DWARF THE TROUBLEMAKERS AT THE WEDDING It all started with a wedding Saturday 27th September a wedding that was broken up by some uninvited guests and thugs in blue uniform.
There was no trouble no damage and no problems in High Street UNTIL THE POLICE ARRIVED. Then the arrests began. If the police had allowed the wedding celebrations to go on unmolested then 11 young citizens would not be in court today.
CRIME IN FOLKESTONE - AGAINST THE What was their crime? They were enjoying themselves in a public place, and, on seeing that the groom had been strangely picked on by the police, they went to his aid. Several people have made complaints against the police. Others have been assaulted by the police.
CITIZENS TAKE OUT SUMMONS AGAINST POLICE Six people have been assaulted by the police, inclaig two peopie wro surferea sertous injuries, and were taken to hospital. Their wounds tell the truth of what really happened. We are the victims of police brutality.
THE PUBLIC AND THE POLICE No doubt you believe the police are there to protect you. But their powers are vast and they can be used against YOU the public. But if you are ren you nave norning to rear. Are you rich. Do you own property? Is your name Mr. Costam?
If not then vou should take an interest in your civil liberties. You should take an interest in securing the liberty of the young people - inside the court. Todav O.K. So we've got long hair and our clothes are different - but we don't ask you to dress like us. And how is it a crime to have long hair? Shades of Hiller!
YOUR FREEDOM AND THEIR POLICE The "free" society is not run by us the people, but by the top 10% population over 80% of the wealth this 10% needs the loyalty and obedience of the rest of the country. That is why we have the police to Dush us around. to keep us in une.
Law and order is the law and order of the rich. To protest against the existing order, ie., division of wealth in society, is a crime.
PROTEST IS CRIME The rich, the bankers, the bosses, the politicians, and the fuhrers in our society need the police to protect them from the wrath of If you like being pushed around, then you will support police brutality because they are official thugs.
BUT MORE AND MORE PEOPLE IN FOLKESTONE DON'T.
For details:
Action for Justice nign sireet, rorkestone Women's liberation Workshop of Tufnell Park have made a film about some aspects of women's position in contemporary society. The film, called, "Woman...are you satistied with your life?" is silent, composed chiefly of still phatos taken from women's magazines, nevspapers and real life, and lasts eight minutes. It contrasts women's 'ideal' life, as depoted in the massmedia, with the real life of houewives, the drudgery, dishes, lavatories and tedim. The script consists of statements about the nage we are taught to have of ourselves (of deccative, consuming housewives and motners, contisted with the impossibility for women to lead reative fulfilling lives under present circuistances. Statistics about the proportion of woen in the work force and in trade unions are all given. The film ends with an optimistic note, owing neroic women or tne past and presensymbolically cutting their ties with the forces hich oppress them.
The Im was made for several reasons: 1 to create i educational product which represeled some of the ideas we wish to discuss th other women not vet involved in focal point for our thinking which would help us to raise the issues which Women's Liberation groups should be thinking about.
An eight minute silent film can only begin to touch upon some of the problems we have discussed in our meetings. The broader personal and social contradictions and political concepts which we raise at our weekly meetings are barely suggested in the film. However, the way we hope to use the film is as a starting point in a discussion. The film was intended to raise quesuons, not answer unem, and is provocanve enough to elicit audience response. Once people are involved enough to ask questions or raise daaluonal laeas in tne aiscussion, a one or two hour discussion follows naturally. We have had such responses at the few showings we have had so far (in London at the Living School conference, and to left people in Toronto, Boston and New York).
All interested groups contact Women's Liberation Workshop, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, N.W.5.
On October 17 a remarkable debate was to have taken place. A debate at Stanford University on Capitalism between John Galbraith, representing neo-capitalism and Ernest Mandel, speaking in the name of revolutionary marxism. The Dwarf was intending to print extracts from the debate. However it seems that the American ruling class called off the debate at the last moment. Mandel was refused a visa by the State Department. We believe that the debate is of some importance and would ask Professor Galbraith to demonstrate his disapproval (?) of the State Department decision, by agreeing to debate Mandel somewhere in Europe. We can certainly arrange a confrontation in London, but something tells us that in reality Galbraith is not too displeased with the decision to refuse Mandel a visa.
