By James Cantres
Steve McQueen’s five-part film anthology Small Axe portrays various strains of Black British life from the 1960s through 1980s. Each film gives ample opportunity to explore a distinct aspect of the experiences of Caribbean and African residents, citizens, and recent arrivants to the United Kingdom during the second half of the twentieth century. What follows is a brief contextualization of episodes of the series with insights from my new book Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization, which is an investigation into the politics and cultural expression that immediately precede many of the narratives depicted in Small Axe. In particular, I draw on the notions of space and racial belonging in the context of decolonizing metropolitan Britain.
In 1948 the British Nationality Act created the status of “citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” (CUKC), a uniform national citizenship for the U.K. and its colonies. In an effort to reassert the metropole’s position as the center of the global imperial realm and in order to effectively recruit laborers to aid in the postwar recovery, British policymakers recognized that free entry into Britain could encourage arrivals from around the world while reflecting the power relations of colony-metropole relations.
Thousands of citizens from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia moved to Britain in the hopes of attaining a status unavailable in their homelands and with the belief that their citizenship afforded them a status equal to metropolitan counterparts. In June 1948, the MV Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury, England with over five hundred passengers who listed Jamaica as their last country of residence on board. Blackening Britain suggests the racist realities of British society in turn encouraged multiple modes of resistance including the development of knowledges and institutions grounded in Caribbean- and African-oriented epistemologies and which rejected the hegemony of British cultural and intellectual exclusivity. The emergence of the Caribbean Artists Movement, the founding of the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Opinion, and the popularity of venues such as Totobag’s café and the Mangrove restaurant all exemplified claims-making and the dynamic blackening of British society.
Colonial citizens of color found ingratiating themselves into British society much more difficult than they had typically expected. Renting rooms, acquiring and maintaining employment, and merely traveling through the cities presented challenges that reflected the unofficial colour bar that operated in British society. While there were no legal justifications or permissions to racially discriminate in Britain, there also existed no protections against racial discrimination so a de facto racial preference pervaded nonwhite experiences. In London for instance, this meant that Black arrivants moved into disparate areas across the city where housing could be obtained leading to disparate settlement patterns in the west (Notting Hill), south (Brixton), east (Stepney), and north (Tottenham) into the 1950s.
Contestations over space and the entitled rights to residence, property, and a peaceful existence dominated discourses around the Windrush migrants. The 1948 arrival of the ship was marked by declarations of “invading” West Indians, arriving in Britain to hypothetically alter and transform the metropole in innumerous debilitating ways. Africans and Asians were often thought to be non-British foreigners, unable to assimilate, and unwilling to acquiesce to the unspoken norms of British society. Concomitant with the post-war migration was the rise of the welfare state in Britain, and many metropolitan white Britons resented the prospect of these “foreigners” living “on the dole” and receiving social benefits. Shop owners, pubs, and landlords could express their displeasure with the colored presence through the rejection and exclusion of nonwhite tenants and clientele. The Race Relations Act (1965) was the first legislation in the United Kingdom that addressed racial discrimination, outlawing discrimination on “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” in public places.
Institutions such as the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, the subject of the first of McQueen’s films, were spaces for community building, revelry, and a respite from the quotidian experiences of antiblack bias migrants faced. Trinidadian Frank Crichlow operated the Mangrove as a meeting place for community members, and its location in west London underscored the claims-making possibilities for Caribbean residents in the capital. Crichlow was a community activist who opened the El Rio café in Notting Hill in 1959. According to Crichlow, the El Rio was a “school or university” for hustlers—drawing street-wise and rebellious community members. It was a safe space for Black people in the city and was frequented by local residents as well as artists, musicians, and politicians of the Whitehall and street corner variety.
The Mangrove Nine: Barbara Beese, Rupert Boyce, Crichlow, Rhodan Gordon, Darcus Howe, Anthony Innis, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Rothwell Kentish, and Godfrey Millett challenged British public opinion in the arena of British justice and succeeded. Their trial represented a reckoning in the crucible of empire and nation, notable because of the Nine’s frequent questioning of the legitimacy of the legal process. Black activists who resisted the targeting of Crichlow’s establishment disrupted the assumed validity of British justice and struck back against the fundamentally unequal way they were treated as racialized agitators. That Jones-LeCointe and Howe represented themselves only further illustrated how British Black Power carved out new space in the British legal system—their unorthodox self-defense did not implicate their guilt—in turn they too were exonerated.
The Mangrove was not the first social space for London’s West Indian community. In summer 1958, riots in Notting Hill, instigated by Teddy boys—working class, often unemployed youths who resented the presence of nonwhites as unfit and unwelcome in British society—engulfed the streets for a period of about two weeks. During these disturbances, Caribbean residents facing assault and harassment could not rely on the protection of the police. In response, many avoided the area altogether or stayed in their homes. Some Caribbean, Asian, and African residents, however, defended themselves and one another in fracases in Notting Hill. Depictions of violence and police brutality in “Mangrove” portray the intimate nature of these communities—the police knew the names of Black neighborhood residents and applied intense pressure on their everyday comings and goings. Through the application of the “sus law,” police were able to stop, search, and possibly arrest persons deemed “suspicious” according to the Vagrancy Act of 1824. In the twentieth century, police in Britain utilized a legal mandate from over one hundred forty years prior to recklessly and deliberately harass and detain persons—these encounters illustrated the continued police pressure on nonwhites that was substantiated by the British legal firmament.
