Roots & Culture

Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain

Eddie Chambers

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

How did a distinct and powerful Black British identity emerge? In the 1950s, when many Caribbean migrants came to Britain, there was no such recognised entity as "Black Britain." Yet by the 1980s, the cultural landscape had radically changed, and a remarkable array of creative practices such as theatre, poetry, literature, South Sudan in War and Peace music and the visual arts gave voice to striking new articulations of Black-British identity.

1

De Street weh Dem Seh Pave Wid Gold

Black people have been present in Britain for many centuries, going back as far as Roman times. Whilst this presence has historically ebbed and flowed, it was not until the relatively recent period of the mid-twentieth century that Britain’s Black population swelled significantly and, within a period of little more than a decade, came to represent an intriguing and somewhat conspicuous new aspect of the British populace.¹ Britain has of course, since the earliest times, been the destination – temporary or otherwise – of a long line of peoples.² Among them are Huguenots, Jews, Celts and Saxons. In more recent decades, we can also speak of Irish, Italians, Poles and others. The crucial difference between these groups and immigrants of African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds is the pretty blunt one of skin colour. While white immigrants within a generation or two have become assimilated and accepted as British, Black immigrants and their offspring have inevitably maintained a particularly conspicuous presence that has contributed to them not readily being regarded as British in the same ways as their white compatriots.³ This systemic, perennial impulse to regard those with visibly darker skins as somehow embodying different traits and characteristics has meant that the gradual formation of a separate cultural identity for Black Britons was, perhaps, inevitable. At every turn, certain pathologies ensured a persistent othering of Black people, with cultural consequences that this book seeks to examine.

The narratives that this book seeks to understand began in the years of Caribbean migration to Britain from the late 1940s through to the early 1960s. In ‘The Caribbean Community in Britain’, the Trinidadian-born journalist Claudia Jones noted, in fascinating detail, the demographics of this period of immigration.

Immigration statistics, which are approximate estimates compiled by the one-time functional West Indian Federation office (Migrant Services Division) in Britain, placed the total number of West Indians entering the United Kingdom as 238,000 persons by the year 1961. Of these, 125,000 were men; 93,000 women; 13,200 were children, and 6,300 unclassified. A breakdown of the islands from which these people came showed that during the period of 1955–61, a total of 142,825 were from Jamaica; from Barbados, 5,036; from Trinidad and Tobago 2,282; from British Guiana, 3,470; from Leeward Islands 3,524; from the Windward Islands, 8,202, and from all other territories, the sum total of 8,732.⁴

To understand the push-pull factors that contributed to Caribbean migration, we need to look at conditions that existed in Jamaica and, to varying degrees, other Caribbean islands and countries, in the years following the end of World War II. Those in the English-speaking Caribbean had, as was mentioned in the Preface, been brought up under the British flag, so much so that many of the young men of the British Caribbean, like their white British counterparts, enlisted for duty in the war effort. In the words of Robert Winder,

Britain, [in the years following war’s end] though far off, was now an attainable destination for more than just the odd writer or cricketer. It was also, thanks to the empire, much more familiar. The colonial administration had given West Indians a grounding in Queen and Country, in Shakespeare and Tennyson, in W. G. Grace, Kennedy’s Latin Primer and the Lord’s Prayer. They had grown up singing ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at assembly. Many of their Christian names – Nelson, Milton, Winston – derived from British heroes. A reverence for Britain had been carefully planted. Now, modern steamships brought the land within reach.⁵

Another commentator, Ernest Cashmore, alluded to the affinity with Britain with which those in countries such as Jamaica had been inculcated. In his book, Rastaman: The Rastafarian Movement in England, he quoted a gentleman who recalled, ‘In Jamaica children are taught all about Britain, its history, its heroes, etc. So coming over here we knew what to expect, or at least thought we did.’⁶ Such sentiments are reflected in a feature on ‘coloured’ immigration in an edition of Picture Post magazine of 1949. Early in the piece, the writer, Robert Kee, noted that ‘it is important to remember that all colonial coloured people, of whatever origin or class, have been brought up to think of Britain with the greatest pride and affection as ‘The Mother Country.’ (West Indians even talk of Britain as ‘home’.)’⁷

While these sentiments allude to the pull factor – that is to say, that which, in part at least, attracted would-be immigrants to Britain, there was also a concurrent push factor, laid out by Winder in similarly cogent and lyrical terms. Writing specifically about post-war conditions in Jamaica, Winder noted:

The Jamaica they [West Indian troops] returned to was still devastated after the tremendous hurricane of August 1944 – the worst for forty years. Ancient trees had been toppled, fruit groves trampled; roofs had been whipped off like napkins. Even before the storm, the economy was in tatters. The price of sugar – by far the dominant export – had sunk to the point where the crop was hardly worth harvesting. Fields of cane ran wild and died, and there was no work for the men who once hacked sweetness from the hills. The Caribbean tourist boom was a long way off. The Western bourgeoisie couldn’t yet run to swanky winter breaks on these palm-fringed beaches. Aside from a tiny trade in coffee and rum, there was little to do but subsist on fish from the ocean, and whatever mangoes, bananas, maize or breadfruit poked through the rubble.⁸

