R Kelly Has Saint Lucians Looking in their Mirrors

Chances are you or your child graduated to either I Believe I Can Fly or I’m the World’s Greatest. R Kelly is considered the king (and the Pied Piper) of R&B. He is a black man with a powerful tale of his climb in the music industry, despite his struggles with illiteracy, and his music catalogue has something for everyone, from regular churchgoers to the nightclub addicts. Saint Lucia did not miss a thing during the peak years of Kelly’s career. Remember R Kelly at the freshly rebranded Jazz and Arts Festival in 2013 and his hypnotic effect on a large crowd of fans who knew his songs by heart? I won’t ever forget: it was the first jazz festival my parents permitted me to attend unchaperoned. I was unfamiliar with his repertoire but, if only vaguely, I remembered that he had been accused years earlier of urinating on some little girl.  

It took Lifetime’s recent docuseries, Surviving R Kelly, for me to realize that the peeing pornography video, supposedly featuring a fourteen-year-old girl, was just one of a string of sexual allegations against someone I thought was just a highly popular, super-talented singer-songwriter. An inspiring success story starring an African-American. Absolutely disgusted, I binge-watched Surviving R Kelly, all the while   thinking: “What more could this man do?” 

The six-part documentary premiered on January 3 and featured several women, including his ex-wife Andrea Kelly, detailing a decades-long history of sexual and physical abuse by the man many believed could touch the sky. The women tearfully recalled being locked-up without food; not being allowed to look at other men; being videotaped during sexual encounters; being forced to ask for permission to use the bathroom; not being permitted to speak to each other; and being “manipulated” since their underage years to perform perverse sexual acts for Kelly’s pleasure. They all described the similar tales of a man with a “god complex” and his persistent pursuit of teenage girls. 

Surviving R Kelly comes about twenty-two years after he married, at 27, his protégée, the singer Aaliyah, then aged 15. There were also the stories of R Kelly convincing children that their sexual relationships had everything to do with love, alongside his promises of money and fame for them. There were also constant financial settlements. Surviving R Kelly offered little that was new about R Kelly’s dark side. It simply highlighted the injustices of the system of justice in America. I choose not to be a spoiler. Let the world discover for itself what Surviving R Kelly is all about. (It can easily be found online.) 

While surfing the depths of YouTube it hit me that I had seen one of R Kelly’s music videos repeatedly on HTS. I was about eleven then and curious about how I might look after puberty took over. It occurred to me then that I knew more songs by R Kelly than I’d earlier realized. I understand those who are on the cusp of this crisis: do we separate the music from the musician or concede that it was the support of his countless fans that had given him the power to do the evil that men do? By the final instalment of the series I decided that I would not abet anything associated with R Kelly. It bothered me so much that around midnight on Monday I woke up and prayed for him and all the women he had assaulted. But then I could not help recalling other powerful men and how they had misused their power.

A certain local prime minister came to mind. I recalled his love letters to a girl not yet sixteen; excerpts were published in this newspaper, just days before the 1992 general elections. Several months earlier the particular prime minister had convened a special House meeting at the start of which he accused this newspaper’s publisher of producing child pornography for distribution overseas. The publisher, as acknowledged in his book Lapses & Infelicities, was a regular critic of his policies and it was the prime minister’s way of taking his revenge—especially with elections in the air.

Readers will also remember former Prime Minister Kenny Anthony’s public acknowledgement of “serial rapists in our midst” without declaring how he came by the information or whether he had told the police what he knew about the unidentified “serial rapists”. For all we know, they might still be on the loose. In late 2017 a physical education teacher at the Canon Laurie Anglican Primary School was indicted on twelve counts of “gross indecency and buggery”. He was granted bail and is still free, considered innocent until proven guilty!

Last year a 12-year-old was impregnated by her stepfather whose brother raped a seven-year-old just months later. Then there’s the long forgotten Mary Rackcliffe whose eight or nine-year-old daughter was ravaged by Rackliffe’s live-in lover. She reported the matter to the police and for that was decapitated by the rapist lover.  

Recently a most popular man who nestled and established himself in a small community was last year charged with gross indecency and buggery against a primary school boy, one of several he had reportedly been teaching the arts. 

Saint Lucians whisper about parents who prostitute their daughters to older men, and about students who come to school with more money than their parents could ever afford. There are the scores of sexual offences similar to the allegations against R Kelly. To what avail? By all the evidence, in Saint Lucia you can get away with almost anything if your name carries weight, as does R Kelly’s. The story about our former prime minister won his greatest mandate immediately following publication of his activities with an underage girl, some of them involving abuse of his office. Food for thought!