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

the ports. The author branded “ignorant” West Africans as the trouble makers. “There is as much
difference between West Indians and West Africans as chalk and cheese... We are accustomed
to living in houses in the West [sic] not grass huts; neither did we come to England to learn the use
of a knife and fork” 43 The debate regarding cultural differences between African Caribbeans
and West Africans was also raised in Glasgow by an African Caribbean caller to the office of local
newspaper the Evening Times during the summer seaport riots.44 Similar rivalry between the
African and African Caribbean intelligentsia was displayed in the inter-war years, when it was
a contentious topic among West African and African Caribbean student groups in Britain.45
In both metropole and colony in 1919 black workers challenged prevailing notions of British
identity and undermined the view of black people as powerless in the imperial relationship.
This was most forcibly demonstrated in the resort to riot of repatriated black sailors in the
West Indies which had a discernible impact on imperial government policy on wages in the
Caribbean. In metropolitan Britain, black colonial subjects contested the existing balance of
power in the relationship between coloniser and colonised by their actions in travelling to
Britain for work; in their membership of sailors unions (and, indeed, the formation of specific
unions for black sailors); in their demands for true recognition of their wartime efforts;
and even in battles between colonial racialised minority ethnic groups for jobs. Yet, despite
fierce resistance from black rioters to police intervention evident in rioting in Liverpool and
Salford and also the outbreak of post-war riots in the Caribbean, the relationship between
coloniser and colonised, as that of employer and employee, remained a largely unequal one.
Urban riots similar in several respects to the British seaport riots took place elsewhere
around what has come to be termed the “black Atlantic” as both France and North America
experienced waves of violence during and immediately following the First World War.
For Gilroy, the “black Atlantic” is an all-encompassing phrase which describes the area of
enforced settlement of Africans through slavery; the colonial process and the reflective cultures
and consciousness of European settlers and the Africans they enslaved and re-settled;
and also the inter-actions between subsequent groups of colonisers and the colonised.46
The black sailors embroiled in the riots in some respects exemplify Gilroy’s notion of the “black
Atlantic” as they criss-crossed the ocean experiencing the competing and complementary cultures
and pressures of life in colonial and metropolitan Britain. Participation in the First World War
re-enforced the notion of the “black Atlantic” as troops from British and French colonial Africa
and the Caribbean enlisted to defend their empires alongside African Americans and black British
volunteers. The war also brought British imperial subjects, French colonial citizens and African
Americans to metropolitan Europe, in large numbers at the same time for common purposes.
There was awareness among the black intelligentsia of these overlapping identities.
For example, in African Caribbean Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo: a sto-
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