Trying to spend my life telling stories
London, England
Joined January 2018
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So happy to be showcasing African and Asian films on the big screen again
Àkòdì presents
FINDING OUR WAY HOME
Five stories that explore identity, belonging, and the many meanings of home
Tickets live: eventbrite.co.uk/e/akodi-fin…
Supported by @Film_London #FilmHubLDN
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party.
It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point.
Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty.
Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way.
You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction.
"Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
All of us at Marvel Studios are deeply saddened by the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart. Sir Patrick brought Professor Charles Xavier to life with extraordinary grace, intelligence, and humanity, defining the character for generations of fans, from "X-Men" to "Logan" to "Avengers: Doomsday." He was a singular talent, a generous collaborator, and a true gentleman. Our hearts go out to his wife Sunny, his children, his friends, and the countless fans around the world whose lives he touched with his art.
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
Nick Cannon divorced Mariah Carey. In the deal, she agreed to pay his travel and hotel when he visits their twins
Then he had 10 more kids with 5 other women
In the video below, he explains why he left: "The husband I became was Mr. Mariah Carey"
April 2008. They marry at her estate in the Bahamas. She's about a decade older and one of the best selling artists alive
April 30, 2011. The twins are born on their third anniversary
December 2014. He files for divorce
Asked to name the reasons, the first word out of his mouth: "Financially"
Asked if he felt he didn't deserve her: "Absolutely. 100%." "This is someone that is out of my league"
The settlement, per TMZ in 2016:
The twins live mainly with Mariah
He puts $5,000 a month into a trust for them
When he visits, she pays his travel and lodging
She signs a 2012 Ferrari over to him
Neither can let the kids call a new partner "mom" or "dad"
Their incomes in the filing: him $2.7 million a year, her $6.3 million
February 2017. His third child is born. Between June 2021 and December 2022 he has 8 more. Total: 12 kids with 6 women
His explanation, in the same video: he wanted to prove he could provide for a lot of people, "because for so much time I didn't have to"
Do the math. In the marriage he made less than half of what she did. In 6 years after it, he went from 2 kids to 12
The case for Nick: he says he went to therapy, still loves her, and calls himself "the low functioning individual" in his relationships
Could you stay married to someone who makes more than double what you make, or would it eat at you too?
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
21 years ago I named "Reddit" and everyone said it was a horrible name, but I insisted one day people would say "I read it on reddit" and used my CEO-privilege to overrule everyone + kept the name. Now the company twitter account (unbeknownst to them) is making the joke. Heh.
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
HOLLYWOOD IS FULL OF VAMPIRES
It goes deeper.. when you really really really really get it.. when you innerstand the whole consent rule…There is a plethora of humans who love to go to the movies to see horror films, watch entertainers walk around with blood pouring all over them.
As they watch it in the movie theater or sitting at home they give consent by their desire to consume that type of content. The consciousness of each individual that does this gets amplified and so they continue to give it to you on the silver screen and behind the scenes in real life all because you wanted to see it.
If everybody in the world stop watching the content, the consent would stop and this thing would stop... but that won't happen because no one ever gets this type of secret information and even if they did.. they haven't done their shadow work so they're just gonna say"it's just theater".
Theater or not I have not given my consent and I don't watch any of it... you better think twice.
Hollywood is so much darker than it appears to be… if you think this is too extreme and there’s no way that your favorite idols could be committing such horrific crimes, how many “elite” PDFile rings need to be exposed for you to see the truth?
They tell us what they are doing in plain sight, but we don’t want to believe them. So we take it as comedy or fiction.
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
Only 5,000 kids were surveyed, only 92 were Jewish, only 70 of 92 responded, and 29 said they had faced antisemitism at school. Only 2% said antisemitism was a big problem at their school and we're reclassifying it as a more serious form of racism based on that? Is this a joke?
Free Palestine 🇵🇸 retweeted
The British government made a 27 point plan based on 29 kids.
Jesus fucking Christ.
All for Israel.
