Heart Of The Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain

By Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, Suzanne Scafe and Terry L. Leap

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain's history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women's place in that history, documenting their day-to-day struggles, their experiences of education, work and health care, and the personal and political struggles they have waged to preserve a sense of identity and community. First published in 1985 and winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize that year, Heart of the Race is a testimony to the collective experience of black women in Britain, and their relationship to the British state throughout its long history of slavery, empire and colonialism. This new edition includes an introduction by Lola Okolosie and an interview with the authors, chaired by Heidi Mirza, focusing on the impact of their book since publication, and its continuing relevance today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Aug 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786635877

Beverley Bryan

Beverley Bryan is a founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent and recently retired from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as Professor of Language Education.

Book preview

Introduction: The Ties that

Bind

When we first came together to write this book, it was because we felt that it was high time we started to record our version of events, from where we stood as Black women in Britain in the 1980s. Over the past ten years, we had seen the appearance of volumes of material documenting our struggles as Black people, and of course we welcomed this for we had relied for too long on the version of our story put forward by white historians and sociologists. And we had seen the women’s movement follow suit, documenting ‘herstory’ from every angle except our own. But, despite the efforts of Black men and white women to ensure that we were no longer ‘hidden from history’, there was still a gaping silence from Black women. Thanks to our sisters in the United States, this silence is at last beginning to be broken, and for the first time ever Black women have a voice. But that voice comes from America, and although it speaks directly to our experience in Britain, it does not speak directly of it.

Inspired by their respective experiences of racism and sexism, Black men and white women have often made well-intentioned attempts to analyse ours. They have tended, however, to portray Black women in a somewhat romantic light, emphasising our ‘innate capacity’ to cope with brutality and deprivation, and perpetuating the myth that we are somehow better equipped than others for suffering. While the patient, long-suffering victim of triple oppression may have some heroic appeal, she does not convey our collective experience. That our race, our class and our sex have combined to determine the quality of our lives, both in the Caribbean and in Britain, is undisputed.

But what matters to us is the way Black women have challenged this triple state of bondage. Black women in Britain today are faced with few positive self-images and little knowledge of our true potential. If we are to gain anything from our history and from our lives in this country which can be of practical use to us today, we must take stock of our experiences, assess our responses – and learn from them. This will be done by listening to the voices of the mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts who established our presence here. And by listening to our own voices.

It is not easy to record history as it is still being made, particularly when so much of our story lies buried, so there is much which has yet to be said. We have touched on many issues in this book – the work that we Black women do, the education, welfare and health care we do (or do not) receive; the responses of women in our community to our experience of life in Britain; and the struggles we have waged to preserve our culture and sense of identity. Our aim has been to tell it as we know it, placing our story within its history at the heart of our race, and using our own voices and lives to document the day-to-day struggles of Afro-Caribbean women in Britain over the past forty years.

As a people, we have rarely been accorded recognition for the part we have played in shaping this land. If acknowledged at all, we are usually portrayed as the passive victims of an historical necessity which began on the ‘dark continent’ with the Slave Trade and eventually brought us to the inner-cities of the ‘Mother Country’. Schoolteachers and television programmes do little to expand our knowledge of these circumstances. At a time when our presence is regarded as ‘a problem’, and our right to be here is questioned almost daily by politicians and the media, we find that we are less and less informed about the chain of events which made the presence of Black people here so inevitable. Yet the Black community did not arrive in Britain through some accident of history. Our links with this country, like the links of many other non-white peoples living here, stretch back over many hundreds of years. An understanding that the basis of these ties was – and remains – economic, is fundamental to any grasp of our lives in Britain today.

Chapters 1, 4 and 5 each begin with an history of Afro-Caribbean women’s role as workers, fighters, organisers and preservers of culture. By interweaving our past with our present in this way we hope that the importance of the part played by our foremothers in determining our lives now, will become more alive, more immediate and above all more accessible.

