“As we reclaim the narrative let us all remember the global majority are the first ones.”

Who said it? A member of the Black Hebrew Israelites? A discipline of the Nation of Islam and Minister Louis Farrakhan?

In fact, it was Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent East, in a Black History Month video that must be seen to be believed. Reciting a poem in which she refers to herself as “the Chosen One” and “an African Freedom Fighter”, Butler rails against an unidentified oppressor — implied to be white — who she terms “wrong”, “weird”, and “violent”. 

To be clear, this flavour of crackpot grievance politics is nothing new from Butler, a woman who has repeatedly called to “decolonise” Britain’s national curriculum and who formerly served as a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan [sic] Reparations. 

The problem is not that Butler’s post was bizarre and divisive — though it was. The problem is that it was stuffed full of Afrocentric Black Nationalist tropes, drawn directly from conspiratorial sources. Leaving aside her dubious understanding of the geographic origins of modern humans, Butler’s post featured AI-generated images of black Africans dressed like Ancient Egyptians, a trope which has its origins in the pseudo-historical “Hotep” subculture. With its origins amongst 20th century African Americans, the Hotep worldview holds that Ancient Egypt was a racially homogenous civilization, comprised almost exclusively of the black forefathers of today’s Africans. 

This is, of course, entirely untrue; the population of Ancient Egypt bore almost no resemblance to that of modern Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, Ancient Egyptians probably bore more resemblance to today’s Copts, a remnant Christian population of some 10 million people which traces its roots to before Egypt’s Islamization in the 7th century. Today’s Sub-Saharan Africans bear little resemblance, culturally or physically, to Ancient Egyptians. Of course, the point of this conspiracy theory is not to accurately chart the lineage of the peoples of Africa, but to glorify black people today by claiming ownership of a civilization which built some of the ancient world’s most impressive monuments and which was managed by one of antiquity’s most sophisticated bureaucracies. To put a long story short, this is little more than pyramid-flavoured Wakanda, propagated directly by a Labour MP.

Perhaps most perniciously, Butler’s post also makes use of the implicitly aggressive term “global majority”, a phrase designed to unite all non-Europeans around the world behind a shared political struggle against Europeans and their descendants. Last I checked, Brexit or no, Britain is still in Europe, and its population is still largely made up of Europeans — who ought to worry that their Parliament now features this kind of rhetoric.

In essence, this is Maoist Third Worldism, stripped of any class-based analysis and recentered entirely around the African experience

“Global majority” first entered the British academic lexicon in 2003, courtesy of Rosemary Campbell-Stephens, a British-born black academic of dubious distinction. Campbell-Stephens also believes in a grand international conspiracy, in which a “white elite” rules the world through transnational corporations and NGOs. She describes postcolonial third world nations as “the occupied territory created for the global majority”, and believes openly that black people have demonstrated the best capacity for leadership of any group.

In essence, this is Maoist Third Worldism, stripped of any class-based analysis and recentered entirely around the African experience. Indeed, Campbell-Stephens’ ideas resemble closely the conspiratorial Afrocentrism of figures like Robert Mugabe, the now-deceased dictator who spent the 20th century turning Zimbabwe from Africa’s breadbasket to the continent’s basket case. It is absurd in the extreme that a Labour MP is downstream of these ideas. 

The problem is not, per se, that Butler is wrong — it’s that she could only have reached these positions by being steeped in conspiratorial Afrocentrism. This not only suggests that she has ill-feeling towards British people, but also that she is disastrously ignorant.

Unfortunately, Butler is not alone in her delusions, and is joined by a number of academics and commentators who make their living from the propagation of similarly racially-aggravated bile. All the while, these same voices attack Britain’s national history and identity, encouraging us to “decolonise” and dish out reparations to countries in Africa and the Caribbean. The kind of unhinged ethnic narcissism that was once the subject of Louis Theroux documentaries is now spewed from the Government benches.

These are rather than less ideal conditions for the harmonious functioning of a society. In fact, these are the steps that you might take if you were deliberately trying to design an unstable society designed to collapse in on itself. The time to stop tolerating this has long since passed. It is not just eccentric but deeply obnoxious.