Benjamin Zephaniah stayed angry all his life

It was his Mum who started it. She was always singing round the house, turning any stray remark into a rhyme, such as “Let’s go to the show, we have to go now, you know….” Uncle Everett added to it when he’d play the latest records from Jamaica at family parties, the men in their suits all dancing to reggae and ska while he, Benjamin the eldest, would add on verses about cooking. Then there was the time he was called to testify at church and made a rap of “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus” and all the Bible books, forwards then backwards. The pastors named him Zephaniah after that, a prophet’s name. So when people said later that he ought to be a painter, or a car mechanic, he clung to what he’d known since he was eight years old: he was going to be a poet, poet, poet.

They said, you can’t make a living that way. He was sure he could. It didn’t need much, just “a pencil full of lead…light and fine,…[that] moves with me through space and time”, and a mind burning with ideas. The first of which was, that he didn’t like poetry much. The world Wordsworth wandered in wasn’t his: Birmingham’s poor black end, all grey tin baths, grey pavements, grey sky, or London, “magnificent through its pollution”. He wanted to write about the lives of people now, walking those streets: struggling to survive with social services cut, lied to by politicians, oppressed by authority right and left without even knowing it. And then, as important as writing, he wanted to stir those people up by standing on a stage and letting rip the verse of fire.

He could make them laugh, too, before jabbing in a serious point. Britain’s diversity, for example, was worth celebrating, a pot of Picts and Celts to which had been added Romans, Saxons, Normans, Afghans, cool Jamaicans, fresh Indians, Pakistanis, Bosnians, Turks, all sorts. Let simmer; add respect. But “treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste”.

Nowhere was the bitterness sharper than in black Britain. It was his main theme. As a child he ached with shame when schoolmates brought their favourite golliwogs to class; as a youth, a naughty boy deep in gangs, rackets and thieving, he’d felt these were the only options open. But even as a dread Rasta strolling real and regal down the street, with his poetry and novels in every bookshop and his face on TV, he still felt unsure about asking a policeman the time. Black males were stopped and searched five times more than white men. When young black men were killed, like Stephen Lawrence, white killers got off. When black men like his cousin Michael and a whole litany of others died in custody, there was no inquiry. And when a white woman sat well away from him on the Tube, was that because he was black?

Black people do not have
Chips on their shoulders,
They just have injustice on their backs

When Nelson Mandela was in prison he wrote a tribute to him, and when South Africa cast off apartheid he hosted a concert for him at the Royal Albert Hall. But he was all too aware that the legacy of colonialism still blighted equality even in Britain, the land paved with gold.

Some black entertainers sold out, of course. They thought going to the Palace and sipping champagne proved how far they had come. He couldn’t do that shit. The queen had met him backstage once, a nice old lady, but No Monarchy was his motto. In 2003 the establishment tried to award him the Order of the British Empire; he threw that thought straight back. If there was anything he had railed against all his life, it was the empire and all its works.

People sometimes got the strange idea that he had softened. Perhaps it was because he was interviewed on the BBC and went into schools to teach children to love words, have fun with them and think again about eating animals, who were people too:

Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas
Cos’ turkeys just wanna hav fun…
It could be yu mate, an not on your plate…

He also worked for the British Council, though mostly to prove that British poetry was reggae and dub as well as Keats. Murmurs even arose that he could be poet laureate. But then he would declare yet again that capitalism would eat itself to death, and urge people to break the law every day just to prove they weren’t entirely under control: by speeding, or wanking at the bus stop. At which point the establishment would cry, “Fuck! He’s still militant!”

His anger did indeed burn a long, long time. So many causes inflamed him. He wrote, and worked for charities, to address all the suffering he heard of: war victims, abused women, the homeless, refugees (“We can all be refugees. Sometimes it only takes a day”). His duty was to drag into the daylight injustice everywhere. On the cover of his anthology of 2001, “Too Black, Too Strong”, with poems about East Timor and Palestine as well as his home cities, his fist punched out smack in the reader’s face.

Yet he did have a more reflective side. It showed as he got older, when he moved to the remote Fens of eastern England, grew his own organic vegetables and thought more about “the African heart deep in my Brummie chest”. Religion, he had long ago decided, gave God a bad name. After trying and rejecting several, he took Buddha as his hero and self-knowledge as his creed. Meditation gave him a direct line to the creator, and didn’t blunt his anger. In fact, one wouldn’t work without the other.

When good at last triumphed over evil, as he was sure it would, he hoped it might be partly due to the poetry he had sown in people’s heads, especially young heads. The love of words, the drive of rhythm, the search for justice; the sense of prophetic power.

I used to think nurses were women,
I used to think police were men,
I used to think poets were boring,
Until I became one of them.