We take up our story in Africa, six thousand years after the Ancient Egyptians first began to establish Africa’s creativity and genius in the world, and shortly before the Europeans first set foot on African soil for the purpose of plunder. By this time, our African ancestors had established a variety of cultures and societies, using whatever different means of production were available to them. We were living as nomads, as hunters and gatherers, as members of settled farming communities and as residents of flourishing trading towns and cities. We were living in feudal societies, paying taxes to local chiefs and rulers; in slave societies, where power, class and privilege were already strictly established; and in communal societies, where resources and decision-making were shared, often on a matriarchal basis. Above all, we were living in societies which we ourselves had determined.

With the exception of Ancient Egypt, which is more often than not portrayed in books and films as a civilisation in which full-blooded, Black African people played no part, we rarely hear talk of the Africa which existed before the Europeans arrived. Yet African societies matched, and in some cases excelled those in Europe. There were the powerful Amharic dynasties of Ethiopia; the wealthy empires of Benin, Congo, Mali, Ghana and Songhai, with their highly developed mining, military and trading skills; and the thriving seaports along the East African coastline, where Arab, Indian and Chinese merchants mingled and intermarried with the local populations. To cities such as Kilwa and Quelimane, goods ranging from cloths and spices to jewels and works of art were brought by caravan, crossing the continent regularly from west to east. And they carried religious, cultural and scientific ideas with them too, giving rise to a dynamic exchange of ideas and the rapid spread of Islam. The land of our ancestors was not a dark, unexplored continent as the history books are so keen to convince us. Flourishing commercial sectors, money-lenders and strong handicraft industries were all well-established features of Africa in the fifteenth century, which may or may not have given rise to modern capitalism, had European intervention not robbed us of our right to self-determination.

When Europeans first began their voyages of exploration five hundred years ago, they already knew the reputation of the continents they sought. Capitalism in Europe was in its infancy, and there was a growing need for raw materials and new trading routes and markets. This was the purpose behind the voyages which heralded our ‘discovery’ in the late fifteenth century. Why else did those school-book heroes like Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus set sail? History teachers would have us believe it was a thirst for adventure, but we have a different understanding. They were motivated, first and foremost, by the need to find new trade and resources to satisfy their newly-developing money economy.

So Europe’s first contact with the land of our ancestors had one purpose – to extract as much as it could. And Europeans were in a position to take the offensive. They had already learnt about the potential of gunpowder from the Chinese, and internal wars had ensured that they had a highly-developed knowledge of guns and canons. Using force and other dubious forms of persuasion, they set about exchanging their second-hand clothing, household utensils and guns for what later proved to be among Africa’s most prized resources – gold, for much-needed coinage, minerals such as iron, and precious substances like ivory. But this exploitative relationship was only the beginning. Africa would pay an even greater price in years to come, in the form of her most precious resource of all – us, her people.

Plunder became the order of the day, and while European merchants were busy looting the African continent, other ‘discoverers’ were making their way to the ‘New World’. Columbus, commissioned by the King of Spain to find an alternative route to the Indies (India) lost his way and landed instead in the Caribbean. He renamed the islands the ‘West Indies’ and claimed them for Spain. The Arawak and Carib Indians who populated these islands were attacked, enslaved and eventually all but wiped out by the Spanish and other marauding Europeans. That infamous instigator and architect of the Triangular Trade, John Hawkins, petitioned the Spanish King for access in 1565, but such diplomatic niceties were not usually Britain’s style. In his wake came the mercenaries and pirates like Drake, who led frequent raiding parties against the Spanish. The French too sent ships to intimidate and steal whatever they could. Before long, the Caribbean became a battlefield where European nations fought each other for land – land which was never theirs to fight over in the first place. Then, as now, war was their way of carving up other people’s world.

