Dear Catherine West MP

I am writing to express my alarm and objection to the race-based anti-immigrant pogrom playing out in Belfast. Do not attempt to normalise it. Do not pretend it is a recent phenomenon, or even an isolated occurrence. It is the latest eruption of a lethal pattern of violence, which has been deployed against migrants in the UK for decades.

This routine deployment of anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence, including by the Labour Party, has allowed this hatred to foment over decades.

For my part, I have been writing about the traumas of migration for twenty years, since the start of my career.

Until a frank conversation is had about racism in the UK and Europe, nothing will be achieved, and the far right will continue to monopolise on the crisis.

As I write, given the current state of the UK, I feel stuck in a revolving door. I have been petitioning you and your predecessors about the same issues for decades. Yet, here we are, and one feels almost resentful about having to petition you again. This is regrettable, given how, in a parliamentary democracy, one’s primary responsibility is to write to one’s local MP. So I persist, in the interests of democracy, such as it is.

It is not my job as a writer to "cut and paste" what I have already written, yet, tragically, this cut and paste illustrates the rut. In this I take no satisfaction. Rather, I despair.

This is a shameful state, but I recognise it because, if we’re honest, we’ll admit to having been here for a long time. The UK now sounds like a nasty, noisy, yappy, toxic little country. Shame on you for allowing it to happen, and for permitting the big instigators to go unchallenged.

I say that I am resentful about having to write to you repeatedly. But I am also frustrated, and to honest, bored. Having grown up apartheid South Africa, 58 years later, I am bored and resentful of racism, and how we entertain it, condone it, make space for it, tolerate it, minismise it, enable it, again and again.

I say "bored", because racism sucks the vitality out of life, the potential out of humanity, our sense of safety in the world, and our aspirations to excel and be excited by newness.

But instead of newness, we have oldness, with the same old racist colonial tropes playing out on a loop. Where, as an African writer, do I continue to look for newness in the world? For safety? I do so less and less in the UK.

The British establishment pays lip service to the Commonwealth. However, the unvarnished truth stands in sharp contrast to the fake veneer because in Britain discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic. In relation to the Commonwealth, Britain can only imagine itself at the pinnacle of an association in which little is held in common, and where only the UK enjoys the (plundered) wealth. From this superior position, Britain’s most entrenched vantage point over the Commonwealth is a racist downward one.

All of this leaves the UK in a perilous position. Britain has squandered relations, not just in Europe, but also around the Commonwealth. And when you find you need them, you will find that they have forged allegiances elsewhere. Migrants arrive, but British arrogance has left it blind to the realisation that they also leave.

*

Related:

There are no guardrails now on the right of UK politics: where Restore Britain goes, others will follow

‘My thoughts about the city have changed’: Belfast residents consider future after riots

Police were warned for months about addresses targeted in Belfast riots

Anatomy of a riot: How the Belfast stabbing was the spark to a fuse loaded with grievance and provocation

The far right

Reform UK

Africa Is a Country: Migration

Africa Is a Country: Britain