Mandela Free and Elected, Lara Breaks Records, Rwanda Burns: A Half-Year of History

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 1994 | Period covered: January–June 1994

Key Developments at a Glance

• 10 May 1994: Nelson Mandela inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected president; Caribbean community celebrates a defining moment.
• 16–18 April 1994: Brian Lara scores 375 against England in Antigua, breaking Garfield Sobers’ test record set in 1958.
• April 6, 1994: Rwanda genocide begins; Caribbean community is among first to ask why the world is not intervening.
• Stephen Lawrence private prosecution of five suspects ongoing; Caribbean community presses government for a public inquiry.
• PJ Patterson’s PNP government continues in Jamaica; diaspora ties strengthened by remittances and cultural exchange.
• Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill before Parliament; community organisations oppose stop-and-search and criminalisation provisions.

The first half of 1994 brings the Caribbean community in Britain three events of world-historical significance and a continuing domestic injustice that tests its relationship with the British state. On 27 April 1994, South Africa holds its first fully democratic elections, with twenty-two million people voting, most of them for the first time in their lives; on 10 May, Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as president of South Africa, and thirty years of anti-apartheid campaigning, of which the Caribbean community has been an active and committed part, reaches the moment it always aimed at. In the same weeks, Brian Lara of Trinidad and the West Indies breaks one of sport’s most celebrated records, scoring 375 against England in Antigua and surpassing the 365 not out that Garfield Sobers set in 1958 in Kingston, Jamaica. And beginning in the first week of April, the world watches as the Rwandan genocide unfolds — watches, and for weeks, does very little.

Mandela’s Presidency: The Fruit of Three Decades

When Nelson Mandela takes the oath of office on 10 May 1994 at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. de Klerk as his deputy presidents and with an audience that includes heads of state from across the world, the Caribbean community in Britain marks the moment as one of the great political events of the post-war era. The community’s connection to the South African freedom struggle spans decades: from the boycott campaigns and picket lines of the 1960s and 1970s, through the cultural boycott in which Caribbean artists and institutions participated, through the political solidarity of the 1980s in which Caribbean community organisations in Britain were consistent and vocal voices against apartheid. The Mandela presidency is not a gift of the international community’s generosity but the fruit of the African National Congress’s long struggle and the sacrifice of those who paid its cost. The Caribbean community, whose own history is built on that kind of long-view persistence, understands this clearly.

Community celebrations in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and other cities where the Caribbean community is concentrated are joyful and substantial. Churches give thanks. Community centres host events. The Black press — The Voice, New Nation — devotes extensive coverage to the inauguration and to the questions it opens about the future of South Africa and the future of the African diaspora. And there is a specific note of political comparison that the community’s commentators make: that the same international community which imposed sanctions on South Africa and ultimately helped create the conditions for democratic transition has not, in the Caribbean and African contexts, applied comparable pressure to governments that have mistreated their people.

Brian Lara and the World Record: Caribbean Excellence

Brian Lara’s 375 against England at the Recreation Ground in Antigua, completed on 17 April 1994 across five days of batting of an elegance and authority that has rarely been witnessed in the history of the sport, breaks the test batting record that Garfield Sobers set in Kingston, Jamaica in 1958 — a record that has stood for thirty-six years and that was widely regarded as unlikely ever to be surpassed. Lara’s innings is watched by the Caribbean community in Britain with the intensity that the community reserves for cricket at its greatest: on televisions and radios, in community centres and social clubs, in the kind of collective anticipation that the game at its best uniquely generates. When the four that takes Lara past Sobers is hit, the noise in Caribbean households and community spaces across Britain is audible. Sobers himself, present at the ground, is among the first to embrace Lara.

The record is not merely a sporting achievement but a cultural statement: West Indian cricket, which has given the world Weekes, Worrell, Walcott, Sobers, Richards, Holding, Marshall, Ambrose, and Walsh, has now produced the new record-holder, and the record holder is Trinidadian and young and extraordinary. The Caribbean community’s pride in Lara’s achievement carries within it an assertion of Caribbean excellence that the community makes in the face of the condescension, the institutional prejudice, and the structural disadvantage that its members encounter in their daily lives in Britain.

Rwanda: The Question the World Is Not Answering

The genocide in Rwanda, which begins with the shooting down of the plane carrying President Jéuvnal Habyarimana on 6 April 1994 and the immediate commencement of systematic killing of Tutsi by Interahamwe militia and elements of the Rwandan armed forces, confronts the international community with a moral and political test of the most fundamental kind. By June 1994, with the killing in its third month, estimates of the dead run into hundreds of thousands. The UN Security Council, under pressure from the United States — whose position has been shaped by the Somali experience of October 1993 — has refused to authorise intervention or even to use the word genocide, which would trigger legal obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The Caribbean community in Britain engages with the Rwanda question from a position that is grounded in its own history of dispossession, the history of the transatlantic slave trade and its global consequences, and its political tradition’s insistence on the equal value of Black life. The failure of the international community to intervene as eight hundred thousand Africans are killed is, for the community, not a surprise — it is a confirmation of a hierarchy of concern that the community has observed operating in the international system for its entire existence. The question is not whether the international community would have acted faster if the dead were European; it is why that question has to be asked.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard; Commonwealth Secretariat; Anti-Apartheid Movement (successor organisations); Amnesty International.

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