Eventually Spain lost its grip on this scattered territory. St Kitts, Barbados and finally Jamaica fell to the British, who sent troops in to seize control and quell any resistance from the indigenous peoples. Once the original population had been depleted by massacres, imported diseases and enslavement, it became clear that the West Indies’ potential could never be fully realised without an adequate alternative supply of labour. Poor whites, mainly convicts and indentured servants brought from Europe, proved unsatisfactory, in terms of both expense and efficiency. The early colonists were left with fertile lands, the possibility of great and lasting profits, but no workers. They would have gone to the moon to find our labour, but Africa was not quite so far. The ties had been formed. The racist justifications for their ‘civilising’ missions were readily available. And so the trade in our lives began.

The horrors we faced during the Slave Trade are well documented in later chapters, but it is the economic basis of that trade which concerns us here. Guns, spirits and cotton goods were exchanged on the West African coast, at some considerable profit, for slaves. The one in seven of our ancestors who survived the ‘Middle Passage’ were forced to establish the plantations and to produce raw materials such as sugar, cotton and tobacco. Although we were dispersed throughout the Americas, the fruits of our labour were all ploughed back into Europe, together with huge profits resulting from the sale of endless shiploads of slaves. The cotton and sugar we produced provided employment in Europe’s developing manufacturing and refining industries, whose surplus products were, in turn, shipped back to Africa to begin the whole cycle again. The overall benefits from this triangular venture were enormous, and eventually turned Britain and France into the strongest trading nations in the world. Most important of all, however, is the fact that it was the blood, sweat and tears of Black women and men which financed and serviced Europe’s Industrial Revolution, a revolution which laid the basis for Europe’s subsequent domination and monopoly of the world’s resources.

The British version of these events, which most of us have been taught, grossly distorts this particular period of history for fear of revealing the extent to which our labour is bound up with this country’s rise to power and glory. Yet none of Britain’s achievements can be separated from the achievements of Black people. The sheer volume of goods we were made to produce provided the incentive for inventions and research into new and more efficient machinery. The profits from our labour made it possible for British patrons to reinvest in ships, factories and land. Competition with her rivals spurred Britain into establishing a monopoly over the Slave Trade on the high seas. Britain’s debt to us goes back centuries. Yet the Industrial Revolution and its repercussions are to this day presented to us as the achievement of a few clever inventors and of the ‘naturally superior’ British ruling class.

In fact, it was the British ruling class which had the highest stakes in prolonging our enslavement. Members of the Royal Family, churchmen, Members of Parliament – they all had interests in the West Indies. But it was not simply a case of the privileged few acquiring wealth and massive profits. The ordinary British people were able to reap the rewards, too, from the plunder of Africa’s people and the exploitation of our labour. The Slave Trade provided new industries and employment, new markets and investments and overall profits which can never be fully assessed. When, a century later, Black people began to enter Britain as immigrants, we came to a country we had already helped to build. Our labour provided the foundations upon which many financial institutions, seaports and industrial centres were built. A local writer said of Bristol at the time that ‘there is not a brick in that city but what is cemented with the blood of slaves’. The same was true, to a greater or lesser extent, of Glasgow, Liverpool and Cardiff and of industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester. Many of Britain’s best-known high street banks and institutions emerged as a direct result of the trade in our lives – banks like Lloyds and Barclays, for example, whose proprietors had progressed from being tradesmen and merchants to plantation owners and bankers. The insuring of heads of slaves and slave ships against the hazards of the Middle Passage, and of plantations against fire, proved so lucrative to Lloyds of London that even after the abolition of slavery, and up to the present day, they have been able to maintain their position as the world’s leading insurers.

The impact of the Slave Trade on Britain was not confined to the material. Our presence in eighteenth-century England was an accepted reality. Black women and men were sold openly at auctions; the busts of ‘blackamoors’, emblems of the trade, commonly adorned local townhalls. Black servants were common too, and our children were the inevitable appendages of slave captains and high-society women. Freed and runaway slaves were conspicuous among London’s beggars and were known as ‘St Giles Blackbirds’. Though in constant fear of recapture, we lived side by side with the white working class, intermarrying with them and taking part in the life of the community. Indeed, many Black communities today, such as those in Bristol, Liverpool and Cardiff, were established long before the post-war immigration of recent years. And even when isolated and dispersed, we still made our mark on Britain. Black people were speaking out against racism and participating in British life as writers, musicians, actors, soldiers, nurses and in any other profession which was not barred to us, over two hundred years ago. Mary Seacole, the Black Crimean nurse, and William Cuffey the Chartist, made as great a contribution to Britain’s history as Florence Nightingale and Feargus O’Connor. This country’s past is littered with the names and deeds of Black women and Black men, frequently anonymous and unsung, who have helped to shape it into what it is today. By no stretch of the imagination can we be described as new arrivals.

