by Gina Yashere
Beating your kids is considered a hackneyed topic among Black comedians on both sides of the Atlantic. Of African and Caribbean kids who were brought up in the ’70s and ’80s, 99.9999 percent got their asses kicked. That’s it. Kids of our generation got beaten, slapped, whipped with belts, tree branches, extension cords, a smaller child—anything our parents could get their hands on. In many Black families, this was the norm, hence the commonly told jokes and stories among us. Whether it was right, you guys can discuss among yourselves. Whether it actually worked is an altogether different discussion.
There is the idea that hitting our children came from slavery and colonialism. I found evidence online to suggest that many indigenous African cultures didn’t hit kids prior to colonialism. Regardless of the history, my mum was partial to a bit of physical violence, as many African parents were at that time. She had a collection of belts set aside just for the purpose of punishment, and she was an equal opportunity punisher. Me and my two brothers, all close in age, tended to get into scrapes together and therefore often shared a beating, where we’d all be lined up with our hands outstretched to take our whippings. If I’d been smarter, I might have been able to avoid at least some of the punishments, by telling my mum it was rude to beat her own mother. I mean, wasn’t I Granny?
The beatings were never as bad as the anticipation of them. My mum’s beatings were rarely done in explosions of frustration. They were slow and calculated, like an executioner relishing the sharpening of her blade. She would tell us what we had done wrong and that a beating was going to ensue, but we didn’t know when it would happen. It was like living under a death sentence. When it was time for our beating, she would line us up, then go into a rant about what we had done, what had led up to the point of us committing this crime, why she had to beat us, why we deserved it, and the history of our previous infractions. This could go on for hours.
Sometimes the phone would ring, she’d answer it, have a forty-minute conversation with whomever, replete with jokes and laughter, while we stood to attention, awaiting our punishment, hoping that surely she’d get off the phone in a lighter mood, only for her to somehow summon up her previous rage and pick up exactly where she had left off with her rant. Those times we wished she’d stop talking and hit us already so we could move on with our lives.
Aside from eating biscuits offered by hosts or coming home a minute later than was expected, reasons for Mum’s corporal punishment varied:
(1) My mum picked me up from school one day, and a teacher mentioned lightheartedly that I’d told her my mum always came to pick me up from school because my dad had run away to Nigeria. The teacher did not realize she was sentencing me to death, as that revelation fell into the “Never tell people our business” category.
Beating.
(2) My brothers and I made a makeshift catapult, shooting glass marbles at each other. A window broke. We lied that it had been someone out in the street, even though the glass fragments were outside the house. We didn’t have the benefit of forensic education from TV shows like CSI back then.
Beating.
(3) Mum would tell us to do something, like fetch her some thread for her sewing machine, and sometimes a kind of tutting or involuntary sound of dissent would escape from our mouths.
Beating.
(4) I am cack-handed.
Cack-handed is a term for left-handed. I didn’t technically get beatings for this, but definitely I was slapped! I’m the only one in my family who was born left-handed. So I was opposite to everything I was supposed to be, just like my grandmother had predicted. But in African, Middle Eastern, Asian, in fact pretty much in every culture the left hand is seen as unclean. The reasoning behind this was that the right hand was used for eating, handling food, and social interactions, whereas the job of the left hand was to wipe your ass—which technically it is, because I’m left-handed! I’m pretty sure right-handed people wipe their asses with their right.
As a child, my mum tried to force me into right-handedness, which was a common practice among parents of leftie-afflicted kids. She would make me practice writing with my right hand for so many hours that I was ambidextrous for a little while. Eventually, tired of a sentence taking eight times longer to write with my right hand than with my left, I resorted to trickery, switching back to my left as soon as Mum exited the room. If I gave Mum food with my left hand, that was a slap. If she came into the kitchen and I was stirring the pot with my left hand, slap, and all that food would go straight into the trash. A large part of my childhood clumsiness was due to trying to do things with my less dominant hand and struggling with everything on the planet being made for righties, including scissors, fountain pens, and faucets.
My mum tried to beat it into us that we had to be the best, that we had to work the hardest. That we would not succeed unless we worked at it. To my mum, it wasn’t abuse. It was love dosed with some fear. As a Black mother, she may have felt she was preparing us for the world and how we were going to get abused out there as Black people. She probably felt, like so many other Black parents, that she needed to get us straight, and beating was her way of doing it. And it kind of did. There are certain aspects of my childhood that I hated, for sure. Like the fact that my mum never let me go anywhere. It felt stifling and sometimes cruel. But looking back, the discipline worked. A lot of my friends who didn’t have that discipline growing up were pregnant by fifteen or sixteen. A lot of them.
