rising prosperity, 
becoming owner' 
occupiers and join' 
ing the professional 
classes, 
while the Caribbean 
population 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
remain marooned 
in the workingclass, 
doing waged 
labour and council 
housed 
failure,' gloated The Daily Express. 'Among blacks, 
the report reveals alarming levels of crime and says 
half of all children live in home with no fathers....' 
Coming so soon after the rumours of inferiority 
that accompanied tomes like 'The Bell Curve' and 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENPORA
'The G Factor , these new tolls of doom 
were enough to make a sleepy eyed 
man congratulate Mr. Khan, give up the 
fight, and return to his bed. 
But the rumours would not keep 
away. Sky's Breakfast News is the first 
to come out with the dread word: 'There 
aregrowing fearsof a black underclass.' 
Inhouse heavyweight Adam Bolton is 
doing a news special at 6pm. 
The meat of the charge, as I saw 
it, were two-fold. We stood accused, 
like the long-standing blue-collar Irish 
before us, of having certain structural 
and behavioural fault-lines so embedded 
as to all but guarantee successive 
generations of under-achievement. 
Something was rotten in our ways of 
being and in the structures, in particular 
the family, the report implied, that surrounded 
them. 
Did I recognise any of this in my 
world, and that of those around me? 
Something I did instantly recognize was 
another, barely commented-on, piece of 
data from the report: 
'The black population is moving 
increasingly from the inner city to ethnic 
villages in the suburbs...'. 
I smiled as I thought of some of my 
• middle-class friends who had made that 
transition, just as their peers are doing in 
America. We would laugh about how 
galling it must be for the white suburbans 
who had left town to escape black 
folk, to find the very same moving into 
their street. White flight, black flight, 
moving on to sweeter pastures, because 
the city ain't pretty. I wondered whether 
it was the urban, rather than our family 
settings, as the report implied, which 
was the key institutional impediment to 
progress. Could it be that we were 
getting undone by the city? 
It was time fora walk, a tour of the 
neighbourhood. 
The first thing I do is to put my city 
face on. This face is quite hard, set and 
wary. It, without being categorically 
unfriendly, is an Tm not to be messed 
with' face, and comes with a roll in the 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. Z/No. 1 
shoulders and stride. 
It is a look that suggests, F hope, an 
ability to survive the hustles and dangers 
of the city. It is a look framed in response 
to the one thing that others know about 
me when they see me, and lays claim to 
one of the key qualities that young black 
people are famous for having: street 
smarts.
My city look is not a look I was 
born with. It is a face I have developed 
to deal with the underlay of suspicion 
and fear in the single-cigarette stores, 
with their bars and grills, with threats 
real and perceived. It is a face that I have 
honed in observation and part-imitation 
of my peers around me. It is, if you like, 
a cultural face. 
Now I'm ready. 
'I'm not black any more,' Larry 
Holmes, the former world heavyweight 
boxing champion, once said. 'I was 
black when I was poor.' His comment 
reminds me sharply how black com munities 
in the West are, typically, poor 
communities, black Western norms are 
poor people's norms. 
Brixton in a place that is generally 
on the up, but this trend is selective, and 
black men feature high on its casualty 
list. There are increasing signs of public 
distress. In the community hostels on my 
street, its residents walk up and down, 
(bite tlight black night, moving on 
to sweeter pastures, because the city 
ain't pretty. I wondered whether it 
was the urban, rather than our family 
settings* as the report implied, which 
was the key institutional impediment 
to progress. Could it be that we were 
getting undone by the city? 
inadequately provided for. Derelict 
middle-aged men have joined the traditionally 
white drunkards around the station 
and outside the cinema, and now 
overwhelm them in number. Many of 
changed hands and now targets the 
insurgent middle-class crowd. 
On the high road I bump into a 
journalist friend. He's been writing a 
story about the door policy of a new 
these people are not local. Like King's 
Cross, folk come from everywhere to be 
casualties on this doorstep. 
Liberal white middle-class people 
have been moving into many of the nice, 
relatively cheap properties to be had, 
and its business economy is certainly 
expanding. But few of the black business 
people at the Eurolink Business Centre 
actually live here. They are part of that 
flight to the suburbs. It is a place that has 
many cultural resources, a big arts and 
entertainment scene, black and white, 
and this is part of the reason why I'm 
here. But curiously, it is a place where 
more and more regular young black men 
are not wanted. 
