One Mile Away Page #5

---

Don't think it's just us on

this side. It's over there, as well.

We have to put this order in place.

Even with having Zilla out,

it's been kind of a mission.

Shabba, he ain't got no support.

Hey, yo, we're tryin'

to stack a million

My life in Brumigan

Code name Zimbo, birth name Simeon

Get money how you can

It's not opinion...

There are loads of mandem over there.

He's got loads of men against him.

On the phone,

I can hear the background

and it sounds like madness,

so for him to keep pushing,

I have to respect him.

And I ain't tryin' to be nice, fool

I'm tryin' to be real...

People are like,

"F*** the truce and that. "

Too much things are happening.

Too much bad things have happened.

Smell me

I ain't had a wash for two days

Cos I'm out on the street

trying to move these 2Ks...

I'm rhymin'...

No one wants a truce.

They don't mind having beef.

Man don't mind.

The life that men

are living now, we don't care.

It is what it is, innit?

You're talking about truce

and this and that, blood.

They're thinking, "You're

chatting sh*t. You're a d*ckhead.

"When I see this man,

I'm gonna f*** him up. "

If it's gonna save a couple of youths

growing up in the future...

When you're dead, they'll

remember me, for what I was about

and for what I was trying to do.

If we all got together today

and says,

"Yo, the beef between Burger Bar

and Johnsons is done, it's dead,"

nothin', nothin' ain't changed.

It's just that...

Not for us it wouldn't,

but for the youths it would.

Why do you think

it would change for the youths?

They're still gonna be seeing

and going through the same sh*t.

It's just that Johnsons and Burgers

haven't got beef.

These little youths in Aston

will probably have beef

with them little youths

in Newtown now,

cos the mentality's still there.

Every lickle n*gger in my ends

is on this thing, regardless.

They're down to reppin' this thing.

You phone them, they'd feel like

"Wow! They phoned me to come. "

I'm rolling. You understand it?

They're passionate about it.

What, goin' to jail and dyin'?

That's why we have

to push this thing hard.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be

the hardest n*gger on the road.

I wanted to be a gang banger,

sell drugs.

That's what I wanted to do.

That was the life, innit?

When I was growing up,

my pops weren't there,

so, obviously, where I learnt to do

my thing or whatever is on the road.

So, obviously,

I'm gonna be a road man.

The only n*ggers that showed me

anything are road men.

I've been gang-banging

since I was about 13, bro,

so I don't know nothin' else.

- When you're tellin' men...

- Stop what you're doing.

You get me, man?

This is the norm now.

It's not even a bad thing to us.

It's life. It's not even bad.

Right now, this is about the

senseless killing, the idiot thing.

Half these youths, they don't know

what this thing's about.

What are they reppin'? What are

half of these people reppin'?

I asked them, "What's it about?"

They don't know.

You don't know nothin' else.

When you don't know nothin' else,

you don't know nothin' else.

How much of us have been suspended

from school or expelled?

Yeah, everyone, innit?

Everyone, innit?

You're 12, 13. We don't have a dad.

So now we're suspended.

We don't need to go back to school.

The school don't want us, so why

are we gonna go back to school?

Now we see money. We're seeing

older people making money.

Well, we're wanting that. You get me?

We're lost, innit?

We've just come up lost, innit?

That's what it boils down to, blood.

We need to be growing

young black men, not no n*ggers.

We need to be growing

young black men.

Hate it or love it,

you're on the internet, Zimbo.

You get 100,000 hits, bruv.

You're a role model, B.

You're responsible.

You get me? Regardless...

We're responsible for our actions

and for the kids coming up.

I've got seven boys, you know, dawg.

My biggest boy's nearly 14, bruv.

When I said I'm going to speak

to Shabba the first time,

he said "You're mad.

You're going to Aston?"

You know,

that kind of scared me, blood.

Imagine that.

My son said that to me.

Imagine how that scared me, like, yo.

Man, look it's giving me goose bumps

now even thinking about it, bruv.

Like, yo,

I've seen it, you know, bruv.

I've seen my bredrens leave.

I've seen my man twisted up.

I've seen them f***ed up.

I've seen them in jail doing life.

Imagine my youth

could fall into that.

Are you crazy?

I have to do something, bruv.

- I think we're f***ing ourselves.

- We're f***ing ourselves!

It's not even the system,

the government. It's ourselves, blood.

Bruv, you see blaming people,

that's all wasted energy.

Let's make it happen, innit?

If we deal with the real issues,

what's really going on,

that's what I'm passionate about,

changing the way n*ggers think,

changing the way we're living, innit?

By coming at us with the truce thing,

we ain't listening

to another word you gotta say.

All this conflict resolution stuff

is a lot harder than I thought.

James Purnell, who's producing

this documentary, is an ex-MP.

James says he has somebody

who could help or give us advice.

This person is Jonathan Powell.

He helped broker the Peace Treaty

in Northern Ireland.

One of the things I did

was Northern Ireland peace talks

because when Blair came in in '97,

it had gone back to violence -

the IRA started killing.

the big bomb in Canary Wharf

and a bunch of bombs

in Northern Ireland.

Tony Blair managed to get them

back into peace talks

and then in about a year,

we got them

to the Good Friday Agreement

where they finally signed off

on a peace agreement.

I guess that's

kind of what you're facing,

cos if you're going to make this stop

after all these years,

it's not something you do

in two or three weeks.

it's something that's going

to take a very long time.

We're not a threat to the government.

We're not shooting police.

That makes it harder for us.

Whereas the government could think,

"They're not bothering us. "

That's the problem, everyone thinks,

"They're killing each other.

Why would we care?"

They're not going to invest in it,

as a way of stopping,

so you'll have to do it yourselves.

Some of these mans are hard work.

It's hard work. Ignorant.

Nothing to live for.

Nothing to look up to.

No role models in their lives.

So it's hard to get through it.

It's been this way for so long.

It's what they know.

They're just comfortable in that.

They don't see no need for no change

or nothing like that,

so the hard part is basically getting

a vision across of the bigger picture

of like, you know,

what we really should be doing.

What I worry about is

looking like you're surrendering,

because that's always a problem -

how you persuade both sides.

The big-man thing to do

is not to shoot someone,

it's to actually draw a line now,

not have anything from now on,

and something will happen and

you need some way of diffusing it.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes