London’s Bonfire of the Vanities
The martyrdom of Chris Kaba
In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s great satirical look at 1980s New York, a white Wall Street trader accidentally ends up in a hit and run involving a black teenager. The cause is taken up by a succession of activists, led by the corrupt race-baiter ‘Reverend Bacon’, all determined to make political capital of the incident.
Much of the satire is easily recognisable from real-life cases, including the way in which the biography of the black victim is turned into a hagiography, and the menacing implication that the streets might erupt in violence if the protesters don’t get what they want. This kind of politics was once distinctively American, but in recent years we’ve become used to it in London, too, and there was something distinctively Wolfian about the death of Chris Kaba.
On 5 September 2022, Kaba, a 24-year-old black man, was shot dead by sergeant Martyn Blake, an officer of the specialist firearms unit MO19. Police in unmarked cars had been following Kaba in his Audi Q8, which they knew to have been used in a gangland shooting the previous day. One vehicle, a Volvo, had been following the Audi, while another, a BMW, blocked its path. Kaba was ordered to stop, but instead drove at the armed officers in his SUV. Sgt Blake fired a single shot to the head, killing Kaba.
Just two years after the entire English-speaking world had been brought to the point of hysteria by the death of George Floyd, this was just the kind of event which police leaders dread and activists relish. Long before the full details of the case emerged, The Critic’s Ben Sixsmith noted, a succession of tributes poured in to Kaba, whose winning smile peered out from newspaper reports.
