Another weekend, another London knife killing

Another weekend, another knife killing around the corner from me, this time 16-year-old Ben Kinsella, who’d just finished his GCSEs at our local Holloway school. Again, a bunch of cowards carrying knives stab a lone victim in the back. Again, a macho culture in which boys play at being big while cowering behind their weapons has laid waste to young lives. And again, no doubt, we’ll have some pusillanimous excuse-making from those sections of the left that try to explain everything in terms of deprivation and inequality.

Not everyone on the left, of course. Not me (see London knife killings). Not Dave Osler, who’s unafraid of talking about the extent to which the recent wave of gun and knife violence is culturally generated. Not the parents and teachers and most of all the boys and young men themselves who are the most affected by it. We know it has a cultural and often – the great unmentionable – racial dimension. It’s time we all started admitting as much and talking about how we deal with it.

And while we’re at it, can we please avoid the sort of cheap shots at Mayor Boris Johnson that characterised his – and the London Evening Standard’s – campaign against Ken Livingstone? We can do without the ‘10 gun crimes a day shame Ken’ sloganising that did nothing to help us get to grips with the 200,000 violent crimes a year reported in the capital before the mayoral election and will do nothing to help us do so now if all we do is to swap Johnson’s name for that of Livingstone.

Guns and ganja

Guns and ganja at the Barbican for The Harder They Come, the Theatre Royal Stratford East’s stage musical version of Perry Henzell’s 1972 film featuring Jimmy Cliff. The guns weren’t real but some of the ganja was. Either that or the Barbican backstage crew can produce some remarkably good sensory effects, with the sweet smell of the sacred ’erb wafting across the audience from the stage.

‘Fifteen minute ganja break,’ announced the Rasta ‘trader’ with the monster spliff at the interval – and at least a few of the audience made their way to the Barbican lakeside to take him up on his suggestion.

The Harder They Come is an exhilarating reggae stomp through the Jamaica of a half-century ago, loosely based around the true story of outlaw anti-hero Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin’ (bad, hot) Martin, who died in a shootout with police in 1948. The original film, by a (white) Jamaican director with an all-Jamaican cast, was the first full-length feature film to be made on the island focusing on the realities of life for its inhabitants; it is widely credited with taking reggae music onto a world stage. The Barbican musical, which runs until 5 April, is blessed with an energetic and talented cast and two of the sweetest, most soulful singers performing in London today, in Rolan Bell as Ivan and Joanna Francis as Elsa, his girlfriend.

There’s no doubt where your sympathies are meant to lie in this tale. Ivan may have shot two policemen but it’s him who’s the hero who’d ‘rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave’, in the words of the song. A Caribbean Robin Hood, give or take a bit of ganja.

But does it glamourise guns, which seems to be a question you are required to answer about any black creative project that features or mentions the things these days?

No more so than (for example) westerns is the obvious answer, a point that the production makes implicitly by screening a particularly bloody Spaghetti western bar fight and shootout during the ganja break.

London knife killings

Four times a day during term-time – once in the morning, twice at lunchtime and once again in the afternoon – the relative peace of the Red Pepper magazine office is broken by boisterous groups of teenage boys making their way to and from the nearby St Aloysius Roman Catholic school. I compete with them for pavement space or observe them from the ground-floor window sometimes when I go there. They’re loud, rowdy and occasionally troublesome but not so very different to teenage boys gathered in large numbers anywhere.

And two of them who would have been passing the Red Pepper windows four times a day this time last year have been stabbed to death in the space of just six months.

The first, back in June, was Martin Dinnegan, a bright, lively 14-year-old whose family lives a few hundred yards from me, killed outside the chip shop just around the corner from where I brought up my daughter. A 15-year-old has been charged with his murder.

The second was Nassirudeen Osawe, Nass, killed on Islington’s main shopping street two days after Christmas and four days shy of what should have been his 17th birthday. He, too, lived down the road from me. In his case, too, another teenager is the alleged killer.

According to the Metropolitan Police, 27 teenagers were killed in London in 2007. Most of them were the victims of knife attacks; most involved some sort of conflict over territory or group affiliation or ‘respect’, even though most of the victims were not themselves involved with gangs or associated activity.

I’d like to think that this is all the result of deprivation, social inequality and a shortage of facilities such as youth clubs. But it isn’t.

There is clearly something going on culturally that is causing heightened levels of violence among teenage boys and young men. The solutions, like the causes, are complex, but the pat notion that it’s all, or even largely, to do with material conditions simply isn’t good enough.

I grew up in a testosterone-charged environment of adolescent male rebellion and aggression. I was expelled from school at 15 (though I found my way back into education again later due to a combination of personal will, parental influence and the solid foundation of learning and inspiration provided by teachers at a previous school).

But there were cultural limits, shared values within our teenage peer groups at the time that put a brake on even the most extreme behaviour. Not the least of these was the notion that certain forms of violence were not acceptable, that they were, in fact, cowardly – unmanly even. The limits were framed in terms of basic negatives: you don’t pick on someone smaller than yourself; you don’t kick someone when he’s down; you don’t use knives or other weapons.

I can’t help feeling that the development of a climate of young male opinion in which the carrying and use of knives, guns and other weapons is held up as being cowardly would do more to turn boys and young men against doing so than any manner of other measures that do nothing to challenge their sense of machismo.