There’s also a difference between hitting and beating. I don’t see anything wrong with slapping a kid on the hand if they’ve been naughty, but beating is a different story. I don’t believe in beating kids. Most of my siblings now have their own children. None of them hit their kids. None of them. It’s kind of ironic how we went the opposite way.
5
Going to Church Doesn’t Make You a Holy Person Any More Than Going to a Garage Makes You a Mechanic
When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.
—JOMO KENYATTA, FROM FACING MT. KENYA
My mother, like many Nigerians, is notoriously secretive about her past. As she’s gotten older, she has kind of started to relax and let some stuff slip, but in general, she has always glossed over the details. When I ask her about her childhood, she answers in platitudes, such as, “Oh yes, it was wonderful.” And I’m like “Well, it wasn’t really—all your blood brothers ended up dead.” Her reply? “Oh yes, they had juju done on them by the other wives, but that was the way things were.” Even Christianity couldn’t sever my mum’s strong belief in the power of juju, despite her being disavowed of traditional Nigerian deity worship at an early age.
From my mum’s recollections, she enjoyed her schooling, which set her on the path to become a qualified teacher in Nigeria before she was twenty. Having been born in the heyday of British colonialism, Mum was educated in missionary schools in Nigeria. “They were very nice. Yes, they hit us with sticks, but only when we deserved it.”
The missionaries’ main purpose was to convert as many people as possible to Christianity while also educating them from a Eurocentric perspective, turning them away from their apparently primitive and barbaric way of life, plus getting them to give up land that was theirs to house churches they never knew they needed. This education included learning the Bible. The same Bible that had been used to subjugate Africans who were stolen and taken abroad. The same Bible with all that worshipping of an impossibly blond and blue-eyed Jesus, with Black people being cursed as descendants of Ham. And with all that obey-your-master, turn-the-other-cheek shit. That stuff that keeps you accepting horrendous abuses in this life with a hope of ascending to heaven in the end.
But despite this, Mum is very proud of her Christian faith. As I grew up and discovered more about our history, I’d throw my two cents in with comments such as “You know Christianity was forced on you, right?” T
o which she’d respond, “Shut your mouth,” then change the subject.
My mother is a Baptist. Despite being a staunch Christian, she was quite unusual among other Nigerian mums in that she didn’t make us go to church. I’ve often heard horror stories from cousins and friends of them being forced to sit still in services that lasted hours. (Although to be fair, when you’re eight years old, being forced to sit still for twenty minutes without playing, it feels like a year. If I’d been brought up in the Black churches of the US, like Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, and the members of Jodeci, maybe I would have been more open to Christianity. Those churches looked way more fun.) To this day, I haven’t worked out whether my mum’s lack of churchgoing was due to a sense of rebellion or if, after a hard week of doing whatever she could to put food on the table, she just couldn’t be bothered to get a herd of kids dressed up in their Sunday best to sing songs in a chilly English church for an hour. Whatever the reason, I’m grateful. I often heard her say the Nigerian adage “Going to church doesn’t make you a holy person any more than going to a garage makes you a mechanic.” And we as kids were more than happy to agree with her.
My mum’s version of Sunday worship was a British TV show called Songs of Praise. This long-running religious show was, in my humble opinion, the first reality show. Basically, every Sunday a camera crew would set up in a church and film people “churching.” It was a Sunday service, delivered to your living room. That was Mum’s church. The flat would be filled with my mum’s voice as she sang hymns in front of the TV. “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the lord God made them all!”
Although Mum was Baptist, her ambition for her children meant that whichever God we prayed to did not get in the way of our education. Let’s just say our religion was fluid, in accordance with whatever was the best school in the area we happened to be living in. If the best local school was a different religion than my mother’s, then that’s what we became for the duration of our time at that school, whether it be Anglican or Roman Catholic. If the best school in our area had been Jewish, I’m pretty sure my mum would have been giving us bar and bat mitzvahs, and whatever else it took for us to fit in and enjoy the advantages of that better school.
I remember once walking with my mother to be baptized. I was way past baby-christening age, and I was tall enough to bend down so the vicar could wet my head. That’s how I ended up at a Roman Catholic primary school from the age of four until I was eight. It was a small school, with a varied mix of kids, from all over Bethnal Green and the surrounding East London boroughs. This school was run by a bunch of hard-faced nuns who had no issue with slapping kids on the backs of their thighs for any infractions, as this was the ’70s, a time of smacking kids with impunity and no comebacks. And, again, my mum had no problem with that.
* * *
Mum was overbearing, a hard taskmaster, and unaffectionate, but there was no doubt in my mind that she loved us and would go to the ends of the earth to defend us against outsiders. After all, she did once take a white man to court for me. Let me explain.
