INJUSTICE & MY LIFE: A CRUSADE

The life story of a solo crusader.

I am no hero or saint, but I certainly am a peace loving, kind and helpful person who is able to distinguish between right and wrong, hence I am able to see injustice from a mile. However, there is a part of me that triggers a passion for vengeance when ever I see injustice being done. Hence my life seems to have been a solo crusade against injustice. My use of crusade here has nothing to do with Christianity or religion, but as in ‘vigorous fight against injustice’. For this reason, I have been traumatised, subjected to vilification, experienced the threat to my life and even used as a scapegoat as a result of my being a lone crusader from and by those I have stood up against in my fight against injustice. I have stood up against teachers, religious fanatics, employers, bullies, racists, tribal people whose practice or behaviour towards others I believed to be morally wrong. But never in my life did I ever think I would end up fighting for my life on my own against hypocritical bullies whose public façade was presented as democratic, anti racists, anti sexism and related injustices like what I experienced in the past 7 years. Worse still, it seemed like all those many people I have sacrificed my life fighting for either professionally or personally got swallowed by the ground instead of rallying around me, their friend as a good turn deserving another.

Now, what I want to look at in this essay is what makes someone like me spend my life dicing with death fighting against injustice, instead of grabbing the opportunities thrown at me to be a high flying successful rich person. I will start off by looking at what causes injustice from my personal experience. I don’t know whether I am fortunate or unfortunate to have siblings whose greedy and envious nature taught me how to fight back from an early age. I don’t know whether my early contact with the life and teachings of Jesus Christ strengthened by faith and prepared me to be strong and resilient against adverse situations. I also don’t know whether having a mother like mine who acted as my role model by fighting against injustice added to my hatred of injustice and my determination in life to fight against all injustices. But I have a passion when it comes to injustices and from my personal experience, I can safely say most of the injustices I have fought against are with people who are driven by greed and envy. Biblically, greed and envy are regarded as part of the seven deadly sins, and I have previously tried to explain what I understand by the word sin, but this definition of greed and envy does not require anyone needing to know why greed is morally wrong.

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. Or, excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves; as in insatiable desire for wealth. The world’s resources are not infinite, there are only 24 hours a day and there is so much energy a human being can spend toiling to fulfill his or her insatiable desire for wealth. The only way a greedy person can fulfill this insatiable desire for wealth is through an unjust act, a morally wrong act and I can think of quite a few as in slavery, colonization, racism, exploitation, theft, murder and etcetera.
I did say in my previous blog that my special friend is real, we met in February 1994 when I joined her work place and we have been inseparable since them. When we met, both of us were fairly comfortable with our lives having worked hard to be where we were materially. We both lived in Kent, she and her family lived in a four bedroom house in a quiet suburb in Kent. The first time I visited my special friend’s house, I was envious of the space in her house. Ours was a 2.5 bedroom terraced little house which was well decorated but it had small rooms. But when my friend visited my house, she was envious of my garden. Every year I looked forward to summer where I invited my friends and my neighbours who lived along our street for a barbecue. My neighbours made me feel big headed because they had seen me digging the garden until midnight and they always publicly marveled at my endless energy and innovative nature as I used to work in the garden till late at night after a 7 hour shift in a cardiac ward. Initially, me and friend exchanged ideas about the garden and she also worked hard in her garden and it equally looked beautiful. But having a big country house was always something I had dreamt of for a long time. So when we bought our current house, which is a 5 bed roomed house it was my friend I invited so as to give me ideas as I envied the arrangement and decoration in her house. So, I am pleased that there is a definition of envy which relates to me and my friend: i.e. admire, look up to - feel admiration for. It gives me a wonderful feeling to enviously admire someone’s achievement, because it means I can learn from others. On the other hand there is a morally wrong way of envy and these are some of the definition of envy as I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Envy as:
- A feeling of grudging admiration and desire to have something that is possessed by another
- A feeling of grudging or somewhat admiring discontent aroused by the possessions, achievements, or qualities of another
- Spite and resentment at seeing the success of another.

