Regrettably, for me, the year 2007 was marked by yet more senseless killings. Between the 3rd and 14th of February, three teenaged boys were shot and killed in south London alone. On Saturday 3rd February, sixteen-year-old James Smartt-Ford was shot in front of more than 300 people at an Ice Rink in Streatham, the following Tuesday, Michael Dosunmu was also shot dead, this time as he lay in bed at his home in Peckham. Then on Wednesday 14th February, fifteen year-old Billy Cox was found by his sister in their home in Clapham North, again he had been shot dead. The rising levels of gun and knife crime in the Capital also had a personal angle to it for me in 2007. On the same day of Billy Cox’s murder, Roberto Malasi was given two life sentences. One of them was for stabbing 18-year-old Ruth Okechukwu to death in 2005. Ruth was a girl I had known since she was five years old and whose family remains close to mine.

The media made much of these spates of killings (including the trial of Malasi) and indeed those shootings and stabbings that followed throughout the year. In total, 26 teenagers were killed, a majority of that figure were young black males. Much lip service was paid, funding streamed to agencies that suggested they could stem the problem, and there were calls for the black community to come out of the shadows and stop “protecting” perpetrators, reinforcing the well worn myth that this is what the community does. For me, the violence is deeply rooted in problems that we can associate to a number of factors: the lack of roles models yes, but peer to peer pressure is even more influential in this regard, the supposed attraction of street culture and a gang lifestyle with hip-hop as an increasingly effective instigator, yes, but we seldom chomp our teeth into larger issues of class and economics, the poor education standards that many take as norm, the gravy train that continues to be something that passes a lot of young people by, and the acceptable variants of “success” continue to appear as something unattainable to a lot of people in many communities. Such communities are sick of the “one leg up” initiatives that don’t really amount to anything. Instead of a leg up in a social system where there always needs to be a gutter in order for there to be penthouse, how about levelling out the playing field and letting them get on with it themselves? Idealism, I know.

2007 was also a special year for Ghana. I had the pleasure of visiting the country in March of last year for its Golden Jubilee. The nation celebrated fifty years of independence with much fervour. Its people came together in T-shirts adorned with Ghana @ 50. They waved flags and draped the national colours of red, gold and green from their buildings. I was present at 12am on the 6th March, in Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park by the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial, where the country’s first President and Prime minister is buried. There was a re-enactment of the Nkrumah’s first speech held at the same time and the same day in 1957 for a new independent Ghana. This was followed by a firework display. The park was jam packed with foreigners, dignitaries, journalists and tourists alike while others, the common citizens, remained shut out by an armed police guard. Ghana was the first African country to see independence from colonial rule. Its freedom signalled much for Africa and the works and words of Nkrumah reverberated across the Continent. However, the celebrations were tainted with raging debates about the millions spent on the celebrations and the misplacement of the countries priorities. Examples were so rigorously bounded about so that they took on a mantra of their own. The cost of the celebrations has been estimated to have cost the Ghanaian government over ten million pounds. Another statement read that a further six million pounds was spent on 200 vehicles for dignitaries. Educational opportunities for Ghanaians beyond secondary school are limited, teachers are poorly paid, and economically the country still has some way to go. Appiah Kusi Adomako wrote in the Ghanaian newspaper The Chronicle “Ghana must weep because after fifty years of independence we are still not a free people and a free nation. Though we are politically independent to take decisions, in the rest of our collective lives as a nation we are still dependent on other countries”.

The attention paid to the Bi-centennial of the Abolition of the trade in slaves didn’t quite sink its teeth into my skin. Not that there was not much on offer. The Mayor’s office paid it a lot of attention and there was an exhibition at the National Gallery. On a community level, there were some interesting events held for children. As far as television, I was disappointed with the lack of depth given to the subject matter and the same small pocket of people used as talking heads offering the same information. Instead my year was shaped by other cultural events, the Word Power book festival held at the Arsenal Emirates Stadium, brought important publishers such as New Beacon Books and Bogle L’Overture under one roof as well as a series of interesting talks from the likes of Mutabaruka and Robin Walker. While the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre brought authors such as Wole Soyinka, Biyi Bandele, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Amiri Baraka to our shores.

In the coming year, I look with interest to the fate of U.S. presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama as his candidacy says much about the politics of identity in a nation that was built on and remains preoccupied with the question of race. As for us in the U.K. what does this say about our own place in this society and how we go forward as a collective group of first and second generation migrants?

Koye Oyedeji