My brothers and I were instructed to always come home from school together. This meant if one of us had detention, we all had detention. I often found myself waiting around for the boys, who liked to take their sweet time hanging with their friends, playing Penny up the Wall. This is a game in which a number of players line up a fixed distance away from a wall and each takes a turn throwing a coin of common value towards the wall. The objective is to throw the coins such that they land as close to the wall as possible. Whoever gets their coin closest to the wall collects all of the coins, shakes them in their hands, and throws them all into the air. Before the coins land, the player shouts “Heads” or “Tails” and is entitled to claim all those coins landing the corresponding way. The remaining coins (if any) are then gathered up by the player whose coin landed second closest to the wall, who repeats the shaking, throwing, and calling of “Heads” or “Tails.” This process continues until all the coins have been picked up.
Dele was a master at it. I’d once lost two months’ worth of pocket money to him in under an hour. Dele and Sheyi often organized after-school Penny up the Wall tournaments, using the game as a way to top up their income. On afternoons like this, I had no choice but to wait around while they gambled.
One such day as I waited, I wandered around outside the empty school. Eventually, tired and bored, I leaned up against a parked car.
“Get the fuck off my car!”
Startled, I looked over to see a white man walking towards me, his face screwed up in anger.
“Get the fuck off my car, you Black bastard!”
My mouth opened before I had a chance to stop it. “Piss off, you white bastard!”
“What the fuck did you say?”
He leapt towards me, and I took off running. I was a good sprinter, but I was wearing my school uniform, so my speed was hindered by my school bag bouncing off my hip, by my skirt, and by my sensible school shoes. I was so panicked, I ran in the opposite direction of where my brothers were playing around the corner. I ran into the school grounds, thinking I’d get back into the school building the same way I had come out. As I ran, I peeked behind me, and the man was not far behind, his face pink with fury. I made it to the glass entrance doors of the school and pushed to enter, but they were locked. I caught sight of a teacher inside, walking down the corridor, and I banged desperately on the doors to get her attention. She turned and began to walk towards me, but it was too late. The man caught up to me and began punching, kicking, and pummeling me as the teacher frantically fiddled to get the door open. She finally did, and I stumbled inside as the man then turned and jogged away. Horrified by what had just taken place, she called the police. She recognized him as a father of a child who went to my school, and he was arrested the next day.
I was bruised but otherwise not seriously hurt. Mum accompanied me to the police station the next day to add my statement to the teachers’, assuming that criminal proceedings would follow and justice would be served. The man was released a few hours after his arrest and let off with a caution. A police caution administered in England and Wales is a formal alternative to prosecution in minor cases. It is commonly used to resolve cases in which full prosecution is not seen as the most appropriate solution. Accepting a caution requires an admission of guilt. Basically, the police believed that the apt punishment for a grown man who had severely beaten a fourteen-year-old child was a “Don’t do that again, naughty boy. Now, off you go!”
That would have been the end of the story, and quite frankly, I was happy for it to be over. I’d gotten away without serious injury, the guy probably wouldn’t attack me again, and I just wanted to put my head down and get back to regular life. But Mum wasn’t having it.
Although she had been relatively calm and collected throughout the dealings with the police, she was absolutely furious when she was informed about the caution. This man had attacked her child and gotten away with it. He was going to be punished. She bombarded the police with calls to voice her dissatisfaction and to demand they prosecute this man for assault. The police told her the case was closed. I was secretly glad and hoped Mum would give up the fight. She didn’t. She decided to pursue a private prosecution against him. This meant that as an individual without the backing of the police or the criminal justice system, she would not have access to a public prosecutor and would have to hire her own. I overheard her discussing the cost on the phone with various lawyers. It was going to cost thousands. This was a woman who bought us sneakers with two stripes on them and told us to draw on the third if we wanted Adidas so badly. A woman who would haggle for thirty minutes over the cost of an apple. Surely she wasn’t willing to spend so much money on this. I was wrong.
She eventually hired a lawyer and took my attacker to court. The teacher was called in to testify and told how she’d seen this man beat me as I cowered in the doorway of the school. I also testified an
d told the court how he had racially abused me before his attack. But this was England in the ’80s. I stood in front of an old white judge who simply saw a white man who had been disrespected by a young Black thug. And as if to cement the futility of the case, my mother’s lawyer made the mistake of asking this man what he did for a living. He was a firefighter. It was all over then. To the judge, here was an upstanding citizen who saved lives. Sure, he’d made a mistake beating this Black child, but she’d probably deserved it. These Blacks could be so unruly. The judge gave the man an absolute discharge. This is an unconditional discharge whereby the court finds that a crime has technically been committed but any punishment of the defendant would be inappropriate. And the case was closed. Again. This meant there would be no conviction on the man’s record despite the fact that he’d admitted to stomping a child. He was free to go. Back to his job, his family, and his racism.