I have also said that I am a socialist, a member of the SWP UK, which stands for Socialist Worker’s Party. I joined the SWP in June 2003. Before 2003, my special friend and I were chasing the spiritual path in our attempt to understand life; we were searching for something, a meaning of life. My friend never recovered from the suffering and early death of her father whom she adored and I was driven by the anger of the early deaths of my mother and my brother. We read a wide range of spiritual related books and attended many spiritual meetings in our attempt to dig deeper into life. It was like a journey and we met many new friends, learnt new things and travelled to different parts of the world and our lives seemed perfect. However, somewhere after the beginning of 2000, some things started to change in our lives and the change was so gradual that by the time we noticed, it was as if something was driving us, subsequently, both of us turned against our comfortable married lives for solitude.

What attracted me to the socialist politics of the SWP is that it claimed to capture something I have been passionate about all my life; my solo crusade against injustice is captured in ‘what the SWP stands for.’ Being part of the SWP was the only way I could end my solo crusade and have others fighting with me – and this gave me safety in numbers protection that I desperately needed. But this was a new terrain for me and socialism was something I had little or no knowledge about. However, I was prepared to learn and hence my desire to get involved in what was happening in the SWP just as I had done with the spiritual journey that my friend and I had previously been involved in. This was a drastic move for me hence I needed to make friends who would help me in this learning process. Little did I know that I would end up spending nearly 7 years fighting for my life and for justice against the very same people whose politics claimed to protect those fighting for justice! I have fought against employers and was always vindicated within a short space of time. I have fought with my siblings and walked away from them with no scratch leaving them flat on their faces. This is no criticism of the SWP, because I believe that the negative forces that I encountered when I joined the SWP were meant to come into my life as a challenge to my strength in terms of fighting for justice.
This experience does not in any where negate the suffering one goes through when fighting for justice. But I believe I had to put my spiritual knowledge that I had spent many years trying to understand into us.

By 2003, one thing my friend and I were doing was cry all the time, but also comforted each other with prayer as it felt like there was a battle inside us. We also seemed to attract people whose intention was to hurt us, resulting in intense emotional battle inside us; and most of the time it felt like we were fighting against ourselves, an emotion that is very difficult to describe. I encountered the worst negativity and injustice in these past 7 years from people I did not know and most of them claimed to be socialists and members of the SWP, and this intensified this passion I have to fight against injustice and negative people. Neither our families nor our friends understood what was happening to us, including the spiritual friends we had made. We are both divorced from our husbands now, that is how inseparable we are. Another significant thing in our lives is that both of us divorced our husband amicably and remain platonically friendly with them.

I can understand the sibling rivalry between my siblings and myself, but there is something amiss in my fight for justice with members of the SWP or their friends. This is the part that answers why someone like me spent all my adult life dicing with death in my quest for justice. I have argued here that from my experience, most injustices revolve around greed and envy, but there is more to greed and envy that drives unjust people. We have solicitors, lawyers, priests, religious people from all walks of life all claiming to fight for justice, yet no one can argue with me that we live in the most unjust world that anyone can ever imagine. I believe therefore that the answer lies in this little sentence: “It is wrong to be right when those in power are wrong.” How many people acknowledge a wrong doing when they see one or applaud a right action when they see one? From my experience it seems like believing something that is wrong as being right is like an infectious disease which spreads from one person to another. On the other hand, very few accept the truth and applaud a good deed. It is morally wrong to kill, it is morally wrong to lie, it is morally wrong to steal, and yet we have role models from parents, relatives, friends, superiors, employers, politicians, comrades, religious leaders or even the legal system who are in that position because they support murder, they lie to others and steal from others; greed and envy is their driving force. If the system we are brought up in condones murder, lies or theft it makes it easy for people to believe that murder is right, lying is right, stealing is right, and children brought up in these societies grow up believing the lies told by their lying parents, friends and relatives, they mature in a society governed by leaders who do the same, hence the end result is this injustice that some of us have spent most of our lives fighting against.


