A Savage Culture Revisted

“It is definitely impossible to write about any injustice with a muffled pen; for outrage demands the hot of belief for clarity” Remi Kapo

And hot ink indeed! This book has it all. It is a mixture of the personal story of a boy from Nigeria who suffered many injustices at the hand of a racist education and care system here in Britain in the 1950s and of a young man who became “woke” to the continued and ugly forms of racism in Britain and highly skeptical of white liberalism. He identifies the mental torment many black people who came as children endured, partly revering a “motherland” we were raised to love and respect, partly knowing that same “mother” is the country keeping us from self-rule whilst simultaneously profiting from our resources. And points out the systems we find ourselves in, which we try to embrace, are definitely not made with ‘us’ in mind. 

Alongside his own journey, the book is filled with lessons from history, from the birth of the slave trade to the totally racist immigration, repatriation, and criminalisation policies of the 80s and 90s, which keep us in a second-class status. 

This book left me sad and somewhat speechless as during my late teens and early 20s I was blind to the events taking place around me, much like many of our current youth are blind and want so desperately to fit into a system that has so indoctrinated us all, we cannot even see that the dial of racism has barely shifted in the past 40 years.

The book is also a call to action. And just as here in Birmingham our only progress is that finally every sector from housing, criminal justice, social care, and health and our leadership is finally owning up to being institutionally racist, very little progress for the black man or woman has been made. It’s a MUST-read.