Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Chronicle | Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Special Edition | July 2007 | Twenty-Five Years of the Record
Twenty-five years ago, in July 1982, this Chronicle published its first edition. One hundred quarterly editions later, in July 2007, the record it has accumulated spans a quarter-century of British Caribbean life: from the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Report to the continuing unresolved questions that neither report has answered; from the election of four Black MPs to a Black British presence in the Cabinet, on the judiciary, in the arts, in sport, in medicine, in every institution of British public life; from the poll tax to the Iraq War; from the Cold War to the War on Terror. One hundred editions is a milestone. The community it records has not stopped moving, and neither has the chronicle.
Six days ago, on 27 June 2007, Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister. Blair’s ten years in office — the longest Labour premiership since Clement Attlee — produced a record on race relations that the community assesses with mixed conclusions: the Macpherson Report was commissioned on his watch and produced legislation, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, that required public authorities to promote racial equality rather than merely prohibit discrimination. The Iraq War, which Blair took Britain into in March 2003 on the basis of intelligence that was disputed at the time and has since been comprehensively discredited, divided the community as it divided the country, with Caribbean community members among those who marched in the two-million-strong demonstration of February 2003. Gordon Brown inherits an Iraq that is not yet resolved and a domestic racial equality agenda that is not yet delivered.
The Bicentenary of Abolition: What the Commemoration Produces
The year 2007 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which prohibited British ships from transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic. The commemorations — exhibitions, services, official events, a debate in Parliament — have been the most sustained official acknowledgement of the slave trade’s role in British history since the abolition itself. The community has followed the bicentenary with the complex attention of people whose ancestors were on the wrong side of the trade: not the abolitionists whom the commemorations celebrate, but the enslaved people whose suffering the trade constituted. The community has asked, with increasing directness, whether commemoration is enough — whether the acknowledgement of historical wrong implies obligations in the present, including the question of reparations, which Caribbean governments have placed on the international agenda and which the British government has declined to discuss.
The Chronicle notes that the bicentenary coincides with an intensifying debate about what Britain’s Caribbean heritage means in 2007. The second and third generations of the Caribbean community — British-born, British-educated, contributing to Britain across every sector of its economy and culture — are asserting a claim to their history that goes beyond gratitude for abolition. They are the descendants of the enslaved and of the post-war migrants; they are simultaneously the products of the British slave trade and of the British invitation of 1948; they are asserting that both histories are British histories, and that acknowledging them fully requires more than an anniversary exhibition.
Fifty-Nine Years: The Windrush Legacy Assessed
The Windrush docked in June 1948. The community is fifty-nine years into its post-war presence — one year from the sixtieth anniversary, which the Chronicle will mark in June 2008. The founding generation is elderly; the second generation is middle-aged; the third generation is forming families of its own, with children who will be the fourth generation of a community that has been building Britain while Britain has been slow to acknowledge the building. The cultural confidence of the community in 2007 is visible in music — grime’s emergence from UK garage, which is itself a British inflection of Jamaican dancehall — in literature, in sport, in fashion. The community has made Britain more than Britain has yet acknowledged.
The documentation concerns that the Chronicle has tracked for twenty-five years have not been resolved. The hostile environment that is being constructed — the requirements for employers and landlords and public services to check immigration status — is not yet in its full form. But the direction of travel is clear, and the community’s legal advice centres are seeing the cases: people who have been in Britain for decades, who have never had reason to formalise a status they assumed was assumed, who are now finding that assumption challenged. The Chronicle has been tracking this pattern since 1982. It has not yet produced the public crisis that it eventually will. We continue to watch.
Jamaica at Twenty-Five Years
Jamaica is now governed by Portia Simpson Miller’s PNP. The island’s murder rate — approximately 1,574 in 2006, among the highest per capita in the world — is the defining public safety crisis of the island’s current governance and the question most often raised by diaspora members discussing home. The Christopher Coke network is operating but not yet publicly named as the defining feature of Kingston’s political economy; that reckoning is still three years away. Tourism is growing — approaching 1.7 million stopover arrivals — and is the primary economic success story that Jamaica can point to. The remittances from Britain remain significant: the community in Britain sends hundreds of millions of pounds home each year, sustaining island families through economic conditions that the tourism boom has not transformed for the majority.
Sources: Bicentenary of Abolition documentation; Home Office; Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; New Nation; The Voice; Caribbean Times; BBC News; House of Commons Hansard; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica Tourist Board.
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