Kitabı oku: «Empire’s Children: Trace Your Family History Across the World»

PROLOGUE

But as the debate was nearing an end, I felt I had been too harsh with the man who would be my partner in a government of national unity. In summation, I said, ‘The exchanges between Mr (F. W.) de Klerk and me should not obscure one important fact. I think we are a shining example to the entire world of people drawn from different racial groups who have a common loyalty, a common love, to their common country… In spite of criticism of Mr de Klerk,’ I said, and then looked over at him, ‘sir, you are one of those I rely upon. We are going to face the problem of this country together.’ At which point I reached over to take his hand and said, ‘I am proud to hold your hand for us to go forward. ‘Mr de Klerk seemed surprised, but pleased.

Nelson Mandela

At the end of January 2007 the Anglo-Dutch metals giant Corus, which had until a 1999 merger been British Steel, was bought by the Indian company, Tata Steel, of Jamshedpur. One hundred years earlier, when the British Empire was at its height, such a future concept would have been unthinkable. Even sixty years ago, when, in August 1947, India finally achieved its independence in a hurried and, some still argue, botched job by its last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the idea of an Indian concern taking over a British one would have been beyond the scope of most imaginations, Indian or British. The visionary novelist Salman Rushdie, whose seminal work, Midnight’s Children, redefined the moment of independence for a new generation, could not have conceived of it when his ground-breaking work was published twenty-six years ago, when the author himself was a mere thirty-four years old.

The world has turned radically in a half-century, and in doing so it has submerged the greatest, largest and longest-lived empire that ever was, and seen the reduction of its mother country from a real world leader to one which on the one hand hangs on the coat-tails of the USA, and on the other refuses fully to integrate with its natural partners in Europe. We, the Children of Empire, still retain a memory that seems more concrete than ghostly of our powerful past, and it still influences our thinking.

But when I say ‘we’ in such a context I am immediately at fault, because there are Children of Empire who are not by descent British at all, except for the fact that the countries they or their parents or grandparents or even earlier forebears came from for generations – in some cases back to the seventeenth century – lived under the shadow and protection of the British Crown. As we settle into the twenty-first century, we must grow used to the idea that India will soon overtake China in terms of population size; and that both those countries will soon become the dominant industrial and economic powers of the world.

In the pages that follow we will hear some of their stories, but here at the beginning it is worth making one allusion to the first wave of Caribbean immigrants to British shores, in 1948, nearly sixty years ago, on the Empire Windrush. Small in number – there were fewer than 500 of them – the men and women of the Windrush, dressed in their best, who had come to seek a new life in a mother country they had always been taught to love, respect and revere, met a mixed reception. A nervous parliament prevaricated – though Prime Minister Clement Attlee stood firmly on the side of the angels – while the racist extreme right, headed by Oswald Mosley, who had previously supported Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, foamed at the mouth. A decade later, after suffering years of poor lodgings for high rents, and a gamut of racist prejudice from the locals, the immigrants had to suffer one more great indignity – the race riots of Nottingham and then Notting Hill in the summer of 1958. Here it will suffice merely to quote from Mike and Trevor Phillips’s masterly account, largely through vox pop interviews, of early immigration to Britain, Windrush – the Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, to give a flavour of those times:

Notting Dale differed considerably from Brixton or Paddington, and it might have been tailormade [sic] for the main event. Notting Dale had everything St Ann’s Well Road [in Nottingham] had, and more, in much larger quantities. It had multi-occupied houses with families of different races on each floor. It had a large population of internal migrants, gypsies and Irish, many of them transient single men, packed into a honeycomb of rooms with communal kitchens, toilets and no bathrooms. It had depressed English families who had lived through the war years then watched the rush to the suburbs pass them by while they were trapped in low income jobs and rotten housing. It had a raft of dodgy pubs and poor street lighting. It had gang fighting, illegal drinking clubs, gambling and prostitution. It had a large proportion of frightened and resentful residents. A fortnight before the riots broke out there was a ‘pitched battle’ in Cambridge Gardens, off Ladbroke Grove, between rival gangs, and the residents of several streets got together to present a petition to the London County Council asking for something to be done about the rowdy parties, the mushroom clubs and the violence.

Notting Dale also had a clutch of racist activists, operating at the street corners and in the pubs. Parties like Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement actually had very few members, but in the atmosphere of hostility and uncertainty which had begun to surround the migrants they provided the country with an idiom, a vocabulary and a programme of action which shaped the resentments of inarticulate and disgruntled people at various levels of society. In the week before the Notting Hill riots broke out a drunken fifteen-year-old approached a black man in a railway carriage at Liverpool Street station and was reported as shouting, ‘Here’s one of them – you black knave. We have complained to our government about you people. You come here, you take our women and do all sorts of things free of charge. They won’t hang you so we will have to do it.’