Eight weeks ago Mrs. Shannon, whose sister was then squatting in Cheshire Street, heard of the East London Squatters Campaign and the Campaign to Clear Hostels and Slums. She had had enough of the rats, of the filth and the heartbreak of No. 32 Cheshire Street. She decided to squat and to fight for something she has never had: "Somewhere to bring up my kids — a real home". She got in touch with the squatters and things began to happen Tower Hamlets council prides itself on being progressive. It isn't. On Saturday, Septembe 6th, Mrs. Shannon and her kids, with othe families, aided by the squatters took over four lats owned by Tower Hamlets Council at Arbour Court, Arbour Square, E. 1. The flats, many of which have been empty for 18 months, were built in 1935. The council were clearing them for "renovation" i.e. while thousands live in some of the worst slums in Britain in the area the "progressive" Council required these relatively modern dwellings for "renovation".
At first the ten or so tenant families already in residence in Arbour Court were terrified, "They thought we were hippies and drug addicts", according to Mrs. Shannon. However, things are different now and most of the tenants are helpful and pleasant. Not so the Council. Tony Mahoney, Campaign to Clear Hostels and Slums:
"Immediately the squat began, the Town Clerk (Mr. Wolkind) came down and we had a discussion in the nearby Police Station. I told him the alternatives were: that the Counci immediately rehouse the families that had the courage to squat and then the East London Squatters and the Labour Council could join forces to bring to public notice the housing chaos which Tower Hamlets Council was sublected to: or 2) we would continue squatting, exposing the Council as totally unconcerned with the real economic issues which prevented a proper housing programme. Mr. Wolkind said there was a third alternative: The Council would get us out with a Court order.
This was the tone that was set by the Council. They don't want their problems known; neither do they want a public outcry bout the thousands of working class people it he Borough who are living in some of the mos appalling slums in London.
Squatting breaks through the whole of the British ethic that property is more important forge a realisation of the blatant contradictions Within capitalism and also encouraging people to act against the established order.
The squatting families in Arbour Court are desperate people. They have had a lot to be desperate about. In the words of Mrs. Shannon, "We will fight until we get a decent home, we'll keep on squatting until we win the right to a real home And they mean it!
O.K. so you know Ridley Road stinks; and the smell is spreading to Colvestone Crescent and Dalston Lane and Cecilia Road. Rubbish is piling up all over London and at Buckingham Palace they are going to make other arrangements'. But there are a lot of things the unfree press didn't bother to tell you about the dustbinmen and why they're striking. HOW MUCH DO THEY GET?
A loader gets £15 9s a week.
A driver gets £15 14s a week.
This is before stoppages. One dustbinman on picket duty in Ridley Road told a Dwarf reporter he took home £14 to a wife and two children the week before the strike. There is overtime and there are bonuses but there's no contro over how thev re allocated from below so 'certain people' tend to get them.
Actually during the strike, while it was unofficial, a married man can only get his rent and money for his family from Social Security'. He can't get anything for himself. A single man can't claim at all.
HOW MUCH DO THEY WANT?
The dustbinmen want E20 a week.
HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN WAITING? Negotiations have been going on for over a ycal HOW DID IT START?
The strike started from Mill fields and spread quickly in the Hackney, Stoke Newington and Shoreditch area. People were completely fed up at the length of time negotiations were taking without anything coming out of them. The eeling was general. As the strike sprea roughout London, dustmen told the Dwar Now we're all in it together.
WHAT ELSE ARE THEY COMPLAINING ABOUT?
There is more and more rubbish to collect everyday. So why can't they claim higher productivity? The council in the Hackney area is actually cutting down on lorries. This means you have to do more rounds. A time and motion man came along and watched how many dustbins each man emptied on each round. He worked out they were handling twenty tons of rubbish a day. This is starting at 7.30 a.m. and giving up part of your dinner hour. The rubbish becoming harder and harder to get out. It's not just markets and private houses. The flats are really the worst problem. In one block in Stamford Hill you have to shovel the rubbish up in a tin bath from the basement. The depots are badly organized so you have to hang around which wastes time. All of them are inefficient, but the one in Defo Road, Stoke Newington is the worst. The lorries are in bad condition. They've complained again and again, especially in the Stoke Newington depot 'Not a decent dust-motor in the place'. They'd been promised new lorries but they never came. Dustmen are responsible too for them when they're driving them.
