AFRICAN DESCENTDANT TRAPS BRITISH ROYALTY

Africa must do more than the addition of their descendant into Britain’s monarchy, writes Okello Oculi

The history of England re-visited its past with the revelation on November 27, 2017 of the engagement of Ms Meghan Mackel (a famous actress with an African-American mother and Irish father), and Prince Harry, Princess Diana’s second son. It is a sparkling peak during ‘’The International Decade for the Rights of Peoples of African Descent’’ (January 1, 2015 to December 30, 2024). In 2007, archaeologists found the skeleton of ‘’a female of Black African descent’’ with roots in African troops and administrators in the Roman conquest and colonisation of England. Subsequently, a black African was a royal trumpeter for Tudor kings: Henry V11 and Henry V111.

England’s revenge against past African conquest would, from 1550 to 1880, yield enormous wealth for thousands of individuals and institutions from sugar cane, coffee, tobacco and minerals grown and extracted by millions of Africa’s most productive youths exported to the Caribbean and the Americas. England later imported over 1,200 Africans who fought with British colonial troops against America’s anti-colonial revolutionaries. Racial discrimination in jobs and denial of government funds to support their making a living trap ensured their poverty. In 1787, 4000 of these ‘’loyalists’ ‘and their white wives were deported to Sierra Leone.

Lacking official funding support, experience in managing commercial agriculture, commerce, industrial production, these colonists failed to match the economic productivity by poor white Britons shipped from prisons to Australia. Sierra Leone’s immigrants suffered from the rejection of productive work shown by African former slaves in Brazil, Guyana and elsewhere freed from cruelties and humiliations of labour under slavery.

Their deportation severely crippled increase in the population of Africans in Britain. In 1772, there were 15,000 Africans in London, representing a mere one per cent of London’s total population. In 2011 the total number of Afro-Caribbeans and Africans in Britain was a mere two million (3 per cent). This limited increase was boosted by the importation, in 1948, of Caribbean workers to help rebuild Britain after the devastation of her population by the Second World War. Nigerians and Ghanaians also increased in numbers: arousing a rush of legislation to limit immigration. For a country that had exported and supported immigrants to increase their population in Kenya, Southern and Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), South Africa, the Americas and Oceania, Britain has continued to remain bad-hearted over welcoming immigrants from Africa. Commonwealth Africa has remained amazingly silent and indulgent over this British virus.

The culture of racial discrimination remains resilient. Prime Minister Theresa May’s irritation - on November 30, 2017 - with President Trump’s re-tweeting anti-Muslim pictures posted to him by a racist British group, ‘’Britain First’’, is evidence of determination by political leaders to erode and control this problem. That, however, offers no agenda targeting African immigrants, including eradicating lack of access to high quality education and ceilings that deny top position in state and private sector institutions.

While showing me around London in June 1977, George Gelber (now

AFRICA MUST INSIST ON CAPTURING AND DOMESTICATING THE INTENSIVE BRILLIANCE AND HARD WORK WHICH MS MEGHAN MACKEL WAVES AT SKIES ABOVE HER ENTRY INTO THE BRITISH ROYAL ORBIT

Lord Gelber) expressed concern that Afro-Caribbean youths were showing attraction by low-self esteem models prevalent among poor African-Americans locked in slums in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Held down by poverty, teenage pregnancies and violence, their role models are star athletes, footballers, basketball players, pimps or fashion models. London’s Telegraph newspaper reported the case of a Jamaican woman who saved her son from falling out of school by taking him back to Jamaica where seeing black political leaders, engineers, architects and other professionals revived the boy’s self-esteem and ambition to become a top student.

British schools have been accused of despising countries of immigrant parents, thereby, undermining the pride and self-confidence of their children in schools. Some Nigerian and Ghanaian parents have succeeded in countering negative effects of racism and enabled their children to match or top scores in nation-wide A Level exams. Investment in positive image-engineering and irrigation of talents in female youths in engineering, mathematics and inventions is vital.

There is much potential for use of television and film documentaries for ‘’telling the story of women from the point of view of women’’ – to quote an Indian film-maker – as a vital mission for promoting freedoms and welfare of women on the continent and among African Diaspora communities. African governments should support the production of positive information about Africa for Diaspora youths; as well as ‘ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES’’ of Europe, Asia, the Americas with the benefit of Diaspora scholars and film-producers exploiting rich library resources and new communication tools.

Nigeria has been focused on structural roots for ‘’good governance’’. A BBC documentary on the Queen’s visits to local communities and chatting with ‘’invisible officials’’ running affairs, offers a worthy model. Similar documentaries on cultures of healthcare delivery; officials relating with citizens, and academics and politicians relating with constituencies deserve such investments.

A 1936 World Trade Fare showed the domination by British aristocrats of new industrial inventions and patents. The tradition of intensive high quality education for the country’s ruling political, commercial, industrial, and banking leaders must be noted. The historian J.P. Taylor recalls reading 1,500 books (including all classics in English literature and history) to prepare for an interview for admission into Oxford University. Britain’s ‘’best and brightest’’ confront Africa’s officials whose ignorance and ‘’intellectual laziness’’ become crimes against humanity and national sovereignty. The African Diaspora must aid Africa to do what Japan’s leaders did for themselves, namely: copying models used by Germany, France, Britain and the United States in breeding their own ‘’best and brightest’’.

Africa must not stop at revelling about the symbolism of adding their descendant into Britain’s monarchy. They must insist on capturing and domesticating the intensive brilliance and hard work which Ms Meghan Mackel waves at skies above her entry into the British royal orbit.