But for those Black pioneers who established our presence here all those years ago, life can have been only an endless struggle against racism. Not simply were they the targets of individual bigots who taunted and attacked them in the streets, they were also up against a whole barrage of racist myths and justifications, expressed through the institutions of the day, designed to exonerate those who profited most from our enslavement. The Church was among the leading exponents of the merits of slavery, easily accommodating its inhuman practices as all part of God’s plan. The slave trader John Newton gave thanks in Liverpool’s churches for the success of his voyages, even asking God’s blessing to aid him on future African excursions. The attitude of the Church and its followers simply mirrored the ideas of a society whose whole economy was directly or indirectly linked with human exploitation. Christianity has rarely been able to rise above the economic imperatives of the day.

It was the Church’s support and collusion with the system which became the politicians’ ultimate justification for the inhumanity of the Africa Trade. But their ability to sanction such systematic cruelty on an entire race of people is only one of many examples of the racist hypocrisy which has continued to characterise British politics and attitudes over the years. Even today, the economic system, because it has the support of ideology and religion, is able to determine the beliefs and values of the entire society. The same myths which were used to justify our subservience as a people in the past have permeated every facet of British culture, and their legacy is alive and kicking. Today’s stereotypes which portray us as being fit only for manual and menial labour, or as idle scroungers who do not wish to work, can be traced directly back to the insulting, and contradictory, views which prevailed about Black people throughout the eighteenth century. The undermining assumptions of today’s teachers, the attitudes of social workers and journalists about our ‘childlike dependence’, the fears of politicians and police when we rebel – all have their roots in Britain’s racist past, when the possibility of Black equality became the source of this society’s most fundamental paranoia. This is why the philosophy, literature and science emanating from Europe continue to be saturated with notions of white supremacy. To admit otherwise would require a total re-assessment of Western thought, culture and economic practice.

It is usually suggested that Abolition was achieved as a result of a wave of humanitarianism, spearheaded by individuals such as William Wilberforce. Teaching in schools particularly perpetuates this version of events. But there were many factors which led to the breakdown of the system, and agitation by humanitarians was only one of them. European industrialisation, which made it cheaper to hire and fire ‘free’ workers at will than to own and maintain slaves for life, was undoubtedly a more important consideration for those with interests in slavery. The Napoleonic Wars, internal conflict amongst Europeans for more markets and trading posts, and arguments put forward by both Black and white Abolitionists, all contributed to the system’s eventual demise. Central to the abolition of slavery, however, was the resistance which we, the slaves, put up. The successful slave revolution in St Dominique (now Haiti), led by Toussiant L’Ouverture, sent a shock-wave through Europe and did much to undermine the morale of planters on other islands in the West Indies. The revolution also destroyed once and for all the deliberately cultivated myth that we were docile and incapable of initiative. The House of Commons, on hearing the news of revolution in St Dominique, ruled that the importation of slaves from Africa should be immediately suspended, for fear that new slaves, still steeped in their culture, would be a potential revolutionary force. But there was little need for imported agitators. For us, insurrection was nothing new, and the events in St Dominique were simply a source of further hope and inspiration.

Our on-going sabotage and rebellion meant that slavery was becoming less and less profitable. The inevitable problems of policing us where we were in the majority posed a direct threat to the lives of plantation owners and their families. By the end of the eighteenth century the planters had begun to realise that their days as slave owners were numbered. It was the unprofitability of the system and the self-interest of those involved, rather than humanitarian motives, which forced Britain to concede to Abolition.