Pickets didn't think much of the kind of ubneity tney ve been getting during the strik which emphasises the chaos rather than whi they're striking. As one man said: "It's all to dampen down our case. Did they think this would make people realise that their job was rather important finally instead of just taking them for granted. They laughed 'we've always been big headed'. But a member of Hackney Council who supports them told them he couldn't use their wages for beer money. What can sympathetic dwarfs do in solidarity? They were pleased people might support them but "Sympathy doesn't pay wages . One man suggested with a grin 'You might try dumping your rubbish outside the Town Hall it might wake unem up a bie.
Dwarf reporter IMMEDIATELY thought of ALL KINDS of other institutions which could do with rubbish reminders. What about the Department of Employment and Productivity, or the homes of B. Castle and H. Wilson for some direct dustbin dumping solidarity action?
Tariq Ali EDITORIAL BOARD DESIGNER CIRCULATION AND ADVERTSNE David Kendall John Weal SECRETARY Judith Wright Published by THE BLACK DWARF, 7 CARLISI.E STREET, LONDON WI A 4PZ.
October 24 DESIGN ART/DESIGN/REVOLUTI SOCIETY. t Marx Memorial Librar Clerkens London tails from Nick Wrigh King Street, London WC2 STARTING OCTOBER 17: Throughout the autu academic term there will be a series of teach oroanized by Camna to cear Hostels Slums. They will be taking place from October 17 December Brighton Bris Coventry. Birmingham, Lamondee LOICESECT.
Sheftield. Leeds. Manchester. For details of dates times, contact 3 Osborn Street, London E1.
SATURDAY OCTOBER 18: STUDENTS AGAI , a Movement for Colonial Free LUHECECHICO Speakers incude Newens MI (National Chairman MCF), Dr. Malce Caldwell, (Lecturer at School of Oriental and Afri Studies and Chairman of CND), Jack Woddis British Communist Party), OCTOBER WORLD REVOLUTION Zu arnest Mandel speaks onHHN Trades Un Social Centre, 81 Carlton Place, Glasgow C5. 7.30g OCTOBER 23: Dr. Joshua Horn will give the first e series or icctures on me Chinese Revolution. Dr. Horn returned to Britain standing, 24 Warren Street, London VC. Society Anglo-Chinese Und OCTOBER 26: To commemorate the October match and be at and to he in tether demos and to tie in with other Rights Solidarity Campaign are planning a dem voc mies. march wrom narme cross empankmer he uister ornice. berkeley street wi and on to r ark. Contact Pat Denny, Tel: 01-GUL 047 OCTOBER 26: This is the provisional date for a m Vietnam mobilisation organized by Tricontinen 15 Lawn Road. London NW3. Slogi Last Dwarf advertised RAINY CITY RAP-IN Manchester. but it was postponed for a few week the schools Unions hadn t had enough time over t holidays to contact all their members. Grass Eye a indu see piya ton to ore the st de 1ope it will be an even bigger and better weekend discussion, revolution, rock and film. and still v 67-834 7738 63-67 Market Street, Manchester. SATURDAY NOVEMBER 1: The Wembley Harrow Anti-Apartheid Group are holding their annu 6d. If you can Northedge Ridgeway, Kenton, Harr prisoners and prisoners of war in Southern Alrica. F Africa Solidarity Committee, 211 Contaroke uto arica sonearly committee. condon wil SCHOOLS STUDENTS IN THE BRADFORD ARE should immediately get in contact with Bradford SAI Their aims are that schools should be controlled t stan burn councis. ane mar corpora our same • such, and THE UNION OF GREEK JOURNALISTS IN EXIL 1UUJDI duaressing AN appea For the London Branch: G. VOTSIS. 268 Kingslan Road. F8. TEL: 254 3353 November: "With the gathering momentum of t evoluuonary movement m sutam, we must exped Road. London SW2. will be holding a public meetin n early November where they hope that all grou and individuals affected can work out a collecti Anthony Barnett, Vinay Chand, Clive Goodwin, Fred Halliday, John Hoyland, Adrian Mitchell, Sheila Kowbomam. soo rowinorne Mike Newton, Ruth Prentice, Agitprop Publicity Group.
