By Gamal Nkrumah THE BEATIFICATION of the Brixton riots of 1985 in the Black British press at the time brought back poignant and passionate personal memories. I was a recent graduate of Sussex University and had moved to London for my Masters and a frequent visitor of one of my political mentors, the late CLR James who lived in a pitiful studio flat, bedridden but as sharp as a fiddle. Those were, after all, the dying days of my youth lyrics. Cyril Lionel Robert James, the immortal intellectual, the African-Caribbean insightful social theorist, was an exquisite essayist. He was a socialist and an anti-Stalinist dialectician who spent his last days in Brixton even as it was burning in the mid-1980s. However, the real reason I first started visiting his humble bachelor flat on Brixton road was to discuss his critique of my father in his seminal Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution first printed in 1977. His magnum opus, however, was The Black Jacobins, the Bible of Black leftist activists the world over. We discussed the works and ideas of this extraordinary Trinidadian Trotskyist even as Railton Road, Brixton, was up in flames, ablaze with race riots. The most solemn lesson of my polemic with CLR James as I reflect on the spectre of racial strife today in Brixton and Tottenham is that the rioters were revolutionaries. They were not looters. The orgy of mindless violence that wreaked havoc in the epicentre of the racial turmoil in Tottenham, north London, was a far cry from the revolutionary violence conducted by Black British youngsters well-grounded in the works of Kwame Nkrumah's Revolutionary Path and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. They were tutoured by the Trinidadian Trotskyist CLR James. They felt the full force of racism and police brutality and the frustration of unemployment in the Britain of Margaret Thatcher. The Black British rioters way back in 1985 understood the dynamics of Thatcherism. Today's looters are reminiscent of the Ice Warriors, the fictional extra-terrestrial race of reptilian-like humanoids in their hooded masks. But as CLR James would have said on his deathbed in Brixton, the means justify the ends. I do not believe he would have had a deathbed conversion, an ideological faith conversion. That would have been as maniacal as the Death Bed Confession, the notorious American heavy metal group. James was into Calypso and Rastafarian music. Hardship and hopelessness breed hatred and wanton and willful destruction of property and vandalism. The Dying Days, the original novel by Lance Parker triggered a series of monstrous scenarios, fictional and cinematic. The novel features classic series engendered Monsters, Ice Warriors and the War of the Worlds, the 1898 science fiction by H G Wells. How prophetic and penetrating were the insights of these writers and thinkers of yesteryear? The cost of clearing London from the wreck of the riots is estimated to be $200 million. British Prime Minister David Cameron described the rioting as "sickening violence" while British aggression on Libya so far costs some $7 billion. When CLR James first moved to Britain it was the Empire on which the sun never sets. When I first encountered CLR James in the 1980s it was a second rate power with imperial pretentions. Today Cameron presides over a Third World country waging wars it can neither afford nor win. These are the dying days of Britain as we know it.
