Have you ever been to a labour exchange? You know, the last time I went there, I was paid my money by a Sikh. A Sikh, sitting there with his turban and a bangle on his hand. Now, I was three years with the Indian army in India. I was three years in India in civilian life. Erm, I got on well with Sikhs, Hindus, the whole lot of them. But to walk into a British labour exchange and find you're being paid out your money by a Sikh... These are the people, that in my small way, I helped train and educate.....erm... To go into labour exchange is not a very edifying experience at all. You know, you change into your old clothes to go to the labour exchange, you know? But you've got to go. Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s from British Guiana. But he had become a best-selling novelist. 

What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence.....the violence and the racism that had been at the heart of the European empires. Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds of those who had ruled the empires. One of his most famous stories, My Bones and My Flute, is about a group of colonialists who travel up a river into the jungle in Guyana. They're searching for the remains of a giant slave rebellion in the past, guided by an old manuscript. But anyone who reads the manuscript starts to hear the distant sound of a flute.....and they change. They become possessed by something that is reaching out from the jungle and working its way into their minds. It is the anger and the fear of the slave owner who put down the rebellion. And it will not let them escape. And Mittelholzer himself became angry with England. He saw it as a decaying, corrupted country. 

I feel we've reached the stage, you know, when we have become so soft, you know, so effete, in other words, so effete, that we feel that, well, even criminals.....erm, must be mollycoddled. And you feel so strongly that you are prepared to go as far as to say that... Yes. ..there are human beings who should be categorised as vermin. As vermin, exactly, quite. Anyone who is guilty of violence on the human person and property, should be considered as human vermin, and eradicated. I know it's a rather, it's a violent thing to advocate, but I can't see any other cure to the crime problem. Every evening, he sat with his wife in his house in Surrey, listening to the music of Wagner. Until one night, Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house, poured paraffin over himself.....and set himself alight. He burned to death. The anger and the fear had reached out to the colonised too. 

In 1966, engineers monitoring Chinese television from a mountain in Hong Kong, began to realise that something unusual was happening in Beijing. China was sealed off from the rest of the world. But what they saw were hundreds of thousands of people streaming in from other cities and the countryside. By August 11th, 1.5 million people had assembled in Tiananmen Square. Most of them were students or schoolchildren. Then, Mao Zedong appeared on the balcony above them. Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, had unleashed a new force in China. These were what Mao called, "The little devils of youth." He told them that they were going to save the revolution. Their job was to go and seek out the demons and the monsters who were corrupting the revolution. "No-one should be safe," he said, "They should all be torn "down and smashed to pulp." 

The new revolutionaries gave themselves a name, the Red Guards. Jiang Qing now had great power. She saw herself as equal to Mao. But she was convinced that the threat to the revolution also came from inside people's minds. She knew that even though China had gone through a revolution, little had changed inside the heads of millions of the people - including those in power. They still believed in a rigid hierarchy. She had been scorned as a woman by the other revolutionaries around Mao. They had done anything they could to stop her. Jiang Qing had rewritten old Chinese operas into epic melodramas about the need to challenge and destroy the old order. All the old figures of authority were banished. Instead, the ordinary people, including women, took centre stage. They were performed to millions of young Red Guards, and in talks before the performances, Jiang Qing told the audience how what they were about to watch were heroes awakening and realising that they could take control.

Till today, I still vividly remember the first time I saw the revolutionary play. I was about 14 or 13 years old.....and there was a rush of emotion, of identity. I was so excited. Suddenly... I saw those plays after Jiang Qing's talk that night. And suddenly what she was saying made sense to me, that there was a fundamental difference between the revolutionary art and the traditional art. There was something in the play about the working-class emotions and working-class world outlook, and just the flamboyance of the working-class figure on stage, moved me. That is my society. That's my life. That's the people I see. That's the people I live with. And they're on stage. Mao and Jiang Qing suspended all schools and universities, which released 120 million students, who were then sent out to find and destroy the demons that were hiding among those in authority. 

