2007 Reviews
Onyeka

Most of the establishment baited by the press, would have you believe there has been a shift of power this year. They tell you that right thinking decent people have lost control. Fear is a weapon of mass distraction and feeds you insecurities, like Chris Rock, you’ll always be looking over your shoulder for that N… !
But don’t believe them! The establishment is in control. Wars: corporate sponsored, plunging the world closer to Armageddon may stutter, but unfortunately the powers of conspicuous consumption and materialistic corporate capitalism need an enemy. So no set backs will stop them, the need for war is constant - no this year has ended how it began, with white nationalism as the most powerful force on the earth, with Africans as misguided, divided and increasingly ridiculous and the rest of the world trying to carve out a place for itself in the midst of the confusion.
The two largest monotheistic religions are locked in a conflict over land and wealth and this conflict is global, in: Iraq, Afghanistan, but also in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, India and Pakistan etc. But Africans should not believe that the hatred the world feels towards us has changed, no matter what conflict is taking place. We are ridiculed and despised all over the world. We are looked at as the enemy, no matter what religion we are, and our inferiority is the one thing that all sides can agree upon! Though there are millions of you dying, when eventually they come to the peace conference, you will be absent!
This year has been shot through with moments of despair and confusion and little hope. Black on black violence has reached global epidemic proportions. Africans in the Congo are involved in a bloody and destabilising debacle, which the world cares little to stop. I won’t quote the death toll, because it can desensitise. Other bloody conflicts have continued throughout Africa, including genocides in South Sudan, Darfur and bloody disputes in Chad and Libya. But don’t worry Ewan McGregor and Charley Borman echoing David Livingston and Henry Stanley will discover you and might just save you, every day, every week, of every month on BBC 2, so long as it makes good television.
The blood shed of Africans killing Africans has continued all year in the Americas. Detroit was confirmed again as the murder capital of the USA (it is a city with one of the largest African populations.) In Brazil: Rio, Brazzaville and Salvador, the condition of Africans like last year was dire, poverty and killings continued. Similar patterns of our self hate were manifested in Islands from Jamaica to Grenada. This year in Haiti, a de facto economic and political war against the people of that country has intensified, producing a mass exodus.
Europe is no exception, with Africans inflicting pain upon each other and our leadership diving for cover in state sponsored quangos, trying to convince us that things can only get better. Every week another young person is eaten alive. The African suicide rate across Europe has increased dramatically, with the startling case of the African woman in Belgium publicly setting herself on fire, to protest against racism.
This year we have had immigration screamed at us. From the News at Ten, to Panorama, and daytime telly blubbering its insipid, fascist pastiche, parading as the moderate views of the silent majority. It made me want to throw up! It seems that everyone is an expert: taxi drivers, postmen, bus drivers, even a Nigerian traffic warden I know was complaining there are too many black people in England! In 2007 we were bombarded with so much bad press about this word; I was convinced that Bush and Blair would announce a war on it!
Immigration has become England’s escape clause. The overcrowding on the tubes and the streets, ‘it must be immigration.’ Of course immigrants are responsible for all the crimes. House prices, and the poor standards in the NHS, Foot and Mouth disease, Blue Tongue, and the rise of HIV cases in England, I have heard it all put down to immigration. Most ridiculous of all was the accusation that foreign players were responsible for the lacklustre performance of the English football team in the European Cup qualifier. Steve Mclaren became an innocent victim of the Government’s failure to keep jobs for our English boys!
Though the slogan of immigration was raised, behind it all was the sinister hand of racial quotas, racial profiling, stigmatisation and mass deportations. The numbers of Africans deported this year was at an all time high. But most immigrants to England are white, the Immigration Laws have seen to that, yet when popular culture focuses on the word, they are still thinking of you! We hear Queen Elizabeth’s 1601 xenophobic proclamation, replayed every day. I heard one caller on BBC Live complain that the Mosques and Hindu temples are too numerous in his city, so he’s gone to live in Cornwall! Another caller said you can’t find a decent English person left. He was in Lozells (Birmingham). These people weren’t talking about immigration - but Race. Yet we are told, ‘England is a tolerant country.’ The phrase has become a mantra, as the BNP at the Oxford Union address, wash the blood from Rule Britannia’s hands and liberals pretend not to see.
Africans lost more money and creativity escaping through the illusion that materialistic consumption would whiten their skin. Debt went through the roof, yet each year they praise shoppers for keeping the economy alive. This year was particularly disgusting with Africans fighting each other to spend money they don’t have, in a fit of extreme apoplexy. And the cult of personality blinded us to the wretched state of the planet, Lake Chad is drying up! Lake Chad is drying up! Lake Chad is drying up! But we have Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, that’s right Al Gore! And a new Prime Minster to save us, playing the same old game, with the same old cards and Barack Obama standing for U.S. President and Will Smith the last man on earth - but don’t jump for joy. It’s only a film, you figure out which one.
Onyeka