Two Nouns #5: Windrush and The Empire Striking Back
There is an election in England this week and I’ll be voting in it.
I can do so as an American with dual citizenship—but not with England. My parents and grandparents were born under British flags, in the colony of Nigeria, not that long ago. As a citizen of a commonwealth country, I’m empowered to have a say on the municipal affairs of the United Kingdom. (As a civic experience, it has been pleasant; read on for why casting my vote is not as simple).
Reflecting on my franchise in a former imperial power (twice over) reminds me of a caption from an exhibition I saw in London in 2014: “We are here because you were there” – so went the title of a photography show about The African Choir, a troupe of musicians from South Africa’s Eastern Cape who toured Europe in 1891.
(Photograph by London Stereoscopic Studios)
If it’s been a while since you’ve refreshed the memory, recall that the triangle trade of African slaves and goods across the Atlantic affected everyone involved profoundly – and that the experience and the mythologies of the aftermath vary. In west Africa, the trade in native bodies has been treated with historical ambivalence or even dismissal—the sins diminished in comparison with a debilitating long century of European colonization. In the Americas, the taut rope of slavery's legacy binds every American, with no slack in sight. In the French and British West Indies, yet another dynamic developed. Bondage metamorphosed slightly sooner, the enslaved and their descendants encouraged to exchange that yoke for the ostensibly nobler role of subject. My family was born into this reality, just before the end of the empire I watched with cosmopolitan bemusement in season 2, episode 8 of The Crown.
In England the slave trade was fairly bloodless; Crews departed ports like Liverpool and Bristol, made their way to the Gold or Ivory Coasts, swapped threads and beads for bodies and then headed west to British colonies like Virginia (ahem). When the ships next docked in England, the decks were hosed free of most evidence.
Recently, perhaps, you have been hearing about another set of ships, coming north to England from islands like Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. Between the end of World War II and 1970, a generation—named for the flagship Empire Windrush—arrived in England. The first of many boats arrived in 1948, bearing nearly 500 Caribbean subjects. Great Britain encouraged the Windrush generation to help scaffold a country devastated by war—to replace half a million war dead and kickstart the local Marshall plan.
This is what England wanted; contemporary reporting sheds light on what those migrants expected. A scene from the dockside welcoming ceremony:
"I could not honestly paint you… a very rosy picture of your future in Britain… If you are a serious-minded person and prepared to work hard in any vocation, you can make your way. It is left to you to win the respect of all those you come across and do your utmost to succeed in whatever sphere you may be placed.”
(See also The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon.)
Immigration is a tender subject for me, as the child of people who traded a rural village for a town, and then a city, and then the world. It’s a miracle of history that I was born in America and that my blue passport lets me roam freely. It’s a stubborn choice to fly by the green one, and a funny joke that it gives me some small power here.
The responsibility has given me a particular interest in the current political chatter, which – as in the US – has been dominated by immigration policy. What is Brexit, or Europe, or politics, but a tussle about mobility?
As we’ve learned recently, the Windrush generation was in many cases never formally documented. They simply lived and worked and raised their families in a Britain they had helped to rebuild. Time passed. As home secretary from 2010-2016, current UK prime minister Theresa May announced policies to make life uncomfortable for residents without legal status. This meant firm quotas for deportation, withholding financial, health care, and housing services from the suspect class, and absurd and painful outcomes for Windrush citizens – barred from attending a daughter’s wedding, denied cancer treatment at the NHS, detained like a criminal, sent back to an unknown country with advice like “be Jamaican.”
As the collateral damage mounted, The Guardian began banging the gong, and MP David Lammy (one of two non-entertainer, non-royal black Britons to whom I have ever seen the public pay attention) became a compelling advocate for Windrush victims. There has been at least one scalp: Amber Rudd, May’s prominent and ambitious successor as Conservative home secretary, resigned over the weekend.
Before we applaud the accountability norms in the UK, note May is not yet facing repercussions for her role in the scandal. Confronted with lies before parliament and the resignation of Rudd, May now says her “hostile environment” initiative was what the public wanted. Her actions clarify the Conservative political strategy of othering that led in part to Brexit. And they’re evidence of bumbling bureaucracy and historical forgetfulness – the twin failings of modern Britain. As black British MP Diane Abbott (the other one) put it, “It’s almost impossible to produce a hostile environment for immigrants and not produce a hostile environment for people who look like immigrants."
(Supporters and members of the "asylum caravan" that has traveled from Honduras to the California border.)
Naturally, the US has gone “hold my beer.” The LA Times has begun to highlight how nearly 1500 American citizens have also being caught up in sweeps for unlawful residents. ICE is apparently prone to "making wrongful arrests based on incomplete government records," and the primary victims of these mistakes are "the children of immigrants and citizens born outside the country." Lives turn on luck and paper. I never forget that a core plank of soon to be senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign for president was encouraging “self-deportation” from the US.
The immigration debate has layers upon layers. I don’t mean to boil it down to political posturing or naked racism. But it’s worth noting the status anxieties of white America are resonant in England, too. From the Norman invasion until basically just now, Britain was deeply homogenous; now London is a riot of every colony. The empire strikes back, we say knowingly at the pub in Bethnal Green or Brixton. But it’s cold comfort.
What I won’t suffer any more is the pretension that the British Conservative party is somehow an enlightened version of the US Republican party—more civilized and lovable for being part of a state nominally committed to social welfare. It’s a handy rhetorical device for cosmopolitan conservatives, but on this issue, without content. As a British friend who has spent a life within and working for the Tory party told me recently: “I’m tired of being the bad guy.”
I’ll be voting Labour on Thursday.
Good reads:
- This woman had an amazing life and I hope someone is working on the screenplay.
- The mercury hit 28 degrees (82, Fahrenheit friends) in London recently and it was so, so good (h/t Amina).
Something to look at:
(The Nigerian Ambassador to the UK, his wife, and the queen. I just shamelessly love this photo.)
Happy May Day!
Dayo