Haringey to Kingston

Haringey — the north London borough that includes Tottenham, Wood Green and Hornsey — had one of the most established Caribbean communities in the country. Its community organisations had been active for decades. Its churches had served Caribbean families since the first generation arrived. And in 2002, its name appeared in an inquiry into a child’s death that no community wanted to be associated with, but that the community engaged with honestly because it could not afford not to

Briefing

• Manchester Commonwealth Games, July-August 2002; Caribbean athletes among tournament highlights.
• Victoria Climbié inquiry takes evidence through 2002; Haringey Council implicated in failures.
• Queen’s Golden Jubilee June 2002; Caribbean community’s response varied and complex.
• Jamaica 40th independence; special celebrations across diaspora mark the milestone.
• Jamaica’s crime rate rises; diaspora expresses alarm at increasing homicide statistics.

Victoria Climbié was an eight-year-old girl from Côte d’Ivoire who died on 25 February 2000, following months of abuse by her great-aunt and her great-aunt’s partner. During the months of her abuse, she had been seen by workers from twelve different agencies — including Haringey social services, the NHS, the Metropolitan Police, and a church — none of which had intervened to protect her. The subsequent public inquiry, led by Lord Laming and conducting its evidence sessions through 2001 and 2002, identified failures across all of these agencies that were systemic rather than individual: a culture of passed responsibility, inadequate training, overburdened case workers, and a failure to communicate between agencies that allowed a child’s suffering to remain invisible to the people who should have seen it.

The Victoria Climbié case implicated Haringey in a way that was painful for the Caribbean community. Victoria was not Jamaican or Caribbean; she was West African. But she was a Black child, and she had come to Britain through family connections in the Caribbean community, and the agencies that had failed her were the same agencies that served Haringey’s Caribbean community. The inquiry’s findings, when they were published in January 2003, would address systemic failures that were not unique to Victoria’s case and that the Caribbean community had its own reasons to take seriously.

The Commonwealth Games: Manchester 2002

The Manchester Commonwealth Games, held in July and August 2002, were a celebration of the Commonwealth that gave Caribbean athletes a major international stage. Jamaica’s athletics team, led by figures including Asafa Powell and Veronica Campbell, performed at a level that sustained the tradition of Jamaican excellence in sprint events that had been one of the defining features of Caribbean participation in international athletics since the independence era. The Games were watched in Haringey’s Caribbean community with the same engaged pride that any major competition involving Jamaican athletes produced.

The Commonwealth Games also brought the concept of Commonwealth itself into the foreground of public awareness in a way that it rarely was outside the sporting context. The Commonwealth was, for the Caribbean community, a complex institution: it was the body that Jamaica and the other Caribbean nations had joined after independence as an expression of a continuing relationship with Britain that was neither the old colonial relationship nor a clean break from it. The Games celebrated that relationship in its most benign form — competitive sport between the nations that had once been bound by the British Empire — while, in the background, the realities of the Commonwealth’s political dimension and the uneven distribution of its benefits remained largely unexamined.

The Golden Jubilee and the Community’s Response

In June 2002, Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee — fifty years on the throne — was celebrated with a series of national events including a concert at Buckingham Palace and a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s. The Caribbean community’s response to the Jubilee was, as with all royal occasions, varied. The older generation’s relationship with the monarchy, often shaped by a genuine respect for the institution that had been part of the political culture of Caribbean life before independence, was different from the younger generation’s, for whom the monarchy was an institution of diminishing relevance and whose historical associations with colonial rule were more legible.

Jamaica’s fortieth independence anniversary fell in August 2002. The coincidence of the Golden Jubilee and the fortieth independence anniversary in the same year was, for the Caribbean community, an occasion for a particular kind of reflection: on the distance between 1952, when the Queen had acceded to the throne of an empire that included Jamaica, and 2002, when Jamaica had been independent for forty years and the nature of the relationship between Britain and its former Caribbean colonies was being renegotiated in the context of devolution, globalisation and a political culture that was still working out what the post-colonial relationship actually looked like. The Jamaican diaspora’s position within this renegotiation was, as always, complex: belonging to Britain, connected to Jamaica, and defined by neither relationship alone.

Jamaica’s Rising Violence and the Diaspora’s Alarm

In the second half of 2002, Jamaica’s homicide statistics were rising at a rate that alarmed the diaspora as much as it alarmed the island. The garrison community politics of the post-independence decades had produced, over time, a criminal infrastructure whose violence was increasingly uncontrolled. The communities most affected by the violence — the inner-city areas of Kingston and Spanish Town, the garrisons that had been built by the political parties as expressions of loyal patronage and that had become, over the decades, self-sustaining centres of criminal power — were the communities from which the diaspora had come and to which it maintained connections through family.

The diaspora’s response to Jamaica’s violence was the response of people who had family in the affected areas: concern, grief for those who were killed, financial support for families whose breadwinners were taken, and a sustained engagement with the question of what was causing the violence and what could be done about it. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had Jamaica among the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world in 2002. That statistic was not abstract for the Haringey families who had cousins and aunts and grandparents in Kingston and Spanish Town. It was personal, and it was the kind of personalised stake in Jamaica’s welfare that defined what the diaspora relationship actually meant in the lives of the people who lived it.