Nikki Adebiyi, Founder, Bounce Black

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This year’s theme for Black History Month in the UK is “Honouring Our Communities”.

In the words of Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP:

We honour our communities through commemorating and celebrating this history. But honour is about respect as well as recognition. And all too often, we still see daily examples of the disrespect faced by the Black community in ways that are inseparable from our country’s imperial past.

As my old history teacher said, “we study the past to live the present with an eye on the future”. This year’s theme is “Honouring Our Communities”. It is important to ask what honour truly requires. Because Black History Month can never simply be about showing gratitude for the change we have seen. It must always be an honest reckoning with how far there is still to go. Our North Star in all of these debates and discussions this month must be justice.

With this in mind, I’d like to share my thoughts on these issues through some life updates of my own.

It’s been quiet for Bounce Black for a reason, some not so good, and there’s no better time to break the silence than now.

The requirements of honour

I appreciate Ms Ribeiro-Addy’s reminder to consider the meaning of “honour”. To not only recognise, but to also respect.

The etymology of the word also carries dignity, reverence, glory and esteem. In other words, to honour someone is to regard them and regard them well.

I felt honoured when I was invited by her office last year for her event at the Houses of Parliament with author Nova Reid: “More Than Warriors: Black Women, Healing and Activist Burnout”.

Important conversations were had that night about the necessity of putting our capes down sometimes as Black women activists who are at high risk of premature death and disease.

For the first time in a long time, I didn’t speak. I didn’t feel the need to, and yet I was still relieved to feel seen.

However, one thing stood out to me in some of the advice given that night, which I have also offered to others but I have come to realise is woefully incomplete.

The sentiment of self care. Put on your own mask first, look after yourself first, pour into yourself first. Do this, do that, for yourself first.

In many cases, this will be enough to reorient someone back to healthy rhythms of living a full life.

And yet.

Here I am, the founder of a wellness platform, telling you, reader, that this advice doesn’t hold water when the source of weariness is systemic, much less if is systematic.

The social architecture of despair

As some of you know, I have been an accidental whistleblower since 2022. Accidental because I never imagined going to HR to complain about bullying, harassment and discrimination could be met with a sustained, relentness and far-reaching campaign of terror that has yet to end.

Four years later, I am still carrying the weight of being pursued by a shadow repression network operating under the guise of power and authority, using loopholes in legislation to subject inconvenient people to extrajudicial elimination.

Four years later, I am burdened by the weight of the realisation that there is a hidden-in-plain-sight terror network determined to destroy me, my work, my life, my livelihood, and anything they think they can infiltrate, influence or impair.

And four years later, this is still so crazy to talk about, even for me!

Since October 2022, I have been subject to covert violence and intimidation tactics, the kind of which were used in the FBI’s COINTELPRO and East Germany’s secret police. The kind of which you see in movies, and the kind of which is deliberately hard to prove so as to prevent you from receiving justice. Instead, the punishment is the further trial of being pathologised when telling the truth.

The term “gangstalking” carries negative connotations because there has been much effort given to discrediting anyone who complains of organised harassment. However, organised harassment is real!

Covert extrajudicial harm is real, and it is running wild and free around the world and in all spaces I find myself in: social justice spaces, faith-based, and beyond.

Not that everyone who has participated is a willing participant or knowledgeable of the full extent of the purpose of what they’ve been instructed to do. But the level of infiltration and impact is remarkable!

In March of this year, my UK phone line of more than a decade was disconnected by O2 without warning or consent. The reason they gave was due to a “fraud flag”, which I was told was removed, but it turns out it wasn’t.

Instead, their fraud analyst team placed a DO NOT RECONNECT note on my file, without explanation despite promising I would hear from someone who would give me answers. To this day, I have not received an answer.

Every single call with O2 Customer Service gave conflicting and contradictory information with delaying tactics that exceeded the 30-day limit, resulting in the permanent disconnection of my number.

I went back and forth with them for months to no avail, just to learn last week that my number is now no longer available (meaning, it has been claimed by someone else, conveniently). This, too, knowing that the number is tied to important Crime Reports. This, too, after I had initially transferred the number to O2 from Vodafone because I mysteriously lost the ability to make phone calls after a call with an employment lawyer.

Everybody now, say it with me: OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE!

This has taken place alongside the LinkedIn debacle I wrote about a few months ago, which kicked off after I reached out to LinkedIn to flag that someone had logged into my account, removed messages and connections, and signed me out.