I was driven to seek the spiritual path because of the anger at the loss of my beloved ones through unjust means. Equally, I was driven to fight against injustice because I grew up under apartheid. Yet it does not automatically mean that someone with an identical life experience will choose the same path just as my siblings are a good example. The same applies with organisations like the SWP where comrades are conditioned to believe each other without realising that some of them are capable of deliberately misleading others if they believe that their status is threatened. It is still greed for power because not all those who join the SWP are driven by what the founders of the SWP believed in just as my siblings are not driven by what our parents taught us. These people are what I regard as impostors and opportunists; hence they felt threatened by someone like me who is an independent thinker and open about my thoughts. There are many reasons I can think of, that made some of these people uncomfortable with me, but one of them is that I refused to condone their way of thinking. I refused to be subservient to megalomaniacs in return for a pat on my back; I refused to be subservient to their belief in free sex. Before joining the SWP, I was not only a solo crusader but a woman who believes in a monogamous relation with a man of my choice. Nothing has changed and lust has never been part of my vocabulary. These people are more dangerous that my siblings because they are not only driven by greed or envy; they are megalomaniacs who grab any opportunity that gives them a position of power. That is why some of them were publicly friendly to me and I would have been their best friend had I played the game by their rules. Publicly, they speak against injustice, against racism, against sexism, against oppression and are pretty much good friends bit only if they control your thoughts, something no one, not even my siblings, ex husband or friend has ever managed to do. That is why they felt threatened by an innocent woman. How pathetic?
This is a summary of how I have made sense of my experience of injustice in the SWP. I always argue with Christian fanatics who despise Judas Iscariot. I don’t despise Judas, because I believe that he was used as a sacrifice, someone who was chosen to be the opposite of good/god so that Jesus Christ could be seen as a god. After all, Judas Iscariot was one of Jesus’s disciples and a treasurer who was trusted with all their money. Surely, if he loved money so much, why did he not walk away with whatever money they had? Instead, he accepted 30 shillings so that Jesus could be crucified but soon after that he handed the money back and hanged himself? It was not Judas who wanted Jesus crucified, but the chief priests, the Pharisees and the law makers because Jesus was exposing their façade and their lies about this god who lived in heaven so as to steal and oppress others. The Romans were oppressing all Jews and the chief priests, the Pharisees and the law makers were oppressing the working class Jews.
Someone I trusted betrayed me to his comrades in the SWP, but it does not mean his intention was to get me crucified; hence I forgave him just as Jesus forgave Judas. This is how simple it all started, a harmless friendly relationship where boy meets girl and they fall in love. No tragedy there because it happens everyday, except that the girl is still married in paper only. Even then, this sort of thing takes place everyday and nobody blinks an eyelid unless those concerned are the so called stars or celebrities, something I am not. I vividly recall feeling a chill going through my spine sometime in August 2003 after a conversation I had with this guy who was the first friend I made soon after joining the SWP, his voice was trailing and trembling and I could hear voices in the background as if someone was telling him what to say and he was saying, ‘they are jealous.’ He said these words for me to hear but they were not directed at me. I knew straight away that someone somewhere was out for a war with me. Hence I attempted several times to clarify what ever he had been told about me, but what ever attempts I made, I was met with a barrage of insults. I felt helpless and spiritually raped and I imagined how fruitless it would have been if someone had tried to stop Judas Iscariot from betraying Jesus Christ! There was nothing I wanted or needed from the SWP except to learn what their politics was all about and hopefully make new friends as I had moved away from my old circle of friends. I believe that it is true that to make genuine friends, one has to be friendly, and that is precisely all I was trying to do with this guy and subsequently with others I met thereafter. So, why were they not friendly with me? What is it that this guy had heard about me for him to turn round, less than two months of our meeting and say ‘they are jealous,’ given the fact that no one in the SWP had spoken to me about me?

Well, let me start off with how greed and envy drove my siblings to destruction: The reason my siblings fought with me is that I had what they do not have, or rather, I am always content with what I have, hence see no reason to fight against another person for what that person has. I am grateful to be alive and I always work hard for what I need and want and once I have got it, I give myself a deserved holiday or a pat on my back. I never tell a lie to deceive another person or cheat to steal from another person. Unlike me, my siblings are always chasing a rainbow, always extremely unhappy and not content with life, hence this is what I got from my siblings: My world turned upside down from June 2003 with my father’s death because my father was the only person alive who knew me very well and would have stood by me through it all. Then I lost £20,000 in the business deal I made with my sister. But that was no surprise to me because my sister has always been like that with money, driven by greed. This is a woman who landed my father, an old man in his 70s in prison after she failed to pay back money she had borrowed from someone who had government connections in Zimbabwe, and then decided to go into hiding. By imprisoning my father this lady thought my sister would resurface and pay back the debt, but I ended up paying this debt and I was gutted by the state my father was in after 7 days in a lice filled prison. So when I lost my £20,000, I put that down to that old devil called sibling jealous, greed and envy. But my brother who is 10 years older than me, who knows how unreliable my sister is, also turned against me and supported my sister and her thugs. These two would happily have sent me to my death for a crime they know I never committed. Having put up with their behaviour for half my life, this was the final straw; hence I have made a clean break from them. What choice have I got between putting my neck into their noose and making a clean break from them? Surely half my life that I gave them to abuse is enough rope for them to go hang themselves.

