In my far from humble opinion, Dave Chappelle is by far, one of the funniest comedians alive. I cannot get enough of him and even though I know some of his more famous jokes, having listened to them several times over, his punch lines get me every time, sometimes reducing me to a state of helpless laughter with tears running down my face. Chappelle is funny, engaging, extremely professional and irreverent to the point of being a certified iconoclast. There is no subject that he holds sacred and when he roasts any identifiable person as he frequently does, all that you have in the air is the smell of burning flesh. For all these however his jokes are not just hilarious, they can be insightful to the point of being deeply philosophical. For what it is worth, I have to confess at this point that this piece is not about Dave Chappelle but this opening is by way of acknowledging that this piece is anchored on one of his very thoughtful discourses.
According to Dave Chappelle and he swears that this is a true story, one which as we speak is being written up as the subject of a high budget film or movie as being American, he must have described it. At the height of slavery in the USA, one extremely fortunate slave owner, white of course, as it had to be in those days had a slave, again as it had to be, a black African who was so diligent and talented that he made a lot of money for his master. In departure from the conventional wisdom of the day, the slave owner was moved not only to give his slave his freedom but gave him a large piece of land from which the newly freed man was to make his fortune if he could. Now that he was working for himself, the man bent his back and very soon had made so much of what he was given that he needed more labour in order to expand his holdings. The only way he could find labour was to buy slaves, Africans like him who were made to work on his land for no reward. He duly did this and set his slaves to work as they had never done before. He worked them so hard and treated them so harshly that his white neighbours were moved to call him to order to save those poor slaves from further gratuitous punishment as long as they remained alive.
According to Chappelle, the moral of this story is that under the circumstances of the day, there were two groups of men, the slave owners and the slaves and it did not matter which was the respective colour of their skin. After all, back in Africa, those nefarious slave ships could not have been loaded with their human cargo of men, women and children without the active connivance of other people who were as black as the slaves who were being sped away on their cruel journey of no return. Indeed, like the slave owner of the story some of those who facilitated the journey from the fatherland were as cruel or even more so than their white collaborators. The black collaborators were useful to their white colleagues who could assuage their guilt by pointing out that even those unfortunate slaves had their own people to blame for their pitiable condition. Collaborators such as this were not confined to people of African descent. At the height of the murderous persecution of the Jews in the death camps meticulously designed to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth in extermination camps built by the Germans in occupied Europe, some of the most sadistic guards were themselves Jews. The kapos as they were called, were indistinguishable from the other Jews whom they fed to the chambers where they were gassed to death and their bodies committed to ovens where they were baked to ashes. Psychologists may have some explanation for this kind of behaviour but I, lacking expertise in this field should leave them to provide their scholarly explanation for this strange phenomenon. The examples I have provided here are of course quite extreme but they are a necessary illustration of a situation which exists across a very broad spectrum.
For all its slave owning past and exploitative colonialism of a large portion of the world, Britain is now, to all intents and purposes, a so called democratic country which is ruled with the tacit consent of her citizens. This may be true but in reality there are still those who rule and those that are to be ruled sometimes at the whims and caprices of the rulers. In the past, both the rulers and the ruled were white citizens of Great Britain and they lived in a world of their own making. From their fog bound island, they sailed all over the world forcing their rule over people of different colours, faiths, civilisations and stages of human developments. From these places they extracted fabulous wealth with which they lubricated thesocial intercourse in their country to such an extent that even if the ruled lived in something close to abject poverty, they could at least revel in the glories of their status as joint rulers of their far flung empire even if the riches do more than filter down to them in tiny streams.
Their comfortable way of life took a beating during the Second World War but of course the extent of the thrashing did not filter into the consciousness of the people of Britain who at that point in time were virtually all white. Suffering from the grandeur of empire, the British flung their doors open to immigrants from the Caribbean countries and from the Indian subcontinent to do all those unglamorous jobs which the natives thought were beneath their dignity. In course of time most drivers working for London Transport were Commonwealth immigrants and the hospitals were staffed with nurses and ward attendants with Caribbean accents. Some seventy years down the line, those immigrants have also grown out of those menial jobs and are in serious competition with the natives for the best jobs and offices. Buoyed by immigrant vitality, some immigrants have stormed the ramparts of the British establishment and are on the verge of taking over power from the bemused natives who are nevertheless still revelling in the tattered glories of their lost empire. At this time, the mayor of London is the son of an Indian bus driver, the onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer, the officer next in authority to the Prime minister has roots in the Punjab province in Pakistan whilst the Home secretary, in charge of immigration is a lady whose Indian parents arrived from East Africa and the front runner in the race to take over the office of the British Prime minister from the rumpled Boris Johnson, himself the great grandson of a Turkish journalist and minister is an extremely wealthy man of Indian extraction. All these dramatis personae are now part of the ruling establishment even if the vast majority of immigrants and their descendants are permanently locked in a restive underclass, suffering from all the uncomfortable indices of their status.
Although some of the immigrants who have made their mark in British politics can be found in the Labour Party, the party of the working class, it is in the Conservative party, the party of the bosses that the immigrants gave found a real home. In the first place, the Labour party was the choice of most immigrants because it appeared to them that the Labour party was likely to stand up for them against the entitled aristocrats who laid down the law in the Conservative party. But as even from the catalogue above, the reality on ground is radically different as the children of immigrants are now ruling the roost in the Conservative party showing that the world is really divided into two; the rulers and the ruled and people find their group irrespective of their social background, their religion or, the colour of their skin.
There is a leadership struggle going on within the Conservative party at this time and one of the front- runners is a forty-two year old lady of Nigerian extraction. Her parents were of solid middle class stock, her father a doctor and her mother a university professor. They did not arrive in Britain to drive busses and were able to expose their child to education of the highest quality. She is now the Minister for Equality in the present government and her chances of becoming Prime minister after the leadership tussle cannot be discounted. She has done very well for herself and is set to do even better as time is on her side and her politics is right out of the powerful right wing of the Conservative party. Her heroes are Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill both of them Little Englanders who believe that the ruled were to be seen and never heard. As Minister of Equality who went to secondary school in Lagos she has declared in no uncertain terms that the rule book was going to be thrown at anyone who teaches any aspect of critical race theory which avers that the whiteness of anyone’s skin confers certain institutional privileges on their person. Any black person who has spent any time in Britain knows that the colour of their skin exposed them to indignities which a white person will not have to contend with over the period of their life time. This woman of Nigerian extraction however is so much in denial of what is proven fact that she is prepared to prosecute those that don’t agree with her. In other words she is quite prepared to be more British than the native British themselves and her reference to Nigeria has so far been to compare her native country very unfavourably with her new country thus showing that like the black man who treated his slaves abominably she was only playing true to type. Still, I wish her all the best but she needs being reminded of the story of Icarius who flew too close to the sun which melted the wax with which Dedalus his father had fashioned the wings with which he hoped they would fly back to their own country from the place of their captivity.