Henry Bonsu

 Writer, broadcaster and journalist Henry Bonsu gives his views on Black parenting and the education of young Black people, and gives detailed steps for pursuing a journalistic career, as well as describing some of the pitfalls.

I think Black parents need to make their children understand that they’re living in a difficult kind of society for many different reasons. It is difficult in terms of our background, colour, race, that kind of thing, but that we as a people have been here for a very, very, very long time and that they are just the latest in a long line of generations, and that they owe it to themselves and to that legacy to build on what has gone before them.  Through their education, through their organising, through their activities, and through the way they conduct themselves as young people.  Parents need to teach young people a sense of pride, to let them know that they have standards and their people have always had standards, as opposed to what we have now. 

A lot of the kids do not know how to conduct themselves.  Even in the classroom, they have no idea how to behave.  And their sense of what it is to be a Black male or female is the most wanton, wild thing.  

I saw a programme the other day about feral children who are brought up by wolves in parts of Russia, running wild.  I’m sad to say that the way I see some of our children behave in school and outside – who brought them up?  I know wolves didn’t bring them up.  But did human beings, with a sense of their knowledge, of their culture, of their history?  The people who brought them up had no sense of these things, clearly.  

Remember, their parents were brought up in Britain.  And for all the things we complain about, this is one of the freest countries in the world in terms of association, in terms of policing – because the majority of the police here still do not carry guns.  A police officer can stop and search you, but cannot require you to produce an ID card.  It is not an offence to have no ID on you in this country, as yet, where it is in other countries.