Our teachers were often paraded through the streets, and we made them chant, "I'm a demon, I'm a devil. "I deserve to die." That's the song, and they had to sing it. And they all sang. Whoever didn't, got beaten up - some very badly. We used our belts to whip them. Some people used sticks. And the mother of this teacher was pushed over a bridge and fell to her death. Horst Mahler had been born in what was now East Germany. His father had been a fervent Nazi and an anti-Semite. In 1945, his family fled across Germany from the approaching Red Army. Then his father committed suicide. Mahler grew up in West Berlin, and everything was buried. In 1964, Mahler joined a new group called the APO - the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. They knew that many of those in charge of the country had been senior members of the Nazi Party. But no-one talked about it. They wanted to expose the Nazi crimes of those in charge.....and challenge their control of the country. 

There was the memory knocking at the door, and we asked our parents and our grandfathers, "What did you do all this time? "Did you resist or had you been a little Nazi? "Or had you been an opportunist?" And....this discussion was blocked by the elder generation. And so it became hostile. The student movement was astonished by the violent reaction of the German government. And Horst Mahler and other radicals began to think that the problem was far deeper than just individual Nazis. That maybe the whole Nazi system had also survived.....and was hiding behind the facade of modern capitalism. They argued that the very system of industrial rationality and bureaucratic control that had made the Nazi state so efficient, had simply mutated. It had been taken up by the victors - above all by America - and was now being used to run the new global capitalism and the multinational corporations that were ruthlessly exploiting what was called the Third World. 

Anything that stood in the system's way was bombed or burnt.....with weapons created by the same rational industrial techniques that made the mass-consumer goods. But the people in the West couldn't see this, because they have been led into a dream world that used mass consumerism and sexualized imagery to entrance and distract everyone. In reality, it was an iron cage designed to look like an open and free welfare state - a full state of peace that was built really on horror and war. We were convinced that our situation here, the welfare state.....is only possible - and a result - - by the exploitation of the Third World. And we said we must disturb this peace, this false peace in our country in order to show the responsibility of us, that it is our task to implement sabotage in the centres of imperialism. 

Nonviolence is OK, but you get nowhere with nonviolence. I like violence. Malcolm X started but didn't finish. Malcolm X said, you know, the idea. He rooted it in the minds of many blacks. He really started the ball rolling. You feel that violence is necessary in order to get rid of.....what you would call the oppression? It wouldn't get rid of it. But it will open, you know, some of whiteys eyes to say, "Well, you know, we're not joking. "We really mean what we say." Do you find yourself really hating white people? Hm, yes. Some people hold grudges, and I do. Look how they treat... How many floors did my great-grandmother scrub, you know? How many babies did she take care of that weren't hers? You know, stuff like that. And I'm just one of those people that holds things. Alice Faye Williams had been born in North Carolina. She had run away from home when she was young because she was frightened of her violent father, and she came to New York when she was 15. She managed to get a place to study at the School of Performing Arts. 

Then, one day, on 125th Street in Harlem, she listened to a speech by Bobby Seale, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers believed that the only way to stop racism in America was for black people to get power. Simply changing the law was not enough. The anger and the fear remained hidden away in millions of people's minds. The solution was Black Power, and the first person to articulate this was Stokely Carmichael on a civil rights march in Mississippi on one day when the more moderate Martin Luther King was absent. So I just made a speech building up to it, building up, building up, building up, showing that it wasn't a question of morality. It wasn't a question of being good or bad. It was simply a question of power, and the way black people had no power, and we had to have some power. Only type of power we could have is Black Power. That's right, that's what we want, Black Power. 

They responded immediately, in a healthy manner. Dr King came back the next day, but it was too late then. Black Power had been established. Alice Williams decided to join the Black Panthers. She became a member of a new chapter that had been set up in Harlem, and she changed her name to Afeni Shakur. She later explained what the Panthers meant for her. "For the first time," she said, "there was now something I could do "with all this aggression and all this fear inside me. "The Panther Party at that time took my rage "and channelled it against THEM, "instead of against us. "They educated my mind and gave me direction. "And with that direction came hope."