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

y without a plot, a Nigerian character named Taloufa was caught up in the Cardiff
seaport riot. McKay portrayed Taloufa as an archetypal black colonial subject.
Educated at a British mission school in Nigeria, he was taken to Britain as a servant “boy”
by a British civil servant when aged thirteen. He then worked for three years in the Midlands as
a servant before tiring of his existence and running away to Cardiff. Taloufa worked out of the
port as a ship’s boy: “he was there during the riots of 1919 between colored and whites, and he
got a brick wound in the head. He went to America after the riots and jumped his ship there.”
47 Taloufa”s life and experience in Africa, Britain and America was the fictional embodiment
of a “black Atlantic” experience, with a hint of a twentieth century triangular slave trade thrown
in. McKay may well have based his fictional account of Taloufa’s life and the experience of the
Cardiff rioting on incidents that he had heard while working in Britain as a journalist in 1919.
In almost every urban metropolitan setting where riots broke out during and after the
First World War, black people had arrived in increased numbers and, of necessity, competed
with working class white people for jobs and housing. In these international riot episodes,
black troops, civilians and wartime workers became the focus for wartime and post war dissatisfaction
among sections of the urban white working class. Evans, in his article on the
“Red Summers of 1917-1919” has described the 1919 rioting in Britain and elsewhere
in the Atlantic basin as the “… pinnacle of a period of intensified racial conflicts
across the north Atlantic world which was rooted in the established patterns
of migration but which was brought to a head by the First World War.” 48
The summer 1917 riots in France were a product of “war weariness” among white subjects
who accused colonial workers and troops of enjoying life in metropolitan France while
white French soldiers were sent to the front. 49 A similar viewpoint was expressed by
white British crowds and in the press during the seaport riots. The comparison between the
French and British rioting can be taken further with respect to “official” responses towards
colonial workers in the metropole. Horne’s study of immigrant workers in France during the
First World War revealed that tensions between governors and the governed in the colonies
were replicated in mainland France. “The internal frontiers of colonialism… between white
and native… were for the first time transported from the colonies to metropolitan France.”
Assumptions of the childlike and dependent status of the colonials characterized their
distinctive treatment by officials, as did the need to maintain certain barriers. 50 A similar
pattern can be detected in the relationships between British black colonials and government
departmental representatives before, during and after the seaport riots. Wartime population
shifts lay behind the American rioting of 1919. According to Segal’s 1960s work on racist
violence: “white labour in the North, reacting strongly to Negro encroachments on the
city slums and industrial plants, barred Negro workers from the unions and agitated for their
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