DEM LIKE OUR STYLE
Lin Sampson visits Brixton, London, where everyone wants to be black
BRIXTON really phwashes me. On the surface it shines and glitters like a disco ball — its witchery casts a special light through the fog. The Brixton style of high-toned hairdos and Jacquard turbans is unmistakable.
There’s a spirit of generosity that spills into eating — tiny street eateries, offering anything from Japanese tofu and pork dumplings to Jamaican jerk chicken.
“Aright you jus’ taking this my darling and eating it?” A man thrusts an ackee, a Jamaican fruit, into my hand. “It’s real bashy.”
There are lots of brukouts (parties). There’s a block party tonight, its attendees wearing cargoes of gold chains freighted with rings. The men are in flamboyant darkers. Women wield shiny prams filled with babies.
But it’s not all splash. Respectable middleaged people dress in go-to-church hats and gloves, grey hair pulled into buns. An exhibition called Black Georgians documents the ancestors of black London, like Phillis Wheatley, born in 1753, who started life as a slave and went on to become a celebrated poet.
Arriving in Brixton, I am squeezed by a crayon-coloured depiction of Bowie, who was born here. He died weeks ago, but dead flowers still remain and someone has left tins of canned tuna. I’ve seen nobody starving, but there are street scuffles about, and on every corner a Bible-basher with a megaphone. Police sirens scream all day.
Brixton has always been powered by music: children jiggle to the groove on the bus, men sing behind vegetable stalls, reggae streams through the markets. An ordinary question might receive a rapped reply: “Don’t smack me, ’cos I come from Hackney.”
It might have been a different place if one Friday afternoon in 1981 a police squad hadn’t stopped to help a young man, Michael Bailey, who had been stabbed. A group of black youngsters assumed he was being arrested, and repressed anger at police racism flared into a conflagration. For three incendiary days, rioters — predominantly young black men — fought police and set fire to buildings. Molotov cocktails were thrown for the first time in mainland Britain.
The great Brixton dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson spake it thus: it woz in april nineteen eighty wan/doun inna di ghetto af Brixtan/dat di babylan dem cause such a frickshan/dat it bring about a great insohreckshan . . .
The hurt dated way back to the 1958 Notting Hill riots, when whites formed violent mobs and burned down the homes of Caribbean immigrants. The Brixton riots put a match to an already lit fire. The area had long-standing threads of anguish — a high police presence and the “sus” law (a “sus” was a suspected person) under which anyone could be stopped and searched.
“The impact of the Brixton riots,” says Labour MP Diane Abbott, “should not be understated. The idea that black people could stage an insurrection in the heart of the capital was significant. It made British politicians take racism and racial injustice seriously for the first time.”
In the aftermath, a range of measures, including the creation of an independent police complaints directorate, were introduced to improve trust between police and minorities. Racial tensions have eased, but every once in a while there is a break-out.
Black Brixton began in earnest in 1948, when an advert in a Jamaican newspaper offered cheap passage to anyone who wanted to work in England. Many immigrants settled in this bleak working-class district south of the river, where suburbanites from elsewhere in the southwest only ventured if they wanted an exotic spice.
Right from the start, the Brixton markets were stonking — brilliant with colour and strange fruits with “blood on the leaves and blood on the root”, bread plants and pigs’ ears. The place was rife with acts of casual kindness not seen in the more uptight areas of London.
‘Now they want to buy our place up for millions — dem like our style’
Brixtonians always knew how to keep up a highly lit style on a shoestring — but now it’s more about money than style. As London property rockets, Brixton has become prime real estate; £500 000 (over R10-million) might buy you a one-room flat.
“Not everyone is happy,” says Danjan, a Brixtonian with a hat flashed with a mosaic of felt flowers. “Mos def wees always been a problem for the English. Now they want to buy our place up for millions, dem want to live wif us because wees knowing the life. Dem like our style.”
Will the new money cast out the cool? Or will snooty neighbours pat Brixton down into naffdom? The next decade will tell.