A meeting with the writer, Colin Prescod, by Dominic Rai
‘You can object to what is going on in prisons but the real monster is the society that drives people into prisons and that gives prisons the right to humiliate and indeed to kill people.’ – Colin Prescod
The prison population of England and Wales is 65,000 but over 20 per cent is either Asian or African-Caribbean compared to them constituting of just 5.5 per cent of the population as a whole.
A total of 1,000 people have died in custody in the last 30 years. So far, no one has been found guilty of contributing to any of these deaths.
Banged Up is a new play by Colin Prescod about two men, a British Asian and a British African Caribbean, who find themselves in prison at the mercy of institutionalised racism.
It is inspired by the true-life stories of two Brummies: Satpal Ram, who is currently serving life for killing a man in self-defence, and
Alton Manning, who died in custody.
The play includes a third character, George Jackson, an African American who was influenced by the black power movement of the 1960s, and imagines his present-day meeting with the fictional characters based on Satpal and Alton.
Directed by Pervaiz Khan, who went to school with Alton, the play is performed by
Vincent Ebrahim and Michael Aduwali. It is on a national tour in October and November
2001.
Colin, who came to Britain from Trinidad at the age of 13 in 1958 and has lived in the family home in Ladbroke Grove ever since, says that although the play was inspired by two convicted criminals, Satpal was defending himself against a ‘very violent attack’ by racists. It was self-defence but he was convicted of murder.
Alton ended up in prison after a number of petty offences. Prison became a nightmare experience and he was killed – ‘strangled by prison officers’ - in 1995.
Colin says the research was a challenge especially as Alton was dead and there were only a handful of letters to his mother that he could use as source material.
Contacting Satpal also proved difficult. Colin went through the campaign which is trying to secure his release. Although sentenced to 11 years, he is now in his 14th year behind bars. Colin tried to meet Satpal in person but Satpal’s mother died this summer and Satpal was unable to meet him.
Colin did manage to speak to him on the phone and pick up a ‘good sense’ of his personality. He said: ‘Satpal was clearly somebody who is standing up for himself and becoming radical politically. He is somebody the state does not want to let out because he is standing up for his rights and the rights of others. The parole board has at last said he should be released but
Jack Straw, when he was Home Secretary, made the decision that he should not
be.’
Colin then came up with the idea of having Alton meet Satpal in the play after he realised that Satpal is currently in Blakenhurst Prison, where Alton died. He said: ‘They did not meet in real life, of course, but in theatre you can do something about that’.
Colin said he also ‘reached across the Atlantic’ to include a famous American prisoner and astute political analyst of the 1960s, George Jackson. Like Satpal, he was a young man when he entered prison and educated himself, becoming ‘extremely sharp’ about prison life and its societal causes.
Colin said: ‘You can object to what is going on in prisons but the real monster is the society that drives people into prisons and that gives prisons the right to humiliate and indeed to kill people.’
He said that in the 60s, people were screaming loudly that something was going wrong with society. ‘To hear that voice in our time is startling. It is a very disturbing voice. The things Jackson was criticising are still there but we don’t speak in such a forthright way any more,’ he added.
The play has been invited to be part of the opening show at the spring 2002 season of the Watermans Arts Centre in west London following the theatre’s refurbishment.
Commissioned by Duende Productions, it is Colin’s second piece of writing for the theatre. The first was
Who Sen’ Me? about the arrival in the UK of African-Caribbean people. For eight years, Colin was the first chair of the
Drum, a new theatre in Birmingham which has been created specifically to promote new black and Asian work, and Pervaiz is on the board.
Duende was founded by Pervaiz and Michael Aduwali – an Asian and an African-Caribbean. They believe that the definition of black is wider than just African-Caribbean. It includes Asians and other ethnic groups with colonial histories. Birmingham also has one of the largest Asian and African-Caribbean audiences in the UK – making it an ideal base for their company. Every performance of Banged Up includes an after-show discussion with members of the company.
Read up more about the productions from Duende at www.duende.co.uk
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