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

By the time New Beacon, Bogle L’Ouverture Publications and Race Today Publications came together to organise
the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, each of them in their own right and working
together had engaged with political struggles and literary and artistic developments and creative products across
the five continents. To give just a few examples:
Political repression in Daniel Arap Moi’s Kenya:
In 1986, having returned to Kenya, Wanyiri Kihoro, a founder member of the Committee against Political Repression
and for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya, was himself imprisoned without trial. In response to the
international pressure put upon Daniel Arap Moi as a result of the campaigning work of the Committee and a barrage
of letters from its Chair, John La Rose, a frustrated Moi was heard to exclaim: ‘What does this descendant of
slaves know about Kenyan affairs and about Africa?’ One helpful aide, no less affronted than his tyrannical master,
then interjected without hesitation: ‘Why don’t you have him arrested?’ John La Rose and his committee continued
their campaign in spite of the repressive Kenyan secret service, publishing the campaigning bulletin, Kenya
News, until 1989. http://www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/trinidad-memorial-owtu-2006
The Anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and across the world and support for political exiles from the South
Africa liberation struggles living in Britain and continental Europe, especially Germany
The Soweto massacre and its aftermath
The struggles of Nigerian academics against persecution and political repression, especially the work of the
Association of Staff of Universities (ASU) against state tyranny, especially as perpetrated by successive military
regimes
Workers’ struggles across the Caribbean, in Southern Africa and in the USA
Antiracist and anti-fascist struggles across Europe and in France, Germany and Italy in particular
The Black Studies Movement in the USA
The Civil Rights Movement in the USA
The independence struggles in Guadeloupe and Martinique
The perennial threats facing the revolutionary government in Cuba
The perennial threats, internal and external, facing the revolutionary government in Grenada
Workers’ struggles here in the UK and not least the onslaught on the National Union of Mineworkers by Margaret
Thatcher and her government in the early 1980s
The fatwa pronouncedby Ayatollah Khomeini against the writer, Salman Rushdie, following the publication of The
Satanic Verses in 1988 and the burning of the book by Muslims in Bradford in 1989. Across the free world, there
was outrage at the fatwa and at what the burning of the book heralded in terms of attitudes to free speech and
to judgements about ‘blasphemy’ on the part of certain sections of Islam. Intervening in relation to both matters,
John wrote:
‘Believers have their right to believe. Writers have their right to write. Between belief and expression there is a
right to statement and counterstatement, to argument and counterargument. That is where I stand. Let those who
disagree make their case in the open forums of the world. Death and sentencing to death have never triumphed
over ideas and belief. Christianity and Islam are proof of this.’
To digress for a moment, one might observe at this time that the Khomeini fatwa, the burning of the Satanic verses
in Bradford in 1989 and the murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris in January 2015 all lie along the same
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