I was pleased and relieved during England’s home rugby matches in 2024 to hear the anthem “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” belted out by the crowd. They have been singing it apparently since 1987, but recently there has been talk of “banning” it. The controversy has involved a prime minister (Boris Johnson) opposing the ban, numerous sportspersons supporting or opposing the idea and the Rugby Union deciding not to. One of my heroes, if one is allowed to have a much younger man as a hero these days, Maro Itoje, has rather sensibly said that he wouldn’t sing it but wouldn’t ban it.
The point is that is what used to be called a “negro spiritual” originating in the late slavery period in the nineteenth century. It tells of a life of cruelty, oppression and misery and uses the metaphor of crossing the river Jordan to describe hopes for a better afterlife. Its connection with rugby goes a lot further back than 1987 because in the days when the game had as many players as spectators we used in in our post-match singing sessions. (My rugby career was pretty much the whole of the 1960s.) It was a comic song with actions. At the words “I looked over Jordan and what did I see . . . a band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home . . . “ we mimed looking and you can imagine what we did for coming. Actually, I’ve always assumed that the version in the stadium was some sort of recognition of of multi-racialism and the crossing of the Jordan a metaphor for victory. This defence could not be mounted of our version.
So am I guilty of anything in having sung that deeply tragic song as a ribald entertainment? Any such feelings should founder on the rock of rationality. Censorship is wrong anyway and all cultural artefacts change meaning and ownership. That song has actually been a “rugby song” for far longer than it was ever sung by slaves. Had we turned up at a plantation in Alabama and sung our ribald version in the presence of actual slaves that would have been wrong, but they’re all dead, owners and slaves. Slavery isn’t – and that’s a serious issue. Pretending to be offended (or, even worse, actually being offended) on the part of your ancestors is one of the worst forms of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “pseudo-morality” because it replaces proper ethics concerned with outcomes and the duties and choices of individuals with a collective partisan morality where goodness reduces to being on the right side. And we’re all the descendants of slaves – Angles and Saxons fetched high prices in the markets of the Mediterranean – just as we’re all of African origin, despite the demonstrable absurdity which talks of “Caucasians”. (That really is something which should be expunged from the language.) One might also point out that it seems overwhelmingly probable that most of those who identify with slaves as ancestors are also the descendants of slave owners.
The attack on Sweet Chariot is part of an intellectual campaign against “cultural appropriation”. This campaign often meets with a baffled response from those unfamiliar with its tenets. Isn’t cultural exchange what we do in globalisation? As I often remarked to Indian students, relatives and teammates, isn’t the greatest of all cultural exchanges that the Indians now love cricket and the English eat curry? Does anyone object to this? Actually they do: the Hindu ultra organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) still lists ridding India of cricket as one of its objectives, though it is not a priority. I know of no organisation that is devoted to ridding England of curry though living in Leamington Spa I do come across occasional individuals who object to the aroma in the town centre created by seventeen South Asian restaurants (two of which have been voted best in the country in the current decade).
But in the past objections to cultural exchange have seen it as cultural imperialism. The RSS point is that cricket (like the English language) has been imposed on India by imperialism just as the Gaelic Athletic Association was founded in 1884 to de-Anglicise Irish sport. It is of course, perfectly possible to object to imperialism while welcoming some of its consequent cultural transfers. Cyril James (better known by his initials, C.L.R.), the Trinidadian marxist whom I used to chat to at literary parties in the seventies and eighties took a very firm view that if what they were imposing on you was cricket and Shakespeare you should regard them as offering routes to liberation and enhancement rather than as forms of oppression.
The concept of cultural appropriation has it in common with that of cultural imperialism that they both depend on the idea of power. But they are opposites in that cultural imperialism the powerful impose their cultural practices on others whereas with cultural appropriation the powerful steal the practices of the powerless. I go back a long way with this idea, to being at Stanford University fifty years ago when there was a debate about the university football team being called “Indians” and the accompanying insignia and chants. At the same time Marlon Brando refused his Oscar for The Godfather and sent an “Indian” lady, Sacheen Littlefeather, along to the ceremony to protest Hollywood’s treatment of what were just beginning to be called “Native Americans”. (First Nations is the current argot.) It would be an understatement to say that this whole incident is disputed: Littlefeather claimed to be an Apache, but her sisters,Rosalind and Trudy, say that she was from a Mexican family with the surname Cruz. Claims about appropriation can get complicated.
It’s important to clarify what is being objected to here. Would Brando have objected to my childhood when I roamed the fields and woods where we lived in a magnificent headdress and wearing a passable imitation of a buckskin top and carrying a tomahawk. (Spoiled rotten the envious said.) Westerns were the dominant genre of the day and I never wanted to be a cowboy, only an “Indian”.Actually I think Brando’s point, though included in subsequent academic accounts of appropriation, is really about the demeaning and misrepresentation of peoples. There’s a further irony to the Brando incident: he was, after all, turning down an award for playing Vito Corleone. Brando was of entirely non-Italian extraction (original family name Brandau) and it is now one of the doctrines of anti-appropriation that actors should play only individuals from their own ethnic group. For the record I have seen Henry VI as a full three-parter only twice and on both occasions the actor playing the king was of Nigerian heritage. They were Chuck Iwuji and David Oyewolo and they were both very good.
If it is acceptable in this kind of moral framework that a “black” man can play a “white” man, but not vice versa the contradiction can only be resolved by reference to the concept of power. I have noticed that this becomes a vital trump card in pseudo-moral argument. Thus when people have objected to things I have written in recent years they often fail to remark on what’s invalid or incorrect about my argument, but confine themselves to saying that I’m an empowered white male (whose views therefore count for nothing?). But what sort of”power” is this? It certainly isn’t real power in the precise sense of a capacity to control outcomes. If I – or most of my supposedly empowered white male mates – really had any of that things would be very different. The kind of power they’re talking about doesn’t predicate to actual people but to vaguely dominant groups. And I’m supposed to be a member of one? Really? Still? Doesn’t feel like it.
In fact I’m barred from being culturally appropriated by who I am. Also by my own rules of life which contain clauses about never being offended because you couldn’t care less about the opinions of people unless you’re living with them. But if I weren’t thus barred boy could I get offended. What the Indians have done to cricket. And though I’m not an Italian I have been going to the country for well over sixty years and I could get very angry about what the Americans claim is Italian food. (or, on second thoughts, any food.) The musical possibilities are endless: how about Beethoven’s 9th being hi-jacked by the European Union (and before that by the Nazis for Hitler’s birthday).I might even get cross about Christian churches morphing good old harvest supper into “Harvest Festival” having previously declared it to be pagan. The list is endless because that’s the way the world works.
At the other end of the scale from my refusal to be offended are some people who can get offended about almost anything. In researching this article I came across a diatribe against middle-class Australians having the effrontery to have items of Aboriginal art in their homes. Well, you’re safe with me, mate. I try to be interested in everything, but when it comes to anything that might be called primitive or native art I fail. Would you really rather be ignored?
Lincoln Allison November 2024
(The original version of this article suffered the, mercifully rare, fate of being “spiked” in old-fashioned terms. That is, it was accepted but never used because another editor at the same magazine had already accepted a piece on the same subject.)