Leaving aside the peculiarity of the boy’s language after it had been filtered through various official reports, the style and content echoes precisely the rhetoric being peddled by such right-wing activists as Mosley, John Bean and Colin Jordan.

There follows an interview with Barbadian osteopath Rudy Braithwaite, who arrived in Britain in 1957:

I remember going to listen to some of the speeches that Mosley would make, you know. I was too young to really take on board what it meant when you talk about the Third Reich and all that sort of thing. And Britain is a white country and it’s for white people, and that sort of thing. That was the gist of the discussion that he would have on this little soap box. And there were a lot of people, who are very respectable now, who used to be supporters of Mosley. I could put my finger on them. I know who they are.

Very massive crowds, big crowds used to come, you know. A lot of people would follow him. I mean, he used to have his meetings on one of the side streets off Westbourne Park Road. And there were people who would really come from everywhere and listen to Mosley, you know. And it was crazy. But that happened. He was a very convincing speaker. And he spoke without a breath, he didn’t take much. He would speak and things would roll out of his mouth, so that he was very impressive. When I remember some of the things that were being said. It’s very impressive. And he said, and perhaps that is true, he used to say, ‘Many of the people who are in high places, who are politicians, would love to say what I am saying now.’

I remember those words. But they are too scared to say it because of the likelihood of jeopardising their wonderful, tidy positions. And, of course, that was borne out by Duncan Sandys [a right-wing Tory MP and minister with a chequered career], who talked about ‘polka-dot grandchildren’. And Gerald Nabarro [a right-wing Tory MP and notorious roué of the 1950s and 1960s, mainly famous for his handlebar moustache], who couldn’t even drive on a main street without driving up the wrong way. Yet he got away with it, his racism. He was very blatant about his racist behaviour.

The Empire Windrush, by the way, set off on her final voyage in February 1954, sailing from Yokohama and Kure to the United Kingdom with 1,500 wounded UN soldiers from the Korean War. The battered ship, long past her best, took ten weeks to make Port Said, and she was later condemned.

Prejudice of a different kind hit Britain hard nearly fifty years after the Notting Hill riots, and the form it took is indicative of how radically and dramatically our culture has changed within a generation.

During the London rush hour on 7 July 2005 four bombs exploded, three on the underground at 08.50, and another on a Number 30 bus in Tavistock Square, not far from Euston Station, an hour later. Fifty-two innocent people were killed, and more than 700 injured, some seriously disabled for life. The four suicide bombers were young Muslim men, all of whom were British citizens and all of whom would have had a perfect right to identity cards – the introduction of which as a means of countering terrorism is clearly invalid.

The London bombing (a similar attack was launched in the same city a fortnight later, but miraculously failed) was the third in a series which started with the destruction of the World Trade Center by Al Qaida in New York in 2001 (3,000 dead). The second was the bombing of the Madrid rail system on 11 March 2004 (191 dead, 1,700 wounded).

We can see how long a shadow an empire, even in its last stages, can cast. England has been no stranger to bomb attacks in its recent past anyway, perpetrated by the IRA, and these outrages were also ultimately the result of decisions made decades earlier and perpetuated in the name of the Empire, largely because irreconcilable differences had been created.

It is true that following the bombings young Muslim men, or indeed anyone with similar looks, ran the risk for a time of being regarded with fear and suspicion. But there were no significant race riots such as those that had occurred four years earlier in Oldham and other major cities in northern England. There were race riots in Birmingham in October 2005, but the confrontations then were not between whites and blacks but between Afro-Caribbeans and South Asians, where the former local population is predominantly Christian and the latter predominantly Muslim. The riots, which took place over the weekend of 22/23 October, were triggered by rumours that a black teenage girl had been raped by a gang of Muslim men.

Violent outbursts of this type have occurred from time to time ever since immigrants from the former British colonies began to arrive in noticeable numbers after the end of the Second World War. The first major race riots – not officially recognized as such – were those of Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958. Though the Notting Hill Carnival came into being (in 1959, in St Pancras Town Hall) as a reply to the Notting Hill riots, tensions remained for many years after that. I can still remember the kind of looks I got when I was going out with a Guyanan girl in London in the mid-1960s.

We have – hopefully – come a long way since then. Most people, wherever they have come from, just want to get on with their lives, look after their families, have a more-or-less congenial job, and so on. That is self-evident. It is the few who muck things up for the many, and the many either have to put up with it or suffer. The people of Iraq, who as I write suffer outrages like the London bombs on a daily basis, are no different from anyone else in that respect. Prejudice against foreigners is endemic but it is essentially rare, and it is the child of propaganda. Many Muslims are in as great danger of tarring us white ‘Christians’ with the same sort of brush that we can be in danger of tarring them with. (And we should also be aware that as early as 1995 the French secret service had invented a nickname – ‘Londonistan’ – for our capital, as a result of their suspicion that it was a breeding ground for terrorists operating in Algeria; our reputation not helped by an initially, no doubt commendably liberal, but perhaps ultimately ill-advised indulgence towards such extremists as Abu Hamza al-Masri.)

