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

But, if colonialists engaged with us in those familiar ways and installed neo-colonialists
to succeed them and take care of business at home in their interests, they
did even worse as we left the colonies to come to the ‘Mother Country’, here to
experience the racism that was in the very DNA of the nation. We were expected
But, what we
leave, we
carry.
to abandon the self-assertiveness we had practised back home and the experience
of struggle in the cause of freedom and human liberation and of sharing our stories
that had made us what we were.
We bring
what
we are and
we are
what we
bring.
But, what we leave, we carry. We bring what we are and we are what we bring.
And that is how we engaged with the society that we found. But, we don’t just
bring what we are, we also bring what we have the potential to be, what we have
the capacity to grow and become. And that capacity includes impacting upon the
society and changing it, even as we too are changed by it. We therefore discover
not just the society, its physical and human geography, its multiculturalism in all its
whiteness, its customs, traditions and cultural norms; we discover ourselves and
one another and become identified as a people.
So much so, that it took some of the natives a long time to understand that the
‘West Indies’ is not one continuous land mass called Jamaica, full of rebellious and
talawa people. If I had been given a fiver every time I was asked which part of
Jamaica was Grenada, by now I would have been a millionaire. So, we discovered
one another in Britain and we were seen as One People, even if we did not acknowledge
one another as such.
What we leave we carry; including our history of struggle and our awareness
of just how much we had been denied access to knowledge of our own history,
knowledge of the contribution of our Ancestors to the evolution of history and the
development of humankind, knowledge of the massive extent of their contribution
to the economic, scientific and cultural development of Britain and of Europe itself.
What we leave, we carry.
It was not surprising, therefore, that John La Rose chose to call his publishing, book
selling and book distribution company ‘New Beacon’ and that his mission as both
a writer and a publisher was rooted in what the ‘Beacon’ represented and did in
Trinidad society. It is as part of that genre that CLR James produced his first novel,
Minty Alley, which was one of the first titles published by New Beacon Books.
New Beacon therefore had a number of key objectives which were very much
related to the state of Britain in the 1960s and the following decades. Broadly
speaking, one can identify 10 objectives which could be summarised as follows:To
be an outlet for the creative products of writers, poets and academics who typi-
76 | Coming of Age
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