Streatham to Portmore

Streatham High Road runs through the south London Borough of Lambeth — through Brixton’s extended neighbourhood, past the churches and businesses and community spaces that mark the Caribbean presence in this part of the city. In February 2003, many of the people who walked that road every day joined a march that was historic in its scale but could not, ultimately, change what it opposed

Briefing

• Anti-war march, London, 15 February 2003: largest demonstration in British history.
• Iraq invasion begins 20 March 2003; Caribbean community’s opposition noted in community media.
• Jamaica 41st independence year; PNP government under P.J. Patterson in its final years.
• Return migration to Jamaica accelerating among older generation; community surveys show trend.
• South London Caribbean community churches lead vigils for peace before and after invasion.

The march of 15 February 2003 assembled in Hyde Park and moved through central London in a column that stretched, at its greatest extent, several miles. The Stop the War Coalition, which had organised the march together with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain, had expected a large turnout but not the turnout that arrived. Police estimated at least 750,000; organiser estimates were significantly higher. By consensus, the march was the largest in British history, and its scale was replicated across the world: in Rome, in New York, in Sydney, in Madrid, millions of people took to the streets on the same day in opposition to the same imminent war.

In Streatham and Brixton and Stockwell, the Caribbean community’s route to Hyde Park was, in geographic terms, straightforward: a bus or an Underground to a central London assembly point. In political terms, the decision to march was, for many in the community, less straightforward. The community’s relationship with organised politics was complicated by the history of its treatment by the British state: a history that gave some members of the community reasons to be sceptical about the effectiveness of peaceful protest and others reasons to insist on it. But the march was, in the event, the occasion for a mobilisation of Caribbean community members — alongside millions of other British people of every background — that was as clear a statement of political preference as the community had ever collectively made.

After the March: The Invasion

The invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003. The march had not stopped it. The Caribbean community’s opposition to the war — expressed through the march, through community media, through the churches that had held peace vigils in the weeks before the invasion — had been part of the largest public demonstration in British history, and it had not changed the government’s decision. This was, for those who had marched, a politically significant fact: the largest peacetime demonstration in British history had been disregarded. The implications for democratic accountability and for the community’s relationship with the political system were drawn with varying degrees of urgency by different community members, but they were drawn.

The Caribbean community had a specific relationship with military intervention and with the states that conducted it. The British Empire’s military history was intertwined with Caribbean history in ways that could not be simply bracketed out when the question of a British military invasion arose. The invasion of Iraq was not a Caribbean story; it was a Middle Eastern story and a geopolitical story. But the Caribbean community’s reading of it was inflected by a history that included the British army’s role in the Caribbean, the police’s role in the Caribbean community’s experience in Britain, and a long experience of the gap between what powerful states claimed to be doing and what they were actually doing.

Return Migration and the Older Generation

In the first half of 2003, a pattern that community organisations had been observing for some years was becoming more visible: the older generation of the Jamaican community in Britain — those who had come in the 1950s and 1960s, who had worked in Britain’s public services and factories and NHS, who had raised their families here — was retiring and, in significant numbers, going home. Not all of them, and not all permanently: some were spending six months in Jamaica and six months in Britain, maintaining dual lives with the flexibility that retirement made possible. But the trend was real, and Streatham’s Caribbean community, like Caribbean communities across south London, was experiencing the departures.

The returns were not uncomplicated. Jamaica had changed in the decades since the first generation had left it. Portmore and Kingston and the rural parishes that families had come from had been transformed, in some cases beyond recognition. The relatives who had stayed — who had been in Jamaica while the diaspora had been in Britain — were both familiar and different. The infrastructure of Jamaican life — its health system, its roads, its utilities — was not always what the returnees had expected, and the culture shock of return was as real as the culture shock of arrival had been half a century earlier.

Portmore and the Jamaican Reality

Portmore, in St Catherine, had continued to grow in the decades since its development in the 1960s and 1970s. By 2003, it was one of Jamaica’s most populous urban areas, a place where the diaspora’s returnees were settling alongside long-term Portmore residents and young Jamaicans who had moved there from rural parishes. The community in Portmore that received the diaspora returnees from Streatham was itself a community in transition: newer, younger, shaped by the Jamaica of the post-independence decades rather than by the Jamaica that the diaspora had left.

The relationship between the diaspora and the community it returned to was a complex negotiation. Returnees brought British habits and British expectations about services and infrastructure. The Jamaican community received them with a mixture of welcome and the occasional impatience that is the natural response to the returning prodigal who has opinions about how things should be done. The negotiation was real and ongoing, and it was conducted at the level of daily life in streets and churches and markets, rather than in the formal channels of diaspora policy. It was one of the most human parts of the diaspora story: the long return to a home that had not stayed still while the diaspora was away. The Jamaican government was beginning to address these tensions more formally; the first diaspora conference, a year away, would be the first step in that formalisation.