Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter

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Nelson Mandela campaigns at a rally before the first democratic elections in South Africa, 1994. Photograph: Louise Gubb/Corbis/Getty Images A vital and richly researched blend of reportage, memoir and polemic, it invites us ringside with Younge during some of the most history-defining events of the last century: Obama’s victory, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, Nelson Mandela’s first election campaign and more. He has observed a lot of changes since, he says. “With the boom and with the arrival of a kind of post-colonial migration, people started to assume that my brother was a Nigerian asylum seeker on the make.” Younge himself experienced someone shouting racist abuse at him from a car during a recent visit. “I’m reminded [of Noel Ignatiav’s book] How the Irish became White … Ireland [had] been peripheral within the European space, then got a different lease of life ... You see this rising racial hostility, but the other stuff hasn’t gone – that sense of, ‘We’re all immigrants’... There is this contested space, which I think has been happening for a while, with a new, borrowed xenophobia in a struggle with a very embedded sense of being an underdog and being a migrant culture.” Arguably though, the most challenging contribution is the article Riots are a Class Act—and often they’re the only alternative. This is a thoughtful and provocative piece, which showcases Younge’s brilliant use of language. Questioning the very use of terminology he asks, “What were the French and American revolutions but riots, endowed by Enlightenment principles and blessed by history?” When commenting on the ultimate weakness of young rioters, he observes, “Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week. But what they really need is a party—a political organisation that will articulate their aspirations.” But it was important for me professionally, too. The Guardian had sent me to South Africa, aged 24, to “try and get some of the stories white journalists couldn’t get”. I had stayed in Alexandria township for several weeks, and travelled to Moria, near Polokwane, in a minibus with members of the Zion Christian Church for their Easter pilgrimage. But my main assignment had been to follow Mandela on his campaign trail.

Younge’s breakthrough came when the Guardian commissioned him to cover Nelson Mandela’s presidential election campaign in South Africa in 1993. It was undoubtedly an exciting, but ominous challenge. Opposition to the white supremacist regime was one of the great campaigns of the second half of the 20th century. Join award-winning author, broadcaster and former US correspondent, columnist and editor-at-large at The Guardian, Gary Younge at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth to hear him speak about his recent book, Dispatches from the Diaspora. It’s not like I go into these situations without a view on Brexit or Trump or immigration, but if you think that you have nothing to learn, that you know why people are doing this, that produces incredibly bad journalismGary has witnessed how much change is possible, the power of systems to thwart those aspirations, and compels you to ‘imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it.' Join the former Guardian columnist for a wide-ranging conversation - from his frontline view if these big political moments, to his memories of getting drunk with Maya Angelou in her limousine and discussing politics with Stormzy, to why he believes all statues of historical figures – from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes – should be taken down. He will be talking to Guardian writer Nesrine Malik. That advice, which came from older white journalists (pretty much the only older journalists available when I started out), was rarely malicious. They thought they were looking out for me. A fear of being “pigeonholed” is one of the most common crippling anxieties of any minority in any profession. Being seen only as the thing that makes you different by those with the power to make that difference matter really is limiting.

To be fair to Obama, he never promised radical change. And Younge argues that given the institutions he was embedded in meant he was never going to be in a position to deliver much. He notes, “You don’t get to be President of the United States without raising millions from very wealthy people and corporations (or being a billionaire yourself), who will turn against you if you don’t serve their interests.” After several years of reporting from all over Europe, Africa, the US and the Caribbean Gary was appointed The Guardian’s US correspondent in 2003, writing first from New York and then Chicago. In 2015 he returned to London where he became The Guardian’s editor-at-large. Younge is a great admirer of that speech and recognised the radicalism that marked King’s final years. He seeks to rescue the reputation of a fearless fighter, who’s been unfairly characterised as a sellout or mythologised as a liberal in the decades since his assassination in April 1968.

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Born in Hertfordshire to Barbadian parents, he grew up in Stevenage until he was 17 when he went to Kassala, Sudan with Project Trust to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school. On his return he attended Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh where he studied French and Russian (Translating and Interpreting). In a rich mix of reportage, memoir and polemic, among other thought-provoking pieces, Gary asks readers to contemplate what a White History Month might look like and argues that all statues of historical figures, from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes, should be taken down. He has enjoyed several prizes for his journalism. In 2017 he received the James Aaronson Career Achievement Award from Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2016 he won the Comment Piece of the Year from The Comment Awards and the Sanford St. Martin Trust Radio Award Winner for excellence in religious reporting. In 2015 he was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year by The Comment Awards and the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “It’s the powerless on whose behalf he writes,” said the Center’s director. In 2009 he won the James Cameron award for the “combined moral vision and professional integrity” of his coverage of the Obama campaign. From 2001 to 2003 he won Best Newspaper Journalist in Britain’s Ethnic Minority Media Awards three years in a row. Join the former Guardian columnist for a wide-ranging conversation – from his frontline view if these big political moments, to his memories of getting drunk with Maya Angelou in her limousine and discussing politics with Stormzy, to why he believes all statues of historical figures – from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes – should be taken down. He will be talking to Guardian writer Nesrine Malik. This was the article that launched my career, and within a few months I was offered a staff job. Originally I had wanted to be the Moscow correspondent. But in 1996 I was awarded the Laurence Stern fellowship, which sends one young British journalist to the Washington Post every year to work for a summer on the national desk. I fell in love with an American. Within three years I had written a book about travelling through America’s deep south; within seven I was the Guardian’s New York correspondent.