With my siblings it was greed and envy that drove them to destroy me. They were not content with what ever I gave them for the simple reason that those who love money are never content with what they have. Hence it is true that money is the root of all evil. Even Jesus Christ equates money to a powerful master when he says, ‘There are two masters in life, money and god and no one can worship both.’ I believe here that the god Jesus Christ is talking about is the soul. This therefore is what makes me and my siblings so different. They worship money and I worship my soul. Being a socialist has also enabled me to understand why money is the root of all evil, and how greed is the driving force for those who are chasing money instead of seeking god. Take the example of my paternal grandfather: he was wealthy and his wealth was in livestock; cows, goats, sheep name it he had it in plenty, but he had no two pennies to rub together. I vaguely remember some of the feasts we use to have where my grandfather would invite the whole village with the first rainfall as that meant the beginning of cultivating the fields and at harvest time. My father who never made it to his father’s wealth in livestock continued with this ritual. It was something everyone in our village looked forward to. However, nowadays, my grandfather’s wealth is no longer regarded as wealth. I believe that this is because very few people nowadays see livestock as wealth if it cannot be translated into monetary terms. The barter system no longer exists and money is now the most common medium of exchange that functions as legal tender.
I have no problem with money as a medium of exchange, what I have a problem with is this whole notion of money being used as a tool of oppression and the cause of injustice where even siblings are prepared to destroy each other for money. My mother for instance, used to save every penny that she had so as to send us to school. On the other hand, white girls of my age whose parents had a lot of money, had their fees subsidized or paid for by the government. That of course is the system that happened under apartheid, but unfortunately it is the system that the so called civilised western governments are now adopting. In UK for instance, by the time children of the working class people finish their first degree, they have accrued a huge debt in tuition fees whereas the children of the rich have their fees paid upfront. This is the lowest any human being can get, because depriving someone an education in today’s world is equal to destroying the future of that person before it even starts. I would not be where I am today had my mother not made that sacrifice of saving every penny so as to educate her children. I don’t know how my grandfather acquired his livestock, but what I know is that he shared his bounty with his village people. This cannot be said of billionaires and millionaires. What can be said of these greedy slimy dickheads is that their insatiable greed compels them to destroy not only other human beings, but the planet that sustains the life as we know it. This is the madness of the injustices caused by those who worship money because these people tend to have an envious nature hence never get content with what they have unless they are better than someone else. But to be better than someone else means depriving that someone else of what she has, hence my siblings wanted to deprive me of everything I had including my life. I suppose that is why my friend and I had to forsake everything we had before we found the god in us, because those who are driven by greed and envy will kill, lie and steal, something that my friend and I are incapable of.
But in the SWP, who are these people who were fighting me? What did they know about me? What part of their lives had I threatened? Well, seven years down the line, I have managed to put names to faces and faces to names. I have identified the reason why this guy said these words ‘they are jealous.’ It was Pandora’s Box that I had opened, people from all walks of life claiming to be socialists, anti racists, who were comfortable in their skin because no one challenged them to put their theory into practice, until a black woman who owns a 5 bedroom house challenged their socialist values. They knew their centuries old lies and ignorance of white superiority will be exposed, they were unable to control the person behind this threat, but rather than being greedy, they became frightened and envious. As far as they are concerned, no one is going to re write the history of white superiority. Women of the same mentality are jealous because some of their men don’t hold their view of white superiority. To them a black woman’s role was to be subservient to white women, to do as she is told, to go out with the person chosen for her. This was jealous and envy in its rawest nature, the same envy and jealous that brought about apartheid. I say this because their actions fit in pretty well with my three definitions of envy, and the megalomaniacs lapped to it as it gave them a reason to subdue me and destroy me. They did not know me from Adam, they had not spoken to me about me, and I suppose they are fucking racists who could not stand a black woman being loved by a white man. As far as I am concerned they can have their men, but what they cannot have is my life, because I kill to protect my life. This reminds me of how it must have been for the first white man who saw the richness of Africa. It reminds me of how this white man must have been overwhelmed by the friendship and hospitality of an African woman. That woman is me, but Africa is no longer the Africa that was before the white man raped and prostituted it. I am claiming my place in history because I am that African woman who was raped by a white man and yet refuses to be turned into a prostitute
On reflection, it seems to me that this was a journey that my friend and I had to make in life; a sacrifice that we could not run away from. Whereas my friend left her marital home and rented a bedsit sharing the house with other people, I nearly lost everything including my house in these past seven years. But I believe our sacrifice is over now, my friend is happily settled in a new relationship and lives in an equally big house in Kent. I am also happily settled with my socialist politics and my new friends that I made in the past seven years. This is where I am in my life, trying to rebuild my life once more. I still meet up with my special friend for our spiritual meetings and for that platonic sisterly chinwag. We keep each other spiritually strong because when ever we are together; we positively influence and encourage each other, and always have a good laugh. We reflect ourselves in each other, hence I know if she is unhappy even if she does not tell me. She has also rung me several times in the past just out of the blues and said, ‘you are in my thought now Florence, are you alright?’ 99.9% of the times I was in floods of tears or angry over something or someone. That knowing that there is someone out there that I am connected to is what makes this friend of mine special.

