Author’s Comments:
The absolutely brilliant, exceedingly principled, thoroughly well-informed, thrillingly entertaining, spellbindingly communicative; a comprehensively superb human being and the most unforgettable, regrettably late and profoundly missed British historian, writer and renowned Africanist Professor Basil Davidson in his universally acclaimed, and quite deservingly so, Africa documentary series captivatingly, meticulously and impeccably truthfully outlined the history of human habitation across the British Isles and most specifically so, and from the perspective of this commentary of mine, our island home Britain prior and subsequent to its detachment from mainland Europe; and doing so thankfully without an intimation of the customary, conceitedly embellished, fabricated and downright lying versions of British, and other histories too, arrogantly and demonstrably portrayed and so characteristic of the writings of many other white Caucasian, and particularly, British historians and most especially so where Africa and its Diaspora are concerned - as it simply wasn’t Professor Davidson’s style or inclination.
I don’t need to add anything either in terms of providing confirmatory information in relation to what Professor Davidson has written or for that matter in respect of any supposed elucidation of any of his works; for how dare one, even with the best of intentions in mind, seek to or could seriously think that something that was already brilliantly outstanding in every respect, a par above excellence and, furthermore, constituted the explicit genius of Professor Davidson needed improvement of any kind?
Personally, I wouldn’t dream of ever embarking on such a task since it would be a monumental and unrewarding quest and quite literally be tantamount to trying to teach one’s granny how to suck eggs. But for the express benefit of the legions of ill-informed, downright ignorant, patently stupid or brain-dead, self-absorbed, risibly delusional, intellectually challenged and the largely white Caucasian populace of the British Isles with their fanciful and deeply ingrained notions of what for them the word indigenous absurdly means and additionally who the first inhabitants of the British Isles were and where they actually came from; who subsequently followed them there; how long they stayed independently and culturally apart from or otherwise chose for whatever reason(s) to merge with other communities; when all of this happened and what meaningful contributions or otherwise this continuum of migration to Britain and its outlying islands over several millennia to the present day made to what the United Kingdom is today, that you our supposed “indigenous” white breed in 2015 advisedly should acquaint yourselves with the instructive writings, films, historical documentaries and the other excellent and detailed works of Professor Basil Davidson.
That detailed and vital introduction was to slam on the head and dispel the manufactured and preposterous myth that Britain always was and as such uncompromisingly, methodically and non-deviatingly must promptly revert to being the rightful bastion of all-white exclusivity that it previously was. Far be it from me to tell you morons out there who revel in this nonsensical kind of stuff how to get your personal kicks. But I’ve news for you, and frankly must tell you all that you’re incontestably barmy, for Britain, except in your vividly unrealistic imaginations, was never such a place. And barring a hypothetical or possibly even an actual ethnic cleansing holocaust of the sort which those of your sick mindset like to fantasize about and that would be globally resisted and vigorously defeated, such a scenario is unlikely ever to happen. But what the hell? If you pillocks like living in your fanciful virtual reality world entirely divorced from the actual realities of daily life and it’s how you essentially manage to get your rocks off – then dream on is all I have to say in response to you.
This poem I’ve calculatedly written is factually based on an actual occurrence which, at the time and previously, wasn’t by any means a unique situation. Since for most of the 20th Century this is precisely how the offspring of Black-White relationships were treated. And prior to the 1960s it was distinctly commonplace for a white mother in a relationship with a Black man, whether she was married to him or not and how stable or otherwise that personal relationship was, who became pregnant to have her baby statutorily and minus all consultation with the couple involved taken away from her, placed into care or else be exclusively palmed out to white foster parents, never loving Black families while the child’s mother was medically sectioned, no matter how absolutely unwarrantedly in every conceivable respect: medically as well as conscionably, that action was. But, of course, to absolutely sick white minds that white woman had to have had something psychologically wrong with her to have voluntarily gotten involved with a Black man in the first place; and thus this hapless mother was invariably and usually permanently confined to a “lunatic” hospital, while everything humanly possible and additionally compounded by zealous official backing was studiously and psychologically done by all these persons and agencies involved to calculatingly and socially engineer that child to reject its black identity and instead absorb for the sake of “whitening” itself, mentally and in terms of its own later procreation – the intentional breeding out of its blackness in other words – involuntarily submit to the identical practices as were carried out with Aborigine children in “civilized” Australia.
Ironically, the hospital where the child in this poem was conceived and was established in 1847 on the outskirts of the City of York as a lunatic asylum and over the decades had mushroomed not only into a huge but also a comprehensively sustainable mental hospital lavishly fitted out with everything from its own farm, enormous and perfectly well-manicured grounds, cricket playing field and pavilion, streamlined walkways, laundry facility, commercial shop, church and even a former burial ground and had itself been the longstanding “home” to some of those aforementioned white women who’d been medically sectioned there, was also the place where the parents of this child first met and both worked as psychiatric nurses. I honestly wish that I could say the rearing and youthful upbringing of this child was a satisfactory one; but it wasn’t. And predictably in those given circumstances most of what happened to her clearly wasn’t her fault. However, she did eventually turn her life around, found someone that loved her for who and what she is and reciprocally fell in love with him. They eventually got married, have been living together contentedly for years now and have a family of their own. All of which she has pleasurably and gratefully been able to share with her biological father who never gave up on her, and with whom just after her 21st birthday mutual contact between them was again made.