Zephaniah – The people’s prophet and poet

On December 7, 2023, to the consternation of Britain and the world, an indomitable and fearless spirit took flight.

Benjamin Zephaniah, patron saint of the ghetto, Rastafarian poet, playwright, author, actor, performer, martial arts master, teacher, mentor and much more, died after suffering a brain tumour some eight weeks earlier. The fact that few outside his immediate and extended family knew of his illness meant that the announcement of his death was met with deep shock and sadness across the nation and internationally.

There has since been an outpouring of grief and valediction in communities, in print and electronic media, and among the many schools, colleges, student societies and other audiences with whom Zephaniah shared his work over the last four decades.

This in itself is extraordinary when one considers his early life, and especially his schooling experience and outcomes. He was dyslexic at a time when black children were routinely classified as educationally subnormal and any neurodiverse conditions were seen as evidence of their ‘subnormality’ and assumed innately inferior intelligence. He lived with domestic violence, directed against his mother especially, with not much attention being paid to the impact of that on his well-being and on his disposition to learn.

School should have been a safe and supportive environment for him and students like him, but it was the opposite. Born in 1958, Zephaniah spent his early childhood in Handsworth, Birmingham. By the time I started working there in 1968, while a student of youth and community work and one year later conducting a study on ‘race in the inner city’ for the newly established Runnymede Trust, Zephaniah’s mother had escaped domestic violence, taking young Benjamin with her. With no women’s refuges to turn to at that time and with racism rife in pretty much all areas of life, being rendered homeless while suffering the trauma of leaving your other children behind must have placed a phenomenal strain on mother and son alike.

Zephaniah tells of ending up in a borstal, a correctional institute that was more concerned with punishment and containment than in supporting him in dealing with the chaos in his life and equipping him to make the right choices about his life chances.

The local community was not a particularly safe place for black young people, either. They were labelled and othered at school, and even more so, on the streets, with the police treating them as if they were in undeclared occupied territories. Police harassment, beatings, framings and criminalising of young black males were as prevalent then as now. My experience of this type of policing in Handsworth, in Notting Hill and in Moss Side, Manchester, is what led me to co-author with Derek Humphry the book, Police Power and Black People (Panther: 1972).

In his own words:

Interviewed by a talk-show host about how he got into writing poetry, Zephaniah told the audience:

“I didn’t leave school. I got expelled at 13. I couldn’t read and write, and even now I am very dyslexic. The teacher said to me outside the school, ‘You are a born failure. You’re going to end up dead or doing a life sentence.’ To be fair, I did get on the wrong tracks, I got into trouble with the police and everything.

But I remember waking up one day and some people were out to kill me. They had a gun, coming to kill me, and I was sleeping with a gun underneath my pillow. And I woke up and I remembered that teacher saying I’m going to end up dead or doing a life sentence and I decided, ‘Right, I’m going to prove you wrong.’ So, I got into a little Ford Escort and drove to London and slept in the car in Peckham. Sound systems were big then and I used to do some toasting. There was the alternative comedy scene, and I started doing gigs on Channel 4, which was big into alternatives then. It was also a time when you did not see a lot of black people on television.’

Written off

Written off by school and living on the edge, precariously, he made some life-changing choices and used his voice to interpret British society to itself, doing so in the only language he knew and drawing upon his experience of the society and its institutions. And the more he held a mirror up to Britain as a black British male, the more his voice became amplified as he presented at one and the same time as poet, journalist, social analyst, social historian, writer, actor and teacher.

In doing so, he reinvented poetry, creating a new genre, a process in which his contemporaries, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean Binta Breeze, Mutabaruka, Mikey Smith, were also trailblazers. Smith was born four years before Zephaniah and like him, died far too young, a victim of the very barbarism he railed against with his equally uncompromising voice. Zephaniah and those contemporaries created and validated new forms of knowledge production and new definitions of the nature and purpose of poetry.

RADICAL CULTURAL

Reacting to his death, many commentators have described Zephaniah’s work as revolutionary. It is indeed so in a number of respects. The first is the spiritual underpinnings of his work and his unapologetic expression of the principles and values of Rastafarianism. In his Guardian obituary (7 December), James Watson says of Zephaniah:

“By the age of 15 he had a reputation as a wordsmith, and when the elders of his mother’s church, feeling he had a prophet-like quality with language, dubbed him Zephaniah (‘treasured by God’), the name stuck.”

Arguably, Zephaniah’s prophet-like quality was not just with language. Those elders were prescient in that Zephaniah grew to be both a griot and a prophet. And like his biblical namesake, he stood before the nation and called out leaders and systems that perpetuated injustice and inhumanity, that sought to keep Britain white and deny the ‘othered’ the right to belong and a sense of hope.

He argued for repair and restoration, and was only able to have such a powerful and challenging voice because he made sure that repair and restoration started with himself. He implored us as African people to know, respect and teach our own history, arguing that we cannot expect people to respect us if we ourselves do not respect our own history and the contribution of those who went before us to making that history.

Zephaniah is remembered for turning down the offer of an OBE in 2003. He explained his decision to the talk-show audience mentioned above:

“The OBE means Order of the British Empire, MBE is Member of the British Empire. I’ve been fighting against Empire all my life. I’ve been fighting against slavery and colonialism all my life. I’ve been writing to connect with people, not to impress governments and monarchy, so how could I then go and accept an honour that puts the word ‘empire’ on to my name? That would be hypocritical.”

His refusal drew the ire of sections of black and white Britain which considered that it was disrespectful to the Queen to turn down the offer of a gong. I was not surprised as I had to endure similar upbraiding when I turned down the offer of a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year’s Honours in January 2000. One of the Queen’s loyal subjects, black like me, stood up in a public meeting irately demanding to know: ‘Who do you think you are?’

Zephaniah defined himself as a radical cultural and political activist. Those offering the OBE clearly defined him otherwise, because they do not give gongs to those who make a point of holding the state and the monarchy to account.

Continue to give ‘em hell from your place in glory, Brotherman.

Professor Augustine John is a human-rights campaigner and honorary fellow and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.