EXTRACT ONE I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones fare enough away to daunt all miners. The man who couldn't understand me couldn't understand the roaring of a tiger.
Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of a human skin I would have words huge enough to contain you all and you too stretched earth drunken earth earth great sex raised in the sun earth great delirium of God earth risen wild from the sea's locker with a bunch of cecrops in your mouth earth whose surfing face I must compare to the mad and virgin forests that I would wish to wear as countenance before the undeciphering eyes of men.
One mouthful of your milk-spurt would let me discover always at the distance of a mirage an earth - a thousand times more native, golden with a sun no prism has sampled - a fraternal earth where all is freed, my earth.
To leave. My heart was throbbing with an insistent desire to give. To leave ... I would arrive sleek and young in that country, my country, and I would say to that country whose clay is part of my flesh: I have wandered far and I am coming back to the lonely ugliness of your wounds.' I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it: "Kiss me without fear... And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak."
And I would say to it:
'My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those freedoms which break down in the prison-cell of despair.' And, coming, I would say to myself: *Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who cries out is not a dancing bear."
On St John the Baptist's Day, as soon as there is some shade, And I laugh at my old childish imaginings. staying-power in wrangling over trifles.. was in His acts.
We, vomit of the slave-ship.
We, hunted meat of Calabar.
Plug your ears?
with inhaled fog.
Forgive me, partner whirlwind! Amen. Amen.
chancelleries.
I defy the craniometer. Homo sum, etc. And may they serve and betray and die pelvis.
And I, and I, I who sang with clenched fist cowardice.
In a tram one night, facing me, a Negro.
little ears in all creation.
The Black Dwarf 26th October - 15th November 1969 Page No, we have never been amazons at the court of the King of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors at Timbuctoo when Askia the Great was king, nor architects at Djenne, nor Mahdis, nor warriors. We do not feel in our armpits the itch of those who once carried the lance. And because I have sworn to conceal nothing of our history (I who admire nothing so much as a sheep grazing of an afternoon in its own shadow), I wish to confess that we were always quite undistinguished dishwashers, small-time shoeshiners, at the very most fairly conscientious witch-doctors, and the only record we hold is our For centuries this country repeated that we are brute beasts; that the human heart-beat stops at the gates of the black world; that we are walking manure hideously proffering the promise of tender cane and silky cotton, and they branded us with red-hot irons and we slept in out shit and we were sold in public squares and a yard of English cloth and salted Irish meat were cheaper than us and this country was quiet, calm, saying that the spirit of God We, stuffed to bursting with the swell, with squalls I hear rising from the hold chained curses, gasps of the dying. the sound of one who is thrown into the sea... the baying of a woman giving birth.. the scrape of fingernails advancing on throats... the sneer of the whip... the prying of vermin among weary bodies... Nothing can rouse us to noble desperate adventure.
I am of no nationality ever contemplated by the Amen. Amen. It was written in the shape of their You must be told the length to which I carried He was a Negro tall as a pongo who tried to make himself very small on a tram seat. On that filthy tram seat he tried to abandon his gigantic legs and his starved boxer's trembling hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose was like a peninsula off its moorings; even his negritude was losing its colour through the effects of a perpetual tanner's bleach. And the tanner was Poverty. A great sudden long-eared bat whose claw-marks on that face were scarred, scabby islands. Or perhaps Poverty was a tireless workman fashioning some deformed cartridge. You could see clearly how the industrious malevolent thumb had modelled the lump of the forehead, pierced two tunnels - parallel and disturbing - through the nose, drawn out the disproportion of the upper lip, and by a master-stroke of caricature had planed, polished, varnished the smallest, neatest
----- pull-quotes -----
the pe make money you have to push other people around, and you need the police to help 5, You do it.
SSE). Sessions will last from 11am-) and 2.15pm-5pm
r help, contac Mia: i 01 0 20 3)
NOVEMBER 16: SOUTHERN AFRICA MOBILIS strialise oppression, to show solidarity ple polit
NATIONA Hitlerstylempress a the annulment of the junta
Estabishment, additom the position from the ACTION FOR PEOPLE'S JUSTICE, 45 Fairmour