Rahima’s case also involves multiple sources of unhappiness: she grew up as her poorly mother’s primary carer, with little help from her stepfather and none from external agencies such as social services. Rahima connected her woes not only to a ‘lost’ childhood, but also to a ‘lost’past, seeking wider socio-historical explanations for such feelings:
When you’re Black and Caribbean, your parents are not African Black, so your ancestors were slaves and you’re lost. You don’t have any status. You’re looked down upon by other cultures. They don’t understand we’re this way because we’ve been indoctrinated.
Rahima’s search for and eventual conversion to Salafism was also clearly inspired by her mother’s own journey. Rahima described her mother as an unconventional religious Christian, very ‘anti-establishment’, and moving towards evangelical Christianity in her older age. Rahima’s mother’s identification with the Black activism of Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers and Rastafarianism of the 1960s and 1970s pointed to an ongoing generational struggle for both Rahima and her mother to resist and “reclaim some form of positive identity out of racialized discourse”, which Foucault calls “reverse discourses” (Foucault 1981:101, cited in Weedon 2004:17):
I was blown away after seeing a video of Louis Farrakhan because we’re not taught about the inventions of Black scientists in history. We’re portrayed with a bone through the nose and we’re brainwashed to think Black people are stupid! I wore a big Malcolm X hat the more conscious I got, but I didn’t hate white people, I wasn’t brought up like that… I was still religious in the back of my mind.
Consequently, Rahima’s own journey also intersected with theories of Black genocide, which made some of the same arguments as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam in relation to the theory of eugenics. Rahima made particular mention of her belief in maafa, a term used to describe “the centuries of global oppression of African people during slavery, apartheid and colonial rule”[1], where Black people were indoctrinated to believe they were naturally ‘stupid’, and others saw them as untrustworthy, thieves and criminals. Her sentiments fit Weedon’s (2004) analysis of how in societies “where there is more than one ethnic group and/or tradition in play [the] dominant versions of history and culture and the forms of identity that they encourage, often function to exclude, silence, stereotype, or render invisible those who do not fit within hegemonic narratives” (Weedon 2004:24):
Black people are always trying harder because they’re looked down upon. So, if we have a child it’s deemed typical of a Black person. In a film called Maafa 21 I learned that that Black people aren’t educated because there’s a fear of them uprising.
Her experience clearly reflects the dilemma of inclusiveness, identity and belonging, typical of postcolonial descendants growing up in a culturally diverse society such as Britain. It also exemplifies the fact that British national identity still relies “on narratives of empire that celebrate Britain’s imperial past”, but from the viewpoint of the colonisers, not the colonised (Weedon 2004:26).
[1] “The title [of the film Maafa 21] comes from the Swahili term ‘maafa’, which means tragedy or disaster … while the number ‘21’ refers to an alleged maafa in the 21st century (although beginning in the 19th, which the film says is the disproportionately high rate of abortion among African Americans” (Wikipedia).
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