The Africa Trade was abolished by the British in 1808, following a futile attempt by politicians to persuade the British ‘West Indians’ to improve our conditions on the plantations. The act proclaiming our emancipation was passed over a quarter of a century later, in 1833, and took effect the following year. It made slavery ‘utterly and forever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British Colonies’. However, after two hundred years of reaping the rewards of selling and exploiting our labour, this could not be the end of it.

Colonialism took over where slavery left off, ensuring that our labour would continue to bolster and maintain the British economy for years to come. In Africa, where we were still reeling from the effects of nearly three hundred years of human plunder, we were faced with a new onslaught as Europeans turned their attention to plundering our material resources. Pioneers and missionaries began to pave the way for the invasion of the continent by soldiers, settlers and colonial administrators, whose purpose was to seize Africa for the white man by any means necessary. Despite fierce and prolonged resistance, the Bible, taxation and the Gatlin gun eventually won the day.

In the West Indies, meanwhile, little had changed. Despite Abolition, the islands continued to rely on a plantation economy, ensuring that we had no other sources of livelihood. Colonial governments, based thousands of miles away in Europe, did nothing to develop alternative industry. Then, as now, their interests in our islands were based solely on what they could extract and exploit.

As we began to embark on the long road from slavery to freedom, we found ourselves faced with a new system which was in almost all respects only a milder version of what had gone before. Many plantation owners never came to terms with the fact that slavery had been abolished, and continued to exploit and abuse our labour with the full support and collusion of the newly-installed colonial administrations. Our working and living conditions were virtually unaltered. But the Apprenticeship System, introduced as a stepping-stone to ‘free’ employment, had to be hastily abandoned because of our refusal to allow planters to continue to treat us like chattel. As ex-slaves, we were beginning to demand the right to live free from the tyrannies of the plantation system. We were asserting our right to our own land, culture and way of life. Those of us who could, scraped together the means to buy small plots of land. Those of us who couldn’t, squatted on the back-lands of the plantation estates, growing enough food to meet our day-to-day needs and trading any surplus for other necessities. Even as we did so, the British government found ways of hindering our bid for self-reliance. In order to prevent us from acquiring land, they introduced huge land taxes and insisted that any prospective landowners buy a minimum number of acres. As a consequence, the majority of us had no choice but to continue to use the only bargaining tool we had ever had – our collective refusal to comply.

This reluctance to grant us land ownership continued, and the British Parliament, itself full of absentee landowners, was faced with the same problem which had first given rise to the Slave Trade. Here was an abundance of land, but no willing and ‘docile’ workforce to cultivate and exploit its resources. We were refusing to toil for the planters on their terms while there was even the remotest chance of working for ourselves. And it was this situation which led the House of Commons Select Committee on the West Indian Colonies to conclude, in 1842, that, ‘one obvious and most desirable mode of endeavouring to compensate for this diminished supply of labour is to promote the immigration of a fresh labouring population, to such an extent as to create competition for employment’.

Once the arguments in favour of bringing a new labour force to the islands under contract had been accepted, the only problem was to find this new labour. The appalling conditions on the plantations proved far more difficult to justify when no racial arguments could be advanced in their defence. Indentured labourers from Portugal found life in Trinidad so miserable that they petitioned the governor to transport them home. To begin with, the British relied on their warships to intercept Spanish slaveships heading for the Spanish colonies of Brazil and Cuba, on the pretext that they were simply putting pressure on Spain to cease trading in slaves. In reality, however, they were capturing much-needed labour. The possibility of encouraging black workers to come from other West Indian islands was ruled out, since none of the colonial governments in Europe would have tolerated large-scale migration from their already under-populated islands. And so they were left with only one alternative – to encourage immigration from British colonies in other parts of the world, such as India and, to a lesser extent, China.