The businesses that start up - often 
on public sector 'City Challenge' money, 
and cater to a local clientele - seem to go 
upmarket as quickly as they can. A black 
sandwich shop where you used to see a 
fair sprinkling of average, local guys, is 
now mainly patronised by folk in suits. 
Prices have shot up, and a few seats have 
been brought in to discourage the hanging 
out tendency. 
The old frontline on Railton Road, 
which functioned in its own way as a 
resource where unemployed men could 
hang out and hustle, has been cleaned 
out by police, and the 'Atlantic' pub, 
once a haven for black locals, has
black nightclub. The owner is only interested 
in attracting the 'new breed,' certain 
of ambitious economically active 
black women. If he could get these 
women, then the 'right' kind of men 
would follow here to the club. He did not 
envisage that either he, or the women, 
would want your average black man in 
there. All the grief and stresses of the 
streets would follow such guys in. If, at 
some point in the future, he had a club 
which was full of black women and nonblack 
men, the owner had shrugged, 
then so be it. 
I asked my friend if he had seen 
today's rumours and we agree that this 
so-called Irishness (in the sense of 'No 
Blacks - No Irish') is happening more for 
the men than the women. Three in five 
young black men in London are unemployed 
whilst black women are now 
doing as well in the workplace as their 
white and Asian counterparts. We're 
both worried about this new development 
in the prejudice exclusion that marks 
the attitudes of institutions to our young 
men. Not just the usual suspects, the 
police, education and criminal justice 
but now black businesses too. It is more 
evidence of a growing internalised suspicion, 
a communal belief in our own worst 
hype. 
In private, we often bond with one 
another so swiftly and in ways that give 
credence to the frequently invoked greeting 
which sees all black people as 'brothers 
and sisters', but translates less and 
less into the public arena. Step around 
and you find a certain harshness, a 
coarseness pervading our public dealings 
with one another, a reluctance to 
give one another the benefit of the doubt. 
You hear reference to it in the generic 
complaints of 'too much attitude' that 
black men throw at black women, and in 
the spat that's going on between a shop 
assistant and a customer in the pound 
shop that I pop into. 'Don't come with 
their difficult black ways,' she is saying. 
Even familiars keep their distance. I see 
black couples around me, but none of 
them are holding hands, or displaying 
other public affection Part of what goes 
with living black in the city is this love of 
the stern. 
My girlfriend, despite growing up 
in Forest Gate, another sharp end of the 
city, does not have this face. I am forever 
reminding her to put it on when she 
comes to visit me in Brixton, but it's too 
foreign to her spirit. The other day we 
were on the bus, and she thanked the 
driver when I got off. I was aghast. 
'Please don't be doing that when I'm not 
with you,' I pleaded. 'People will take 
your kindness for weakness.' She says 
we should resist this requirement to be 
stern. I say I do my best, but it's bigger 
than me. 
Later that night, we went to a party 
in Tottenham that a friend of mine who 
runs a hair salon was having. It was a 
private party, but there was still security 
on the door. We had a nice time until 
three youths who have been standing by 
the wall looking moody, started touching 
up my g irlfriend. I step in and have words 
with the main guy. It is city look against 
city look, with my adversary challenging 
me to demonstrate my blood skills 'if 
you're bad and brave enough...'. I don't 
want to go down that route. No doubt I 
am less proficient in these areas than 
him, but I'm not about to walk away 
when he's the one out of order. 
Eventually, security men arrive and 
break up our tete-a-tete. My girlfriend, 
upset, tells me that one of these days 
those city looks will do for me. 
My father was not interested in the 
city, and sought to remove me from the 
expectations and institutions of the northeast 
London neighbourhood I grew up in 
as quickly as possible. Wood Green/ 
Green Lanes, although never as poor as 
Brixton, was like a blue-collar, whiteworking-
class and immigrant area with 
that characteristic whiff of being set up 
for mediocrity that you smell in the local 
schools and services. Education for my 
parents was paramount and they cobbled 
together the money to send me to a feepaying 
school in the suburbs when I was 
6. At 13 I went, on a scholarship to a 
boarding-school in darkest 
Worcestershire. 
Both schools were fine in the ' O ' / 
'A' Level way my parents wanted them 
to be. There were, of course, few other 
black pupils there, and those that were 
tended to be scions of wealthy West 
Africans, not the kind that lived in an 
area like mine. After a decade of this, 
and three more years away at college 
where the racial make-up was similar, I 
had had enough. I was tired of the 
myriad bizarre encounters that occur 
when you're the flyboy in the buttermilk. 
