Archive and upfront below is a selection of
thought and action provoking articles by Victor Headley

“I ain’t mad at ya…”

Maybe this was Tupac’s absolution to his killers. What could have gone through his mind during the times he regained consciousness in the hospital? No one will ever know, although all of us who listened to his music over the years and related to his ups and down feel like we knew him well enough to almost guess his last thoughts.

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Fire Me, Fire You

To outsiders, those living in the relatively normal conditions of modern democracies, violent incidents like those that took place in Kinshasa yesterday afternoon sound like Wild West stories. Yet, for people of the central African region, military coups, civil wars, massacres are all too real and have been so for the past thirty years. That’s what life is like down here. This morning, as news filtered through, the population of Brazzaville, where many are citizens of the neighbouring Democratic republic of Congo, you could read concern on the faces of the office workers as well as those of the koro-koro (pushcart) men.


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What’s a passport to do with it?

Nobody died last time. Half a dozen people got shot. Young black people out for a night clubbing who ended up shocked and bloody, realising only hours later how close they had been to ending up stretched out for good on a Peckham street. This time its two dead, separate incidents. As yet I’m not quite sure if the police eventually found out whom the intended targets were, because a precise target there must have been. Unless, unless London has already got to the stage where, just like in L.A., a couple of guys get inside a car with the sole intention of spraying a bunch of people with bullets in some part of town in retaliation for some other incident involving individuals from that area. In any case, the result is the same: indiscriminate shooting.