The victims of the bombs in London, as they would have been in any concentrated multi-ethnic community, were random ones. Several members of what we still call ethnic minorities, including Muslims, inevitably died alongside ‘native’ Britons – something the bombers must have known. The hospital doctors and nurses who looked after the injured counted many non-ethnic Britons in their number. There was little racist reaction: we were united in common shock, outrage and grief. Ironically the most naked prejudice today – often stirred up by sections of the press – is against immigrants from the former Soviet bloc. But there is no stopping the tide, or the constant fluidity of demographics. The British Empire aside, an article appeared in the Evening Standard on 13 November 2006 pointing out that one-third of Londoners today were born outside Britain. This is a good thing. We should not forget that immigration has essentially enriched the country, not threatened or impoverished it. We had better get used to it, and the good news is that, slowly but surely, we are. This is only fair, since the British are a mongrel race anyway – and it is arguably that which has given them their edge in the past.

Britain is, generally speaking, a tolerant nation, though racism in many forms still exists. A thirty-five-year-old black London cabbie recently told me that when he was doing ‘the Knowledge’ his examiners – mainly ex-policemen – would tell him to drive to such destinations as Black Boy Lane (N15) and Blackall Street (EC2). However, there are some positive signs. About a year ago, I was pleased, if not 100 per cent convinced, by the optimism of a British-born Pakistani friend, who has had her share of racial abuse, who told me that she felt she was now living in a country whose institutions had become much more liberal in the last decade or so. She is about forty, and it seems to me, half a generation older, that a growing familiarity with other cultures is leading to a greater sense of ease. Many people have a South Asian doctor. Almost all city-dwellers have a South Asian corner shop or newsagent, or have eaten at one time or another in an Indian or Chinese restaurant. London probably has the greatest choice of cuisines of any city in the world, and Birmingham certainly has among the very best Indian restaurants. Many of our sporting heroes and heroines, whether they are athletes, cricketers or footballers, are of South East Asian, African or Afro-Caribbean origin. The Afro-Caribbean contribution to popular music since the late 1940s has been nothing short of revolutionary. Famously, chicken tikka masala (devised with the British palate in mind) has supplanted fish and chips (originally a French concoction) as the ‘national dish’.

It is probably true to say that most people born since, say, the mid-1960s – people who are now middle-aged – have greater tolerance than their parents’ generation, and their children will hopefully be more tolerant still – on both sides. After all, a large number of people of African, Afro-Caribbean and South Asian stock living in Britain today were born here, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Empire, and the flowers on the grave of that once mighty organization. And if it is depressing to reflect that the current leader of the British National Party was only born in 1959, it is also worth remembering that he was influenced in youth by his parents, and that the BNP has nothing like the clout of, for example, its Austrian or its French counterparts (the latter itself inexorably losing ground), and that Britain can at least be proud that it has never contained a political party of the extreme racist right which has had more than a derisory following, even in areas where ‘blacks’ now outnumber ‘whites’. When the BNP leader was recently (in November 2006) acquitted (by an all-white jury) of charges of racial incitement, the official reaction of the government was an undertaking to reexamine ‘race hate’ laws.

There are still spheres of official life in Britain that are tainted by institutional racism, but in other public areas our record is good. In the sixties and seventies, sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part dealt uncomfortably with the existence of racism. Although written from an ostensibly liberal point of view, and aspiring to show as ridiculous the characters who exhibited racism, all too often it was the non-European immigrant characters who were the butts of the jokes, and an uneasy sympathy sometimes bolstered the unpleasant protagonists. Such shows now seem to belong to a different planet. British television has nurtured a number of Asian and Afro-Caribbean sitcoms and series – from Empire Road by Michael Abbensetts and broadcast in the late 1970s to Meera Syal’s The Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me. That television is almost painfully aware of its responsibility is borne out by an article by Mark Sweney in the Guardian of 9 November 2006, detailing the results of an investigation carried out by the Open University and the University of Manchester for the British Film Institute (entitled ‘Media Culture: The Social Organisation of Media Practices in Contemporary Britain’), which found that programmes such as Coronation Street, A Touch of Frost and Midsomer Murders have little appeal for members of the non-white ethnic minorities resident in Britain. It is a difficult gap to bridge, for portrayal of the predominantly white communities in the latter two programmes is still valid; oversen-sitivity to the sensibilities of ethnic minorities could be detrimental to harmony.