I went to the Climate March in London -a 50,000 strong triumph – so the organisers say.
It was cold literally and otherwise and I walked through the march feeling like an outsider until I got to the front where the Wretched of the Earth bloc were marching.
It was good to walk with the Global Pan Afrikan Peoples Parliament, it was good to hear Ken Saro Wiwa‘s name being called, it was good to meet with the young members of Black Dissidents it was good to meet Indigenous people from the South Pacific, Peru, Northern Scandinavia.
But in one bizarre moment, there seemed to be some confusion about who should be at the front. The big NGO’s tried to push the Wretched of the Earth out of the way. Some of them were wearing giraffe and zebra head pieces. I guess because giraffes matter more than PoC and Indigenous human lives.
In the weeks leading up to the march I spoke with PoC activists about participation in conversations about climate change and the consensus was that the climate change movement was colonised by the white middle class. Those suspicions proved true at the march.
Why is there a lack of understanding that human bodies are at the frontline of these climate struggles? It’s as if the people of the Global South must always play victim, we are trotted out to perform but we must otherwise stay silent, we cannot articulate our pain, we cannot celebrate our triumphs, we cannot mourn our dead, we cannot shout our defiance.
As the Climate Change talks begin today in Paris, it is really crucial to ensure that the voices of indigenous communities and people of the Global south who are at the frontline of climate change’s effects are heard.
Don’t white wash climate change. Don’t colonise the climate change movement.
We are watching you, governments of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia who are still convinced that industrialisation is the only way forward, yes you bauxite mining in Jamaica, yes you T&T with your obscene levels of CO2 production per capita, yes you Nigeria with your unchecked oil pollution, yes you India trying to steal land from the Adivasis.
To the governments of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia who are aiding and abetting corporate colonialism, we are watching you and promise that our communities are finding each other, we are linking our struggles and we are joining voices and forces for justice.
The song the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia raised for Mother Earth is still ringing in my ears. It was more of a wail really, echoing through the heart of Babylondon. I sang for my own African and Indigenous ancestors, on behalf of those killed for profit, to demand justice not just for the destruction of their bodies but for the destruction of their land, their rivers, their way of life.
The climate march was a stark reminder to me that we can’t wait for others to decide what we need to be doing for ourselves. And in as much as we know that these spaces continue to attempt to deny us our voices, we have to continue to hold the line, stand firm, claim space and shout for justice. We have to remind them this week and everyday that without Indigenous and PoC participation, any conversation about climate change is meaningless.
Photo by Tom Lebert
The notion of development is often a tricky concept to navigate. We have bartered with market women from Kingston to Accra and walked the hills of Haiti, denuded of mahogany forests to repay France, and know that entrepreneurship lives, but that wealth remains elusive for many in the Global South, and that a country may have untold natural wealth, quickly decimated and gone to enable another’s growth. By contrast, we have lived and worked in the major cities of the Global North, where there remains insufficient awareness that its comfort and development is built on a result of centuries of heavily asymmetrical systems. We observe vestiges of this past where inequalities persist among nations and discrimination and exclusion also manifests. Moreover, tens of years after decolonisation, the view of development still remains largely defined based on the likeness to the Global North.
Tillah Willah 