Part of the reason why, when I 
returned to London and flats of my own, 
I stayed in black areas was to catch up 
with what I had been missing. I wanted 
to embrace my mainstream, use it as an 
emotional and cultural resource. Increasingly 
though, the constraints challenge 
the resource. 
If black norms in the West are 
poor people's norms then black Western 
orthodoxies are especially affected by 
street orthodoxies. Attitudes developed 
against the backdrop of the asphalt 
jungles have far greater purchase on our 
general mores than say, white workingclass 
ways have on the white population, 
simply by dint of the greater proportion 
we have living there. When those 
attitudes are glamourised and endorsed 
by a contemporary black popular culture, 
in music, film etc, which is heavily 
ghettocentric, then it becomes harder to 
prevent the collapsing of 'street, urban 
black' into 'real black.' 
This had much to do with my 
encounter with the guy at the party. He 
was coming to me on the basis that black 
men are fighting men. Italso explains the 
sting in the chat-up that is going on in 
front of me. 
A car, adorned with laser lights on 
its sides, has slowed to a crawl as its 
young male occupants chat up a nicelooking 
lady walking alongside. She 
has a bag on her shoulder and is wear- 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA
ing a cotton, knee-length dress. 
They want her to step in the car, 
come for a ride, come for a drink, whatever. 
She's cool, she doesn't give them 
grief, but declines the offer. They ask her 
if she's got a boyfriend, she replies it's 
not for them to know her business. 
'So who', you don't check brothers? 
You tink you too nice?' they tease 
her, before adding a loud 'Cha', and 
speeding off. 
The incident bothered me, partly 
because of the way the chirps had degenerated 
into abuse, but more because 
of the way these guys had accosted her, 
and believed that simply being street 
should be enough. When she had rebuffed 
them, their first instinct was to 
impute her racial solidarity, as if her 
behaviour had placed her outside some 
pro-black magic circle. 
The cultural triumph we can claim 
for redefining the sound and style of the 
city, has been won with some cost to us 
as a people. Street types may be 
marginalised by club owners and others, 
but they occupy a central space in our 
thinking in the sense that anyone who 
spends time amongst the mass of black 
Britons feels under some pressure exerted 
by the grip it has on 'black authenticity.' 
The great thing about the country 
areas, from a black point of view, is that 
there simply aren't enough of us there to 
form an orthodoxy and set of norms. This 
does lead to some country black folk 
displaying a backwardness or ignorance 
about black life as it is routinely lived in 
this country, but more often it frees up 
people from the preconceptions and big 
city baggage their London cousins carry 
around. 
I'm sure that my termly absence 
from London during those years helped 
me to have an open heart and mind on 
my return. During my time away I met a 
number of regional black folk who likewise 
displayed a greater charity, a spirit 
less diminished by metropolitan corrosions. 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol 2/No. 1 
I went through a mental checklist 
of my friends, amazed at how many of 
the more progressive, ambitious ones 
had some unorthodox, non-London element 
to their make-up. Maybe they had 
spent some time in Europe, or back home 
in Africa or the Caribbean, or simply 
travelled out to school or college. 
A friend of mine who teaches Twi 
in a local Saturday school which has a 
range of African languages on offer, tells 
me the increased take-up in the last few 
Afrocentric years has been negligible. 
The learning of homeland languages, 
I'm sure, could have a vital role to play in 
resisting the city's stronghold on our 
identities. 
I stop off at one last friend's house 
on Loughborough Road for a drink. He 
keeps open house pretty much and there's 
always a little crowd there, deep in 
global reasoning. The talk is of Jamiaca, 
of flight from the country areas to the city, 
and the big lousy development along its 
north coast: of how people are foolish to 
be deserting the hinterland of the island, 
where its milk and honey and plenty is, to 
go to the cities which do not have enough 
to provide for the numbers who flock 
there. The interior would take time now to 
bring to its former fruitfulness, they say 
too much of its has lain fallow for too 
long, but there is enough inside the 
myriad little lamps (lights?) beckoning 
the cars on their myriad little 
missions. You could make fat curves 
and swerves as the lanes widened on 
the approach, pick up speed once you 
hit your chosen one proper, and smile 
once again at the pleasure to be had 
behind a wheel. Even make a night of 
it as the native boy racers had taken 
to doing on the 11/l bridge 
ground to feed the whole cotmtry. 