My Instagram and Facebook accounts have also had multiple takeover attempts, and I have experienced regularly being mysteriously logged out for hours at a time, then mysteriously logged back in despite not being able to do so myself due to Two-Factor Authentication being tied to the number I no longer have access to.

All these coinciding events that have a marked beginning because I have never in my life had to make this many complaints for anything at all.

And now it feels like filing a complaint is a weekly task of mine as what look like deliberate attempts to disrupt my life and cause a death by cortisol are mounting. Again, these things had a marked beginning, and I can trace it directly back to my former workplace.

Who knew that these people had the connections to systematically destroy someone’s life, and they were willing to unleash them on an intern?!

Who knew the platform I built from triumph amidst suffering to help others would become such a threat to the powers that be which seek to silence anyone who even hints at their faults or failures?!

This sustained campaign of intimidation and onslaught of harassment is not something that anyone can or should “self-care” their way through. This should not exist, and yet it does! A hidden evil thriving in secrecy.

Everywhere I go, through what I suspect is the use of Stingray technology, people in the vicinity seem contacted with warnings and instructions concerning me. They’re either informed before I arrive or as I arrive, because I have noticed shifts in behaviour, including that people are being instructed to perform conditioning cues around me (such as coughs, head scratching or playing with hair) or embody them through clothing or other merchandise. Many of these cues are performed at specific times which are designed to taunt or remind me about something or someone (such as the loss of a loved one).

It’s as crazy as it sounds, and yet it is happening!

If you’re exhausted reading this, imagine how much more I am living it. And this is not the half of it. My family and loved ones are also being targeted in various ways, including victimisation through fraud, sabotage, entrapment and acts of violence. Seeming warning gunshots fired outside my family home, among other heinous intimidation tactics.

Veiled death threat after veiled death threat.

The police are not protecting us. Parliament is not protecting us. Institutions are not protecting us.

And this is what I call the social architecture of despair.

I am under attack, along with perhaps thousands of others around the world. And it is coming from all sides in all spaces.

Surviving thus far itself is resistance, but I maintain that care, here, looks like justice.

And I cannot give that to myself. It must come from society.

And if not, it will come from God.

I will not hear anything less.

An honest reckoning

Returning, to the theme of Black History Month: how can we honour our communities without confronting this evil quietly destroying our communities?

It’s not possible. It’ll only ever be incomplete. And there is no dignity in dishonesty. It is intrinsically dehumanising.

Even in the spaces where I have tried to raise awareness of this issue, someone has been in the room who is (knowingly or unknowingly) an agent of the dark forces I have tried to expose.

It is repugnant to me now to see much speech about human or civil rights around the world from the mouths of those who refuse to bat an eyelid about this very present and prevalent evil here at home, right under our noses!

If it can happen to me, it can and does and will happen to anyone.

And the question I keep getting asked is do I regret speaking up? Absolutely not! But do I regret being put in a position where I was forced to speak up? Absolutely! I was just trying to do my job, go home and incrementally rebuild the life I lost to trauma years prior. Contrary to the inferences sometimes made, I never asked for any of this. It is not my fault.

I don’t wish this harm on anyone. But I do wish those who know about it would stop perpetuating it. Even more, that those who have the power to do something about it, would DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Next steps with the North Star

Justice is indeed our North Star. We must follow it.

However, we will not be able to do so without truth. They go hand in hand.

There is no reckoning about how far we have to go without bringing to visibility what is hidden that holds all of us back.

Whether we are brave to accept it or not, THIS is where we really are as a society.

This is the state of our social progression and civil rights.

Right here, in the terrifying, complex, uncomfortable mess. In the things that most people don’t want to talk about because it disrupts their comfortable lives here. That mess is for over there. Away from me, my conscience and sense of responsibility. Am I my brother’s keeper? Who is my neighbour?

And I’m not trying to hear any waxing poetic about honouring our community when members of our community are doing the dishonour to other members by perpetrating or concealing this evil.

Not all skinfolk are kinfolk, I’ve learned harshly these past four years. The wickedness I have seen would make our forebears Medgar, Malcom and Martin roll in their graves.

They did not die for this!

They died because of this.

And I’m tired of being told not to become a martyr for the cause.

The question is why are we still enabling and emboldening corrupt, anti-Black systems and forces to make martyrs of us?