One of the major ironies of the period of Indian immigration to the West Indies was that for every Indian who came there to work, three West Indians left to seek work elsewhere. Britain had imported a new population of workers in the hope that they would reduce wages by competing with us, the freed slaves, for available work. However, the result was our large-scale migration. This fact, coupled with the desire of many indentured workers to return to India at the end of their contract, still left the British colonialists with a diminishing workforce. Despite their vehement opposition to the sale of land to ex-slaves, they were forced to give land to Indian indentured workers as an inducement to stay. Plots of land were frequently offered as an alternative to a return passage to India, enabling the recent immigrants to establish themselves as planters and traders, while those of us who were ex-slaves were forced to continue to look for work elsewhere. Needless to say, the divide-and-rule potential of such a situation was not lost on the British, who never missed an opportunity in the future to exploit the inevitable divisions which resulted.

Throughout the nineteenth century, greed and self-interest continued to be the main features of Britain’s relationship with our islands. Political and economic power remained firmly in the hands of the British Parliament. Still no attempt was made to develop industry and resources beyond what was needed to line the planters’ pockets and service the British economy. Many landowners ran their estates and companies from abroad and, with no thought of living on the islands themselves, they made no attempt to improve the quality of life for those of us who did.

The stranglehold of the plantation system continued into the twentieth century, with each island making its own contribution to the British economy, alongside the many other reluctant members of the British Empire. Jamaica produced sugar, Grenada cocoa, Monserrat and St Kitts grew cotton and Dominica, limes. In Jamaica, the sugar which was the lifeline of the people was frequently subject to the whims of European competition, particularly as sugar beet’s use as an alternative to cane increased. Not until Britain itself began to feel the effect of this competition did the Norman Commission of 1897 turn its attention to how our islands could expand their resources and diversify their economies. Despite the opening of the Canadian market to West Indian sugar in 1912 and the boom in the economy brought about by the First World War, as labourers we saw little improvement in our standard of living. Our grandfathers who went off and fought for Britain in the ‘Great War’ returned home to conditions which had, if anything, deteriorated during their absence.

As the world-wide depression which characterised the 1920s and 1930s set in, the sugar industry throughout the West Indies declined even further. Those of us who lived in Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, St Vincent, St Lucia, St Kitts, Grenada and Trinidad were all to feel the effects, since we all relied on sugar to a greater or lesser extent. Our wages remained at or below subsistence level, and on some islands they had hardly advanced beyond the daily shilling rate which had been introduced after Emancipation. We continued to live in dilapidated barracks around the plantations, or in rat-infested wooden huts within easy reach of the estates. These and many other relics of slavery still existed a hundred years after its abolition. It was because of these conditions that many of us drifted into the towns, which were ill-equipped to cope with an influx of hungry, unemployed workers. There we were faced with serious overcrowding, slum housing and insanitary conditions. Our general poverty meant that malnutrition was rife and left us prey to chronic sickness and disease. For some, the only answer to this intolerable existence was to emigrate, either to other islands where prospects were rumoured to be better, or to the American mainland, where we became agricultural and factory workers. For the majority, however, there was no choice but to stay and fight for better conditions at home.

Until the 1920s, no collective voice had emerged to speak the people’s grievances. A strong workers’ movement could not develop, mainly because of the punitive legislation which existed against it. Unions were liable to pay damages to employers, who were well organised and fully supported by the colonial governments. Moreover, the competition for jobs was enormous. Landless peasants, disaffected soldiers from the Great War and the underemployed jostled shoulder to shoulder for whatever work was available. Many of us worked long hours, to the point of exhaustion, to preserve what little we could. Naturally, employers took full advantage of the situation.

But our response was not long in coming. It took the form of massive political upheaval throughout the 1930s. By now most of us felt that, in spite of the legal restrictions, we had nothing left to lose. Dockers, sugar workers, shop girls, street cleaners, domestic workers and casual labourers took to the streets and demanded better conditions and living standards throughout the West Indies. The most striking feature of these revolts was that, despite the apparent lack of any organised or coordinated plan, on nearly every island we made our mark within the space of three years. From 1935, when the St Kitts’ sugar workers went on strike, to the General Strike