Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

... it is also
abundantly clear that
because Black, in the
UK, had taken on a
political meaning
derived from its
anti-colonial
provenance, it
attracted to its
standard immigrants
from the Indian
sub-continent,
Africans and
Indo-Caribbeans. In
fact, Ajoy Ghosh from
India and Roy Sawh
from Guyana played
a large part in the
UCPA, Farrukh
Dhondy and Mala Sen
in the Panthers, Tony
Soares (from Goa) in
the Black Liberation
Front, and Sri Lankan
A. Sivanandan as a
fellow-traveller of the
BuFP ....
Chinese, Cypriots, Sikhs, children, youth, families, workers –
literally hundreds of studies, which would now be called ethnographic,
came from the IRR stable. And even when studies
looked at political organisation within ethnic communities, they
tended to be ethnographic rather than political and tediously
detailed rather than enlightening – for example, Indian Workers’
Associations in Britain by Dewitt John (1969) and The Politics of
the Powerless: a study of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination
by Benjamin Heineman Jnr (1972). But the latter and
the comprehensive tome by Sheila Patterson Immigration and
Race Relations in Britain 1960–1967 (1969), as well as the now
notorious Colour and Citizenship by E. J. B. Rose, et al. (1969)(8)
which summed up a whole plethora of research projects in the
1960s, are well worth using as reference tools.
However, the ‘them as a social problem’ tone was punctured
by three key books by the subalterns: Journey to an
Illusion: the West Indian in Britain (1966) was written by London
Transport worker Donald Hinds, who was also a cub reporter
for The West Indian Gazette and Black British: White British
by Indian journalist Dilip Hiro (1973) both published by a mainstream
publisher and the latter released as a Penguin paperback
in 1992. Edward Scobie, a Dominican journalist who had
edited the magazine Flamingo in the early 1960s, wrote the
telling Black Britannia: a history of Blacks in Britain (1972) half
on the post-war situation but, published in the US, it was hard
to find copies in the UK. All of these, the latter two with useful
indexes, give an excellent flavour of life in Britain from what
some termed ‘the worm’s eye view’.
But the worm had already turned! There may not have
been in the 1950s and ’60s the time, the money, the contacts,
for the writing of many Black books, but there was an extremely
vibrant and variegated Black press – which ran the gamut
from the coloured glossy Flamingo magazine with eye-catching
women on the cover to small cyclostyled and folded occasional
broadsheets like The Black Ram or Black Chat, clandestinely
produced in someone’s front room – telling it like it was. At
least forty black magazines/papers/journals were produced between
1958 and 1970.9 one of the first and longest running was
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