In 1949, Robert Kee described the economic challenges of life in Jamaica, faced by many, in stark terms. Referring in part to migrants such as those who had in the previous year come to England on the Empire Windrush, Kee stated, ‘These have come here partly because of the economic impoverishment of their own country (the unemployed figure for Kingston, Jamaica, alone is 70,000.)’⁹ This figure represented a significant proportion of the city’s labour force. In so many ways, beginning with the widespread implementation of the use of enslaved Africans in the latter half of the seventeenth century, issues of labour and employment had always been vexatious in the Caribbean. Enslaved Africans had been brought into the region for no other reason than to work the plantations and sugar mills, or otherwise attend to serving the master class, the plantocracy. The end of slavery in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the technological developments in manufacturing and harvesting processes, meant that a massive proportion of the Black populations of Caribbean countries effectively and rapidly found themselves either unemployed, or pitiably under-employed. Upon the abolition of slavery, businesses that had relied on wageless labour to turn profits thereafter became, for some of their owners, liabilities rather than assets. As a consequence, labour and employment in the Caribbean became difficult and aggravating issues. Thus, the Caribbean has long since been a region with a surfeit of labour, and consequently a region from which labour has been exported.

The only valuable export was labour. Caribbean workers knew all about this: they had known little else. Even within their own islands they often had to trudge for miles in search of piecework on the plantations, and for years they had been hopping over to Florida to pick fruit. In the first half of the century, up to 150,000 Jamaicans (a tenth of the population) went job-seeking in North and Central America. Many had been ferried to Panama to dig the canal.¹⁰

Though reflecting no end of deeply troubling pathologies around race, freely expressed at the time, the book The Panama Canal written by Frederic J. Haskin and published in 1913, at just about the time when this monumental feat of engineering and construction was completed, is an invaluable reference to Caribbean workers’ involvement in the enterprise. According to Haskin,

The Government paid the West Indian labourer 90 cents a day, furnished him with free lodgings in quarters, and sold him three square meals a day for 9 cents each, a total of 27 cents a day for board and lodging. On the balance of 63 cents, the West Indian negro who saved was able to go back home and become a sort of Rockefeller among his compatriots. His possible savings, as a matter of fact, were about two and a half times the total wages he received in his native country.¹¹

Later on in his references to workers from the Caribbean, Haskin claimed that those ‘negroes [who] were industrious, constant, and thrifty … saved all they could, worked steadily for a year or two, and then went back to Jamaica or Barbados to invest their money in a bit of land and become freeholders and consequently better citizens.’¹² It was then reported that ‘The negro laborers at first were obtained by recruiting agents at work in the various West Indian Islands, principally Jamaica and Barbados. The recruiting service carried about 30,000 to the Isthmus, of whom 20,000 were from Barbados and 6,000 from Jamaica.’¹³ Earlier in this particular chapter, Haskins had stated that, ‘The West Indian negro contributed about 60 per cent of the brawn required to build the Panama Canal.’¹⁴

Figure 7: Construction workers boring through rock with tripod drills during the construction of the Upper Miraflores, Panama Canal.

There was one other significant reason why migrants from the British Caribbean wanted to enter whatever labour market there might have been in Britain. Frankly, there were precious few other destinations open to them. The USA had instigated draconian restrictions that limited Caribbean migration to a derisory annual figure.

The door to North America was quickly shut by the McCarren (sic) Walter Act in 1952, which limited the number of British West Indians who could settle in the USA from 65,000 a year to only 800. People turned instead to Britain and exercised their rights, as their passports indicated, as ‘British subject, Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’.¹⁵

Another commentator put the figure of Caribbean immigrants allowed into the USA by the McCarran Walter Act at a far lower figure, though this was likely to be on account of the act allowing for 100 persons per Caribbean territory, per year. However, his sentiments of migrants’ expected citizenship were consistent with the other such views expressed.

Unaware of Britain’s hostility towards immigrants, the first large group of West Indians who stepped off the Empire Windrush in June 1948 thought they were ‘coming home’. Some of them had spent the war years in the R.A.F., stationed in Britain, and all of them had been brought up to believe that England was the ‘Mother Country’. Prevented from going to the U.S.A. by the McCarran Walter Act (1952) which restricted immigration from the West Indies to a hundred a year, most of the West Indians who followed the pilgrims’ boat expected to be welcomed in Britain and felt they had fulfilled their dreams.¹⁶

Incidentally, Black dissatisfaction and unhappiness at what were regarded as dreadful conditions and treatment were not confined to mid to late twentieth-century Britain. The great Jamaican-born Pan-African visionary and agitator for Black rights, Marcus Garvey, was dismayed at the conditions he encountered and observed among the Jamaican labourers referenced by Winder. In his mid twenties, Garvey travelled to Costa Rica. One of Garvey’s biographers noted,

The United Fruit Company was currently expanding its operations in Costa Rica and Garvey’s uncle secured a job for the Jamaican as timekeeper on one of the company’s banana plantations. The plight of the Negro field workers, many of them his countrymen, on...