Benjamin Zephaniah has sadly passed away.
The British poet and campaigner, passed aged 65 due to a brain tumour.
Zephaniah was born April 1958 in Handsworth, Birmingham and became a world famous poet.
Benjamin Zephaniah Died
An Instagram post about his passing read: “Benjamin’s wife was by his side throughout and was with him when he passed.”
“We shared him with the world and we know many will be shocked and saddened by this news. Benjamin was a true pioneer and innovator, he gave the world so much. Through an amazing career including a huge body of poems, literature, music, television and radio, Benjamin leaves us with a joyful and fantastic legacy”.
Guardian
In the news piece about his passing the Guardian did link to one old piece after writing: “In 2003, Zephaniah rejected his OBE. “Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought,” he wrote in the Guardian. “I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.”
They seem to have missed this one though, with the title ‘Benjamin Zephaniah admits to hitting a former girlfriend.’
In this article they wrote: “Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Zephaniah confessed that in the past he had been violent to a partner. “The way I treated some of my girlfriends was terrible. At one point I was violent. I was never like one of these persons who have a girlfriend, who’d constantly beat them, but I could lose my temper sometimes,” he told presenter Nihal Arthanayake. “There was one girlfriend that I had, and I actually hit her a couple of times, and as I got older I really regretted it. It burned my conscience so badly. It really ate at me, you know. And I’m a meditator. It got in the way of my meditation.”
Leave it out?
When someone dies, in the public realm, the grief is spread beyond friends and family, but does that mean that an old report about someone should just be forgotten?
Perhaps so.
We should just celebrate the great things people do during their lives, and I thought he was an amazing person.
As ever in the digital world this dark side should not have been mentioned for a least a couple of day’s, but the world moves so fast now.
I might stand corrected on this one, but did they miss the article or just felt some things are best left unsaid.
“Comment is free…but facts are sacred CP Scott, 1921 Guardian editor,” guess it depends which facts you use…
