How did I get here? (2005)

 

I am 80 years old, having lived a varied and adventurous life, challenging and enjoyable as well as highly achieving, the latter because of good luck and/or being in the right place at the right time.

 

I am still active as the Director, on a full-time voluntary basis, of the Communities Empowerment Network which provides advice, support and representation for people having problems in education, mainly school exclusions, and employment such as grievances, disciplinary actions and employment tribunals.

 

I did my first tribunal in 1977, shortly before my departure for Nigeria, then progressing from military to civilian government. What an experience that was – a country with 300 different ethnic groups and 120 different languages. And I learned about Islam.

 

I have had a number of different jobs and I have loved each one, including the three from which I was fired because of fundamental differences of principle with my employers. They had their employers, too, of course, and I was as bit of a maverick, rather difficult to manage because I didn’t hesitate to challenge oppression and injustice.

 

The first was from a popular progressive secondary school headship in Jamaica for political reasons – I was politically active for the opposition party.

 

The second time was from the headship of large coeducational comprehensive school in North Wales for ideological reasons. The school had 1650 students on a unique Anglo-Welsh campus – the governors didn’t like the way I was implementing my brief to develop a genuinely comprehensive ethos and my somewhat relaxed attitude towards school uniform. We also got rid of corporal punishment. They chose to ignore the fact that within a couple of weeks we had managed to eradicate both vandalism and violence.

 

The third time was just preceding my retirement from the post of Principal Education Officer at the (then) Commission for Racial Equality – again for ideological reasons. However, on this occasion I was reinstated on appeal but suspended for the last month of my employment. They didn’t quite know what to do with me!

 

However, I bear no malice towards those who fired me. I don’t have the time or the energy for that. And they had their employers, too, of course – and probably they were only carrying out their orders! I actually sympathised with them as creatures of their job descriptions.

 

But what was it in my background and upbringing that brought me into these confrontations.

 

I was born into a religious Welsh peasant, working class family in a wholly anglicised area of North Wales. I spoke neither Welsh nor English properly. At home, in the Anglican primary school and on the council estate, communication wasn’t such a problem because we all spoke the same guttural ‘pidgin’.

 

It was when I entered the grammar school that my problems really began. It was middle-class and English despite being staffed by a majority of teachers who were Welsh and spoke Welsh. I was not the only ‘scholarship’ boy but I was conscious of getting everything ‘free’ – books, bus travel, uniform and school dinners.

 

During the first week I learned to keep my mouth shut because I spoke differently – I got belly aches, not stomach aches. I went to the lavatory, not the toilet. I shortened and flattened my vowels. I knew my place. The British class system did a great job in conditioning me. I developed a crushing inferiority complex

 

During the first term at the school I was never absent, never late. Thereafter, until the beginning of the fifth year, I was absent 50% of the time. I would get ready and go out to wait for the bus. As soon as I saw it coming, I would feel like vomiting. I would go home to where my mother seemed to be expecting me. ‘Mam’, I would say – ‘I’ve got a belly-ache’. ‘Go and lie down’, she would say – and then bring me a hot drink and my comics to read! It was whole lot better than school – and my mother truly loved me. Modern mothers are afraid of being fined!

 

What my parents gave me – especially my mother – was empathy on the one hand, a capacity to put myself into somebody else’s shoes, especially to appreciate what it meant to be the underdog – and also perhaps the most valuable thing of all, namely the capacity endlessly to day-dream and escape the drudgery imposed by poverty as a life-sentence.

 

But I also got good things out of school. I studied Welsh, my mother tongue, which I had lost like many others of my people because of class oppression and colonialism. It was not the most popular subject-option because it was timetabled alongside French but we had a first-class teacher, Mr Angell, who taught us poetry and old sayings although the school environment seemed hostile to our speaking what we were also told was the language of heaven.

 

It was when I went to university and lived in a Welsh-speaking hostel that I eventually learned to speak my language and made my first public speech in my third year. Almost inexplicably, I was elected President of the Students’ Union – and my inferiority fell away from me and I assumed my rightful, God-given place in the world.

 

There were lots of things to challenge. I joined the Welsh Nationalist Party but still retained the radical Marxist socialism my father had brought me up with. I became a human rights campaigner. I was a vigorous pacifist and resisted enlistment into the armed forces. My brother went to prison for his anti-war stand.

