14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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Britain's 'walk on by culture'
The killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor whilst on his way home from an extra computer class, has transfixed people in Britain. His shy, but rueful grin has been splashed over the front pages of all national newspapers and featured on television over the last two weeks. For many reasons he has become a tragic icon.
He died on 27 November from a fatal wound to his left leg, leaving his femoral artery gushing with blood that took away his young life. Dami -- as his family called him -- was found lying in a desolate urine-stained stairwell of a council estate in Peckham, Southeast London. He was a five-minute walk from his home when he was found by a man who tried to stop the bleeding.
The young boy was born to Nigerian parents and had only arrived in London four months earlier. His father, Richard Taylor, 55, a senior civil servant in the Nigerian Ministry of Defence and his mother, Gloria, 49, had to sell their car and other items to come to Britain. Exorbitant cost of medicine in Nigeria forced the parents to seek medical attention in London for Damilola's sister who suffers from a severe form of epilepsy.
Whilst a police team of 80 are making conscientious efforts to track down the murderers, the circumstances in which this intelligent and highly motivated school boy met his untimely death raises many profound issues and questions about British society. It has led to some serious soul-searching and provoked moral outrage, pity, sorrow and shame in Britain.
Who killed Damilola and why? Was it fellow school children who stabbed him by prankish childishness or calculation? Or was it strangers? To what extent is his death indicative of the lack of moral values parents have failed to instil in their children, or has society at large become corroded by a prevailing "violence is good" ethos?
There is a great deal of speculation that he was killed by three youths who were seen in the area soon after the boy left the local library and was seen walking home. The youths are aged between 11 and 17. As one of Britain's most socially deprived inner city areas, the North Peckham estate in Southeast London, suffers from high rates of drugs, unemployment and is in serious need of regeneration for its graffiti-stained walls, dark alleys and very poor lighting. It is the norm for children of this estate to carry knives and surveillance in school corridors is carried out through CCTV cameras. Was Damilola's killer not much older than himself? And why does a teenager feel the need to carry a knife?
Some weeks before the young boy met his tragic death, he told his mother that he was being bullied at school by some of his peers. Bullying in some parts of inner city Britain is a sad fact of life that is on the increase. It occurs not only in the school but also outside the school's gates.
For moralising conservatives, bullying, along with indiscipline, lawlessness, and aggressive youths is attributable to bad and poor single parenting that is believed to rage on housing estates like the one in Peckham where Damilola briefly lived. However, residents of the North Peckham estate point out that crime rates in the area have decreased. Despite this, conservative voices still urge the need for more police officers to patrol Britain's streets in order to combat crime.
Liberals, on the other hand, believe the root of the problem lies in a growing poverty that has created widening social inequalities between rich and poor. Youths who are disruptive at school and then excluded parade the streets aimlessly and alienated from society. They are rejected and feel rejected. They embrace a gang subculture of violence and machismo which breed new social mores among gang members that glorify violence. The local MP for the constituency of Peckham, Harriet Harman said: "There is clearly a sense that this is an unequal society where you are blocked by the colour of your skin, and there is a feeling that you achieve status not by getting a degree or by qualifications but by having a knife."
A minority view being put forward is that the murder was carried out by West Indians against an African -- or what some have erroneously termed "the new racism." The Deputy Home Office Minister Paul Boateng, in a recent BBC Radio 4 interview, played down this speculative view. African and West Indian community leaders have come out to deny this claim. Certainly, the community in Peckham is inhabited predominantly by people of Caribbean and African origin who live cheek by jowl but there are far more issues that unite them rather than divide them.
Likewise, Michael Eboda, editor of New Nation one of Britain's largest selling black newspapers, also denies any mileage in the view that Damilola was killed because of rivalry, tensions and racism between Africans and West Indians. He says: "When New Nation went to Peckham last week, one of the questions we asked was whether the kids there thought this was an African/West Indian issue. Not a single one of them did. They didn't have time for theories of new racism. They simply said it was about kids with knives who were not afraid to use them". Similarly, many people in Britain have said that the child could have been a Turkish, Indian, English, Scottish boy and it would have raised the same shock and moral umbrage.
Perhaps the explanation of the death of this "brilliantly exceptional child," as Richard Taylor referred to his son, is due to many deep-seated reasons. In the larger picture, West Africans migrating to Britain to give their children a better chance in life is a grave indictment of the lack of social and economic services in their own countries. If Nigeria's riches were used to develop its health and educational sector, provide jobs and affordable drugs for its people instead of being allocated to pay the country's debts, perhaps the Taylors would have remained in Nigeria. Richard and Gloria Taylor will have to live with the fact that to improve the quality of life for one child they lost the life of another. Richard Taylor insists that had his son stayed in Africa, he would still be alive today, for bullying and school gangs do not exist in Nigeria in a culture where discipline in schools is matched by strong moral values both in the classroom and within the community. Very bluntly, he said of Britain: "Presently, the family value has been bastardised and allowed to go to the dogs."
Minister for Home Affairs Jack Straw equally condemned the "walk on by culture" in British society, whereby, lack of social responsibility and selfishness have allowed people to turn a blind eye to others in distress.
On Thursday 7 December, more than 1,000 people, including Members of Parliament, attended the funeral. It was highly emotional as it replaced what should have been a birthday celebration for the young Damilola.
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