“Lovers Rock” was inspired by memories of dances relayed to McQueen (of Grenadian and Trinidadian descent and born in London) by his aunt growing up and sneaking out to party under the cover of night. The film showcases youths in a blues dance and reflects the social dynamics of the Black British experience in historically accurate ways. Often decried as vagrant, dangerous, and threatening, Black women and men could expect to be prohibited from nightclubs and pubs. Their response was to organized their own house parties. Reproducing the party culture of the Caribbean—competing sound systems in “Alex Wheatle” and the slow wine of hips and waists through the night along with the thumping bass from the subwoofers—Small Axe captures the rhythm and style of the West Indian partygoers. Beyond the scuffles, the intimidation, and the abuse suffered, Black people in Britain also got down (and continue to do so), contributing incredibly innovative and vibrant cultural forms as modes of resistance in their own right. In a nearly ten-minute sequence in “Lovers Rock,” viewers watch the blues dance crowd sway and sing along to Janet Kay’s “Silly Games,” and one realizes that joy can be made in that space and it lasts as well.
McQueen’s “Red, White, and Blue,” narrates the career and journey of Leroy Logan, the London Metropolitan Police officer who attempted to reform that institution from within. Logan was born in London to Jamaican parents and worked as a research scientist into the early 1980s. Logan’s bigoted colleagues undermined his abilities and sought to impair his path to success. This tendency was not uncommon in various British industries during the post-war era. In the 1950s, debates on the employment capacity and legitimacy of certifications from the West Indies had become central to the question of how to fill jobs in the necessary industries. Engineers and mechanics who had been certified in the Caribbean were in many cases made to retrain and serve additional apprenticeship before being certified in Britain—as if their Caribbean qualifications were not analogous to metropolitan ones (they were indeed). Additionally, some labor unions excluded non-native Britons from joining, further impeding the integration of these populations. Despite these patterns, Caribbean and South Asian workers were recruited to fill essential jobs in critical industries including mining and transport. In particular, London Transport (now Transport for London) relied on the employment of thousands of Caribbean bus drivers, mechanics, custodians, ticket takers, and train operators and even created a guaranteed employment scheme to enlist workers from Barbados beginning in the 1950s.
“Education,” which highlights the rapid reschooling of youths determined to be “subnormal” in Britain, provides a perspective on the race and class-based assessment of pupils that has impeded their learning for decades. As referenced in the film, Grenadian Bernard Coard, who worked for two years as a schoolteacher in London, composed a pamphlet, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain in 1971. Similar to claims that Caribbean workers did not belong within the British workforce for a variety of reasons, their children were too deemed unworthy of British schooling and belonged precisely to a parallel and substandard system of education. Structural impediments to educational success for Black students was in turn countered by efforts within and between Caribbean, Asian, and African communities who designed their own curricula (the West Indian Mothers Club for instance) to ensure decent education for the children as well as developing Afrocentric epistemologies. Furthermore, they created their own presses, supporting new scholarship and publishing critical cutting-edge work that centered the experiences of the Africana world.
Caribbean, African and Asian claims-making in Britain not only developed in response to racism but also was forged through innovative re-conceptualizations of identity through which Jamaicans, Nigerians, Indians, Bangladeshis, South Africans, and Barbadians among others could understand themselves collectively in the former imperial metropole. What is worthy of consideration was the extent to which working-class colonial/post-colonial migrants of color in the industries organized together when excluded from trade unions or outright discriminated against according to racist hiring practices. This was also reflected (particularly from the end of WWII through the early 1960s) in housing discrimination and the subsequent overcrowded lodgings that housed Nigerians with Jamaicans and Guyanese and South Africans and Indians and Pakistanis who in turn would often then go to work at the same bus garage or trainyard. In other words, political blackness emerged in Britain in various iterations and from viewpoints reflective of intersections of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and profession. At times political blackness was articulated as such contemporaneously and in other instances the term has been used as a historical analytic to retroactively describe events, movements, collectivities. West Indians for instance, who began to articulate a collective political identification in Britain unique to the metropolitan context and informed sometimes in critical ways by nascent movements in both the Caribbean and Africa.
Spaces such as the Mangrove, a blues dance, the Florence Mills Social Parlour, the Black House on Holloway Road, and Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite’s Bloomsbury flat were distinctly Black establishments in Britain that reflected the nuance and texture of Black lives in the former mother country, remaking the metropole in strikingly new relief. Small Axe, in its depictions of sorrow, tenderness, violence, and joy provides a mere glimpse into the textures of Caribbean imaginaries expressed in and transformative for British and transnational social formations.
James Cantres
James Cantres is assistant professor in Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College, CUNY where he specializes in migration, black internationalism, radical politics, cultural formations, and Africana epistemologies. He is the author of Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Rowman & Littlefield International, December 2020).