 

My mentor at university was Derick Jones, a charismatic divinity student from a family of poets and pacifists – one of his uncles, a small farmer, committed suicide to ensure that his son enjoyed the farmer’s reserved occupation rather than armed forces enlistment. The vibes were powerful.  There was only one way for me to go – the radical struggle for justice and respect.

 

While there I won a scholarship to study theatre and opera-singing at the University of Vienna, again almost by accident! I worked part-time for the Americans whom I regarded as dangerous warmongers – I wanted to study them at first-hand, and I saw them as unconscious victims of Western capitalism and the military complex. But they were seduced by status and affluence, of course.

 

I went back to Wales and fell in love with a vivacious Jamaican woman. We married at the end of the academic year and people came from miles around to witness this Black-White, Jamaican-Welsh union. We were in Jamaica a couple of months later, to teach at a highly progressive co-educational boarding school up in the hills.

 

My deep-rooted socialism took me into the ranks of the Peoples National Party led by Norman Washington Manley. I shared the excitement of the Fifties and Sixties. The short-lived West Indies Federation was established in 1958 and that was also the year when Jamaica became the first country in the world to cut off trade with apartheid South Africa.

 

Peter Abrahams, author of ‘Tell Freedom’ had recently escaped from South Africa and settled in Jamaica with his family. I was invited to speak to the Mandeville Methodist Young Men’s Fraternal, and I used Peter’s novel to illustrate the evils of racism that sustained colonialism and imperialism. The young men rose to their feet at the end and swore to help their Black bredren and sistren overseas to throw of their shackles. The local party adopted the policy at its monthly constituency management meetings, and in the summer of 1958 it became official policy eventually adopted by the government – the party was in power at the time – and immediately, despite having a credit trade balance, the Jamaican government cut off trade.

 

Things came together. No obstacle was allowed to stand in our way. We shared a profound socialist vision of a country embracing the principles of freedom, justice and equality. We were kindred spirits – ‘ de spirit ketch’ as they say in Jamaica. We were committed to wiping out the legacy of slavery and its supportive framework of class, the great British export overseas, and the sixteen gradations of colour by which you were placed on the social, political and economic ladder.

 

Politically, socially and culturally – and to a lesser extent economically – Jamaica was revitalising. My mother-in-law was a poet who wrote ‘Ancestor on the Auction Black’ with its inspiring refrain My freedom is within myself. She was the first editor of the Jamaica Welfare Reporter. She was the first Jamaican Black woman to head a civil service department as Chief Clerk at the water Commission. She was one of many to teach me the lessons of enlightenment, commitment and determined struggle. She was an inspiration. But these were also lessons we learned from people at every level of society.

 

We were also West Indianising the school curricula. Schools were creative in all subjects, not only art, music, drama and dance. Students moved at their own pace, according to their unique potential and need. Streaming and setting were dispensed with. There was self-testing and therefore no cheating. Group work was inclusive and integrated.

 

This was the legacy I brought back with me to the UK in 1966 where I quickly saw patterns of discrimination. Take young people of school age, for example: Black students are on average 3 times more likely to be excluded than others; children with special educational needs statements three or four times, and children in care 8 times.

 

95% of those we assist are from the Black communities for obvious reasons, disadvantaged through a combination of negative prejudice, destructive stereotyping and low expectations, a deadly interplay of attitudinal and institutional racism. We turn nobody away. We operate on the basis of partnership and solidarity.

 

We work with and gain inspiration from so many good people, scholars, academics, lawyers, researchers, teachers, activists and especially parents, children and young people who stay on the frontline and survive with dignity. They are too many to name and give their details. 

 

This is my measuring-rod for whatever I do now. Jamaica gave me an awareness and direction that has inspired me ever since. It gave me empowerment and fulfilment and the ability to withstand any threat. It has given me a capacity for limitless enjoyment in all that I do. Whatever happens in life, it brings a benefit, at least an opportunity to learn lessons for the future and thereby transform the world.

 

But I could not do all this without the support of my family which has done more than anybody else to keep me on the right track, prodding me gently but regularly to reflect and evaluate while planning for the future.

 

1782 words.

 

Gerry German

 

2 March 2008