Books 7

This Round-Up keeps you updated on works reflecting the imagination and creativity, and the problems and potential, of Black writers, artists, philosophers and activists, entrepreneurs, media leaders and politicians.

Books

Ken Saro-Wiwa, an outspoken critic of military rule and Shell's oil operations in Ogoniland, was executed in November 1995.

 Ken Junior's book is a frank and memorable depiction of growing up with a politically active and socially conscious father. "How do you make your own way in life thereafter, especially when you carry the same name," his son asks, and "Where does he end and where do I begin?"

 Estranged by his father's tough-love during his formative years, and educated and brought up faraway in England, Ken Junior resented his dad's demands to return home to Nigeria to take up the struggle. However, the threat of his father's execution pushed aside personal feuds and Ken Junior was thrust into leadership of a desperate campaign to save his father's life.

 Ken Junior's personal journey for self-understanding is enriched by conversations with the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Zindzi Mandela, and Nkosinathi Biko, who like himself suffered from losing a martyred parent by incarceration or death.

 The book ends with Ken Junior's journey back to Nigeria to give his father a proper traditional Ogoni burial. Thrust again into a situation not of his own making, Ken tries to come to terms with the meaning of his father's death, and with the direction that his own life should now take. It is a powerful and moving story.

 Inevitably, there is a postscript to this African tragedy not covered in his son's story: payback time is coming. Ogoniland has been the venue for a 30-year struggle between an unconsulted minority and an alliance of corporate greed and Nigeria's institutionalized corruption," Giles Whittell reports in The Times Thursday November 16, 2000. It has been left to Owen Wiwa, Ken Senior's sibling, to charge the oil giant Shell in court as a chief villain in the execution of his brother. This act is one small symbol of a global movement to make big corporations accountable for destroying the regions where they extract their wealth.

The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report. London: Profile Books, 2000. This report, financed by racial justice organization the Runnymede Trust, sets forth some contested principles that have been welcomed by many, and maligned by much of the popular press. Defining equality in a culturally sensitive way, respecting diversity and denouncing racism are said to be founding principles of decent society. See further discussion in Media section of this issue of The Chronicle.

Untold - Making A Difference. Bi-monthly black male fashion magazine. November/December 2000. Editor Peter Akinti starts his 15^th issue with a baleful postcard from the hellish depths of despond. The man who wanted to "take the lid off the canned persona of black men" the better to "reflect the wondrously diverse characteristics for all of Britain and the world to see", has failed to gain the support he dreamed of from financiers and advertisers.

His feature on "Rock God" Lenny Kravitz, the brown-skinned boy raised up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district, stylishly takes up this moan from across the Atlantic. "If I was white they would be calling me a **** genius", Kravitz told writer Michael A. Gonzales.

These themes of illusions lost and gained are dominant in this issue called "New York Uncovered". The pros and cons of living stateside are revealed by Black British emigrants to the Big Apple: film maker Kolton Lee, some-time actor Eamonn Walker, the mellifluously named rapper and radio presenter Monie Love, and the photographer Ziggie.

In one innovative piece, five resident ex-brits sing the praises and the faults of the boroughs in which they live. ValerieBrown, a radio DJ, likes the Bronx where hip-hop first surfaced. Hiroko Tsutsui, a paralegal, goes for Manhattan's round the clock nightlife. Nicole Babb, a government worker, likes Brooklyn, the home of the annual West Indian carnival. Hospital administrator Tsega Lawrence, from Guyana, likes Queens because a lot of his home buddies are there and he loves the smell of curry on a Saturday afternoon. And, Earl Jones, a computer analyst, isn't quite sure about living in "ethnically insular" (read white and Italian) Staten Island where he is "overly watched at times, as though I made others feel insecure".

Unfortunately, Untold's feature on Black Harlem and the "Latin Quarter" (read Puerto Rican neighbourhoods) plows a distorted and ethnographically distasteful furrow just like pop-fashion editors on an urban photo shoot: all bums and tits, menacing tenements, dark alleys, sexual crudity and drugs, and cops and protests, but nary a sight of honest hard-working low-wage native Black, Hispanic or polyglot immigrant New Yorkers, the workforce without which the city's techno-finance-fashion and cultural industries could not run.

Akinti's NYC trip was, he admits, a personal and professional quest "for inspiration from people who are handling their lives better". The success of four editors at the helm of the city's most cutting edge magazines - the hip-hop bible, The Source, the urban music and culture icon Vibe, and the style-conscious Savoy and Honey magazines - filled him with hope, but this soon congealed into envy.

Back home in Britain, Akinti is uncomforted by the failed progress of his Untold enterprise. "I'm so depressed y'all. Nuffing ain't going right. I feel like I want to pick up and run," he says forlornly.

But think hard, Peter, before you take a fatal leap across the Black Atlantic. As a denizen of Gotham City once told me: "If you're coming to New York for money, brother, better bring some with you or get in the line with the rest of us".

See The Chronicle archive for a previous review of Untold, and its problems and prospects.

Features in this issue include problems of "Parenting" within busy two-career families, "What Black Men Really Want", a survey of their thoughts and obsessions, and "Kwanza Becomes a $700 Million Business", a story of how the 34-year-old Africa-centric holiday inspired by militant cultural nationalists of the 1960s has proved to be more enduring than a fad among African-American families, communities and culture.

The People section spotlights high-flyers and their spouses, among them Howard M Holley, Xerox senior vice-president of the company's China-based services to enterprises, government and education groups throughout mainland China. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Shanghai.

Ebony's Letters to the Editor column covers a range of intensely debated marital topics including "Ending and Surviving an Abusive Relationship". And, managing editor Walter Leavy concocts a wish list "For Brothers only" to enrich the quality of the Christmas season for every Black man. "Equal opportunity" in discriminatory labour market tops the list, followed by "The love of a good Black woman...to inspire you, uplift you, and sustain you".