Why I Hate Samba

I have a confession. I don’t like samba. OK, that’s not quite true. I often enjoy it. It’s cheering. But I have a political objection.

But that’s probably not where I should start. Perhaps more to the point, I don’t like dressing up on protests. If I am going on a demo then I am putting my body in a place in order to say that I, Adam Ramsay, believe this. Because it will make my life better, or I think that will make worse the lives of those I love, or of people who I have never met, but about whom I still care. I am not anonymous. I am not a clown. I am me. Because that’s the most I can be.

And, whilst sometimes for a photo op it can easier to get coverage if we are dressed up, I prefer not to. Because I think people are more likely to identify with us if we are authentically ourselves. They are more likely to engage with us as humans if we stand up as ourselves. What is the point in demonstrating that fictional characters are against something?

Of course, I understand why we dress up. Every time I go on a demonstration, I get a little embarrassed. I’m British. We are raised to queue, drink tea, and be cynical: the cultural echo of our war traumatised grandparents and of years of imperial drilling still haunts us down the generations. We don’t express emotion in public. And so we combat our awkwardness by copying the main traditions in which we are allowed to be raucous – those of the theatre, and the circus. We step out of ourselves, and pretend to be someone else. Because that someone else can be liberated from the shackles of Britishness. Community organisers teach us to stay within our comfort zone, whilst encroaching on that of those against whom we protest. And we can only be in a comfort zone if we are not ourselves – many British people are never comfortable.

But in pretending to be someone else, we take away what is most profound about protest. That we are real people, not fictitious representations. And we are there because we care.

And that authenticity often seems to be missing from British demonstrations. And this is why I don’t like samba. Do any of us listen to Samba music other than at protests? What do we really listen to? Why don’t we represent ourselves at protests as we truly are? Why isn’t the music we listen to from our culture? Now, when I say ‘our culture’, I don’t mean Morris Dancing – unless you genuinely do it. I mean whatever it is that you and I listen to and do in the rest of our lives – whether that’s Rap or Rachmaninov.

In my generation (I’m 26) many of us haven’t grown up with a domestic protest culture. And it is always hard to know what to do when demonstrating – other than standing in, or walking through, a space, there isn’t really anything to do. And so we learn from others, and we mimic. We don’t chant that we are ‘anti-capitalist’. We chant ‘a-anti-anti-capitalista’. Because that’s what the Spanish speakers do. And Latin America has the best socialists, and Spain the best anarchists, so let’s copy them.

If we sing when we march, we sing Bella Ciao – a song about Italian struggles. Which is a lovely song, and so we should sing it. But I’ve never heard a British demonstration sing the song of the Suffragettes – based on a poem written by an early anarchist to protest against the rise of industrial capitalism – “Jerusalem”. And so it has been co-opted by conservatives as a nationalist song. I have rarely heard Scottish demonstrators sing Robert Burns’ early socialist anthem ‘a man’s a man’. Nor have I heard UK hip-hop, or Welsh male choirs, or dubstep.

By Adam Ramsey of Bright Green Scotland