We discuss the implications of the 
rumours, its place in a chain made up of 
Operation Eagleeye, and 'get tough' 
talk on immigration and welfare. We're 
to end all grudges 
Half a mile beyond this scene was 
an uglier one: two lighties doing the 
taser dance. The boy and girl staggered, 
stunned and disorientated, li*e 
agreed that war is going, a war in which 
the West is counting the cost of its 'encounter' 
with the East. A war that needs 
its heroes and villains, its cowboys and 
Indians, its Indians and Blacks. We need 
new arms and new terrains to fight this 
war, new bases of moving out of our city 
heartlands, and creating new communities 
which will develop new orthodoxies 
with less limitations. But most of it will be 
an inside job. We have to do something 
about this rampant romance with the 
urban; get it out of our beds and out of 
our heads. 
The City and bridges 
'Mas-ter Blas-ter! Ay, 
Blaster! M.B, M.B!' 
He dipped into the money bag that 
lay on his lap and, with an instinct for selfpreservation 
so foreign to his style on the 
field of play, flicked out folds to all and 
sundry. Small denomination bills, I grant 
you. but largesse none the less. This way, 
no-one would come to him and his status 
as the People's Champion was assured. 
Folk still spoke proudly of how he 
still lied on this side. Although I understood 
that he maintained a place here, in 
truth he lived out west. But he always did 
a tour of the soil that bore him during the 
build-up to Sports Day, stirring up the 
juices amongst his homies for the match
short-circuited automations, as five officers sniggered around 
them. One returned to the van to switch on the hosepipe and 
douse the screaming pair to the ground. The others moved in to 
cuff up the catch, slipping their batons under the restraints to 
lever them up and fling them into the van, beyond the reach of 
any street cameras. And I feared for the pair, for there seemed 
to be some malice in the officers' approach. No doubt, we 
would be reading of their fatal heart conditions come the 
morning. 
I pulled over by Nyam Food as the road left into the SI 1 
division. The front had been granted a fresh lick of green paint. 
You hadn't really noticed the flaky dryness of the front before 
but, as soon as you saw the paint you thought, yeah, it could 
really do with that. 
My pulse quickened as I approached the bridges, the 
gateways to everything else. A couple took you east, into the old 
City, but most took you to the end - or its beginning, you 
understand, from my direction - of the West. 
Aaah, the bridges! Their sight at night! A myriad little 
lamps (lights?) beckoning the cars on their myriad little missions. 
You could make fat curves and swerves as the lanes widened 
on the approach, pick up speed once you hit your chosen one 
proper, and smile once again at the pleasure to be had behind 
a wheel. Even make a night of it as the native boy racers had 
taken to doing on the W1 1 bridge, whirling in their customised 
Escorts and fat bumpered Fiestas, with indulgent police and 
emergency series in attendance. But all the while, your own 
efforts were dwarfed by the greater majesties around you. The 
murky expanse of water to right and left. So easy, so near to fall 
NIMBUS 
GALLERIES 
TEMPORARY NIGERIAN ART 
klBADUROAD, SOUTH-WEST IKOY1, LAGOS. 
VoL 2/No. 1 GLENDORA 
and barely a murmur down there. And the undaunted slabs of 
cross-stone, with their cross-arches, their craft, their repetition, 
erected to govern this expanse, and assert the triumph of men. 
So when I am asked, as I frequently am by some 
depressed new arrival, to talk of some beauty in the city, I return 
to the bridges. One such man, who had rashly joined us from 
his State across the Channel, told me that his capital city was 
full of such stony grandeur He said that the places of work and 
rest were blocks of polished white stone. He said that the 
suburbs, the places where our kind lived, was a different story. 
But the city proper flaunted untold proud statues and monuments, 
while triumphal arches lined the grand boulevards 
everywhere you looked. These great projects had begun, he 
explained, by bulldozing through the rebellious slum areas of 
the town, build in its place the city of stone and its vaulting 
ambition. I had to insist on our bridges. One of the delights I 
recommended to him was that, beyond their night towers, you 
could glimpse a thousand lights again, but this time of the 
myriad territories and villages which had sprung up around the 
original centres of the City and the West's End, to make up this 
town. For although my city had settled into a number of loose 
concentric rings- natives (!?) in the suburbs, newer arrivals of the 
inner city, and anyone who had got, or was born with their 
beachead in the wide spaces of the west • this had not been 
planned in any systematic fashion. Our city, like its late, great 
empire, had been built in fits of absent-mindedness. What 
monuments we had were scattered,our grand developments 
half-cut. GR 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts