I dreamed I saw Enoch last night
Alive as you and me
Said I, "Enoch, you're nine years dead"
"I never died", said he
"I never died", said he
Isaac, 17, from Norwood, in southeast London, said he became involved in gangs and stealing before his parents sent him to Ghana. After four years at school in Accra he is softly spoken and articulate and hopes to sit international GCSEs at the end of this academic year before returning to Britain for A-levels.
When they first arrive the teen-agers are often “a lot wilder”, said Amoo-Gottfried, but with time and discipline they become “domesticated”. He puts the troubles of the British pupils down to a lack of good role models - a reason many West Indian families cite for sending their children to school back home.
“In London father has run off to work early in the morning, mother the same. So you find the children left to themselves and, as they say, the devil finds work for idle hands. Here they see professional people – lawyers, doctors – whereas in the UK most of the Ghanaians are blue-collar workers.”
The list of consistent A, B and C grades on a results sheet pinned to the notice board is a source of pride and several of Amoo-Gottfried’s former pupils are now at British universities.
Michelle Asante, 23, attended Archbishop Porter girls’ school in Takoradi, Ghana, and went on to complete a sociology degree at Sheffield University before going to drama school.
“The school I was attending in Plumstead [southeast London] wasn’t great and my mum felt I wasn’t being challenged. There was a lot of fighting,” said Asante, who is now an actress. “Education is so important in Ghana – people take it as their only means of escaping poverty. With education you can do anything, no matter how poor you are.”
The pupils at Faith Montessori agree discipline in Africa can be tough but also see their lives changing for the better. Abena and “the London boys”, which includes James, 16, from Edmonton Green, north London, also admit that while they are benefiting from a Ghanaian education, they miss home and look forward to going back to A-levels and university.The years of mischief are behind them, Isaac said: “What gets you respect over there is disgrace over here.”
"This says nothing about the neighborhood," said Noreen McClendon, executive director of Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles.
Unique Kiana Bishop has been convicted twice of burglary and once of petty theft in the last two years, police said. Her latest conviction came after a July 26 arrest for burglary in South Los Angeles. She spent 14 days in jail and was placed on probation after being convicted in the Norwalk branch of Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Meanwhile, close to where the brawl started, friends and family of the dead woman gathered at a makeshift memorial Tuesday. The mourners said it was unlike the 22-year-old to be involved in a violent dispute. "If she would've had any idea what she was getting into, she wouldn't have come," said Brenda Rowry, Shontae Treniece Blanche's aunt.
At her childhood home in a neighborhood about three miles northwest of the fatal confrontation, Blanche's grandmother and cousin remembered her as a popular girl and bank worker who was determined to avoid trouble. "She would tell me, 'I'm not going to be like my mom,' " said Helen Hayes, 60, who raised her granddaughter.
According to Hayes, both of Blanche's parents had been in and out of prison since Blanche was a young child. Blanche, who was five months' pregnant and married to a man in prison, was looking forward to a future as a mother and to graduating from Cal State Northridge.
Back in 1999 I was working with homeless young people, and a number of them converted to what seemed to me to be a fairly radical form of Islam. These were not young people from Muslim families, but white kids from Christian/ atheist backgrounds, mostly girls who then adopted veils ranging from headdresses to burkas or niqabs. I thought at the time the appeal was twofold. Firstly, they were being offered moral certainty and clarity for the first time in their lives. For many of the girls, they welcomed the veil because it gave them a chance to think of themselves as being defined by something other than their sexual attractiveness. The other appeal, however, was simply that it became fashionable. Those that were "in" formed an exclusive club, and those that weren,t felt they were missing out.
My point is that we can't address this issue until we recognise how little our desperately vacuous, morally empty, celebs'n'shopping culture offers to all our young people, and the powerful sense of importance and belonging conveyed by involvement in "jihad". By all means stop the hatemongers from preaching, but we also need to take a good look at our society, and the world we are making for our children.
The "Blair generation" will be the best educated in history, the school standards minister, David Miliband, promised yesterday.
A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it. The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.
To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing. But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.
Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards. The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.
"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it. I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression - the card doesn't say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled."
A Camelot spokeswoman said the game was withdrawn after reports that some players had not understood the concept. She said: "The instructions for playing the Cool Cash scratchcard are clear - and are printed on each individual card and in the game procedures available at each retailer. However, because of the potential for player confusion we have decided to withdraw the game."
More than 15m adults in Britain have poor numeracy - the equivalent of a G or below at GCSE maths. Almost three times as many UK adults (15.1m) have poor numeracy - the equivalent of a G or below at GCSE maths - than with poor literacy skills, according to the government's Skills for Life survey.
Peter Hall, of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, said: "The concept of minus numbers is something we would cover with 11 or 12 year olds, and we would expect them to have come across it before".
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
2001 : "Labour has called on William Hague to expel a senior Conservative backbench MP, who made a speech attacking immigration. John Townend spoke of "Commonwealth immigration" undermining Britain's "homogenous Anglo-Saxon society" and said Enoch Powell had been right in making pessimistic forecasts about its impact. "
In his column for the Express and Star newspaper in Wolverhampton - where Mr Powell was MP at the time of the 1968 speech - Mr Hastilow wrote: "When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration. "Many insist: 'Enoch Powell was right'. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically."
He also wrote: "They have more or less given up complaining about the way we roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves."
"Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically."
Cabinet minister Peter Hain said Mr Hastilow's comments had revealed the "racist underbelly" of the Tory party.
‘The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimilable populations … in the heartland of the state. … The disruption of the homogeneous “we”, which forms the basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a “divided community” take charge and begin to operate… The two active ingredients are grievance and violence.
‘There is one factor which not yet been injected. That factor is firearms and explosives… with the escalating and self-augmenting consequences which we know perfectly well from experience in … other parts of the world. I do not know whether it will be tomorrow, or next year, or in five years: but it will come.
‘At first there will be horrified astonishment, and inquiry as to what we have done wrong that such things should be happening. Then there will be feverish endeavour to find methods to allay the supposed grievances which lie behind the violence.'