There is only one other person who I was spiritually connected to, my mother. The woman spoilt me rotten because she felt my pain when I was angry and vice versa, hence I refused to speak to every one when I was angry. I would only speak if the person who upset me was punished or reprimanded. I am forever grateful to these two women, my mother and my special friend, because without them I would never have made it in life. I say this because I was completely lost after my mother died in 1981 until I met my friend in 1994. However, there is also something special that bonds the three of us together – the BIBLE and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Whereas my mother taught me to read the bible before I went to school, I introduced my friend to the wisdom of the bible when we embarked on our spiritual journey. Despite reading a wide range of spiritual books, it was the bible that guided us to the life that we were looking for, the life in us, what I regard as the kingdom of God in us, our Soul. It is our soul that connects us to the universal god, the universe. That is why I was able to expose these greedy manipulating envious liars who wanted to destroy an innocent person. My soul is the cornerstone in my fight against injustice. It is this wisdom with particular emphasis to the life of Jesus Christ that makes me and my friend stand out from our other friends. It is not easy to practice what Jesus Christ teaches, but we did and I believe that it is the reason why we defied GREED. Both of us were prepared to surrender everything we owned in order to find a meaning of life so as to find peace in our lives.

But it is not easy for even the strongest soul to embark on a solo crusade against injustice in this unjust world; hence the SWP remains dear to my life. I now know that greed and envy kill because these buggers tried to kill me, but I let bygones be bygones because through my faith I am able to defend my life/soul even if it means killing the person who is threatening my life. But at the moment I am envious of my special friend, she is a white woman who has fought and won the love of her wealthy Chinese/Hong Kong partner. I love both of them dearly even though I have threatened her partner with GBH in the past for betraying my friend. I put that down to his insecurities because the last time I went to their house, I had a wonderful time. He made us this wonderful meal whilst I and my friend were getting drunk. After the meal we all listened to some wonderful music with me dancing all the time. But come bedtime my friend came to my bedroom and we chatted until the early hours of the morning. This led to him accusing us of being lesbians and I had to get involved to clear the air. But what makes me envious of my friend is the fact that she is in love with a man of her dreams. As a spiritual sister, I asked her whether there was someone out there for me who would love me unconditionally. She looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘For you Florence, the only man who can match your love is God.’

Now you readers of my blog understand why I feel sorry for myself. I am not god, but I am the goddess of dance and for that reason I need a god to dance with me. Throughout known history, there are only two men who would have made a match for me, Jesus Christ and Che Guevara. Well not all is lost because I believe that the spirit of Jesus Christ and the spirit of Che Guevara live forever and just like the spirit that possessed Judas Iscariot, the spirit of Jesus and Che is bound to possess the man who will love me unconditionally.
Hasta la Victoria – Against brute force and injustice, the people will have the last word, that of victory. Che Guevara. (That is my life.)

No more greed, no more envy, no more lies, but love, peace and justice; THANK YOU GUYS and all those who stood up for me. GREED & ENVY ARE DEADLY SINS, please stay away from them!