Clapper Priest

Clapper Priest 

I’m dead against stop and search.. it's counterproductive to the community. I’ve been stopped and searched around 60 times in my life.

I am born and bred here in Dalston, growing up on Arcola Street and Bradbury Street. My Jamaican parents separated in the early 1970’s and I was put into care and lived outside of London. But I used to come back every weekend to meet up with my friends. With my generation a lot of us ended up in care because the courts were actively removing members of black families and placing them in care. It wasn’t all bad as I was educated and a lot of people I knew did not get that. 

Back in those times there was not a lot of places for West Indian people to go as they were not socially accepted. So they started to congregate and have house parties and I grew up in that musical environment. It was vibrant back then and music venues would pop up everywhere from clubs to pubs. There were no DJ’s back then but the music was interesting… there was freedom and not so many licencing laws. It was easy to set up an event space anywhere. Less regulation and more community which allowed more people to earn money as creatives. You could earn a living in that economy. Someone would find a venue, a couple of others would put money in and get the drinks and food and then you would have a circuit going on. Most of the black music venues in Hackney have been closed down now. But in those times people had more time and freedom to create and congregate. 

This country has a problem with freedoms from when it started colonising starting with the Irish and eventually enslaving black people when they realised how profitable our strength was, so they came for us. These things linger and even though they tell us we are now free, we still can’t walk down the street in peace. Charles the 2nd was responsible for the removal of millions of people from Africa onto the slave plantations. People like me are now asking from these crimes against humanity to be addressed. The people who made the money are still benefitting from this and the victims are still losing out. Certain ideologies that were created during those times were used to negate black people who are still struggling with those label and this stereotyping and criminalising continues. Chris Kabba is a recent UK example of this, but it is a global situation. In the colonial period, this supremist ideology separated all of us by highlighting us as different but actually we can be a community united. I write songs and narratives about the issues we have discussed and perceived difficult topics such as the wrongs committed against victims of the Black Atlantic. I have three children and I do have contact with them but another consequence of colonialism is the breakdown of family structures. The way the police go out of their way to arrest, beat up and criminalise Afro-Caribbean men. When you remove black men from their families so they cannot be fathers, it has a generational effect that continues to this day. Looking back, I can see how it plays out, both in my own family and others. 

My dad was in the building trade and he used to get me to come and work with him. He was quite well known around here. He was a local on Gillett Square and I remember when there was a little Shebeen there. In the week it was a car park and on the weekend a guy had a reggae stall there, selling music. I went to a Reggae club around the corner from the Square called ‘Peaceful Valley’. It was very black music centred in this area back then but this seems to have disappeared over the years. There was a huge talent and music ability in these streets. They want to make film about the Westway and the DBC (Dread Broadcast Corporation) was the first black pirate radio station in London. World class musicians from the Diaspora came from around Gillett Square. I found out last week on my 61’s year here that the village my father came from in Jamaica was a slave plantation. The plantation was 1,500 acres. To get an idea of how large this was I went online and found out that Victoria Park in East London is 230 acres. So if you can imagine a sugar plantation that is 8 times the size of Victoria Park. This is history that needs to be taught in our education systems so that young people can learn real history. Then and only then can things change.