On Friday, 9 November 1979, representatives of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) attended a fundraising dance at Acklam Hall. The venue, located in Notting Hill, London, was a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the dance’s organizers, the Black Liberation Front (BLF), a radical group committed to the overthrow of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Notting Hill was one of the major centres of post-war Caribbean settlement in London. A crowd of mostly Black Londoners paid the £2 admission fee to see a performance by a Zimbabwean dance group, and to hear the sounds of the roots reggae groups Dambala and Ras Angels (who both performed for no fee), as well as the now-legendary sound system operator Jah Shaka. Dambala no doubt performed their 1978 song ‘Zimbabwe’, the chorus of which implored the listener ‘Crucify Smith and take back Zimbabwe/Crucify Smith and take back Namibia/Crucify Vorster and take back Azania’.Footnote 1 Revellers looked forward to the imminent conclusion of the Zimbabwean War of Independence, chanting ‘Zimbabwe must be free’ and ‘pamberi ne chimurenga’ (‘forward with the revolution’). All proceeds from admissions, as well as the sale of food and drink, went to ZANU. At the event’s conclusion, BLF representatives handed over a cheque for £200.Footnote 2 The dance offers just one example of how Black activists in Britain practised anti-colonialism, forged transnational solidarities, and connected the global and the domestic politics of race.
Black activism in post-war Britain is a growing area of scholarly interest. Historians have produced vital work on the anti-colonial sensibilities, ideologies, and aesthetics of the various forms of Black radical politics that emerged in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 3 This scholarship has very effectively demonstrated how transnational forces shaped these politics (for instance, through discussion of how migrants transported Caribbean political cultures to the metropole, how Black activists in Britain drew on the ideas and language of the US civil rights and Black Power movements, or the influence of Maoism in forming revolutionary strategies). However, historians of Black Britain have in general paid less attention to anti-colonial activism and practices. The rich and expanding historiography has been more likely to examine how Black people in Britain organized collectively to combat discrimination in education, employment, housing, and policing. Black activists’ thinking and activism around the rest of the world remains, at best, an incidental theme in these histories. This stands in contrast to the historiography of Black activism in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, which has examined anti-colonialism more fully.Footnote 4 Where the global impulses of Black radical politics in Britain after the formal end of empire have been considered, the focus has usually been on the United States, rather than Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean (with the notable exception of anti-apartheid activism).Footnote 5 We need to understand how Black activists in Britain were not only shaped by transnational forces, but also in turn directed their activism back towards the rest of the world, often in quite concrete and practical ways. These insights demand that we rethink the periodization of anti-colonialism in Britain. Most of the general historiography of anti-colonialism in Britain takes the first half of the 1960s as its ending point.Footnote 6 Studying Black internationalist activism after this period allows us to see the changing shape of anti-colonialism in Britain into the 1970s and beyond. The activists discussed in this article rallied against continued economic domination after political independence. Opposition to empire persisted—if in changed form—after the main burst of formal decolonization.
A new historiography is emerging, which has begun to explore the ways in which Black people in Britain contributed to anti-colonial and nation-building projects in Africa and the Caribbean during the post-war period, and into the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 7 However, the broader implications of this scholarship for the study of Black politics in Britain are not always apparent. This article therefore intervenes conceptually, as well as empirically, in this developing field by examining the anti-colonial politics and activism of the Black Liberation Front, a Black Power and pan-Africanist group that formed in London in 1971. By foregrounding anti-colonial activism, it uncovers aspects of the exchanges and pluralities of Black politics in Britain that have evaded other studies. It also probes the relationship between domestic anti-racism and transnational anti-colonialism, showing how a deeper examination of the latter necessarily reconfigures our understanding of the former. Indeed, many BLF activists considered Black people in Britain to be colonized. The lines between the politics of race in Britain and the global solidarities of anti-colonialism were often blurred, as Black activists in Britain applied a Third World framework to understanding their own condition.
Attentiveness to this aspect of Black politics in Britain also has implications for the broader historiographies of transnational anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and Third Worldism. Erez Manela and Heather Streets-Salter have recently identified anti-colonial actors and organizations as transnational in three senses: their imaginaries, their networks, and their mobilities (‘in how they moved about the world as they pursued their struggle against colonialism and imperialism’).Footnote 8 BLF members and supporters were clearly transnational in the first two of these senses. Not all were transnational in the third sense: their mobilities. Those who attended the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1974 clearly were, as were those who took part in various other delegations and exchange schemes throughout the world. Many more, however, remained in Britain all, or most, of the time. These (extra)ordinary Black Londoners nevertheless thought and cared deeply about Third World liberation, and contributed to these struggles through activities like fundraising and protesting. This article thus offers a prompt for further reflection on some of the prevailing concerns in the historiography of transnational anti-colonialism, which often focuses on mobile, border-crossing individuals.Footnote 9 As Daniel Laqua reminds us in his recent study of transnational activism, ‘even when activists affirmed notions of a global community, their practical endeavours or personal experiences could operate in more confined settings’.Footnote 10 Such an observation speaks directly to the experiences and activism of those Black women and men who, for instance, organized fundraising dances in London for Southern African liberation movements. For them, Africa was psychologically, intellectually, and politically proximate, even if geographically distant.
There were also limits to solidarity. The BLF regularly bemoaned that many Black people in Britain were apathetic about struggles in other parts of the world. Even those who were not indifferent had to contend with other priorities, including other activist demands, as well as the need to feed, clothe, and shelter oneself and one’s family. As such, this article responds to Maud Anne Bracke and James Mark’s assessment that discussions of transnational activism need to ‘focus as much on tension and conflict as they do on connections and unity’.Footnote 11 Yet it is important to remember that, in the BLF’s case at least, such limits to solidarity were as likely to be financial and material as they were ideological and political.
Alina Sajed and Timothy Seidel have recently pleaded for scholars to attend to how colonized and post-colonial subjects made connections ‘sideways’, challenging what they see as a dominant tendency to ‘focus on the flows and relationships between colonial metropoles or hegemonic centres and colonized spaces’.Footnote 12 Sajed and Seidel are correct in their observation that the metropolitan spaces of London and Paris often loom large in historians’ accounts. I nevertheless query whether metropole–(post)colony connections are by definition not ‘sideways’. My contention is not that we should disregard the request to look ‘sideways’, but rather that branding metropole–(post)colony anti-colonial connections as necessarily hierarchical risks obscuring or mischaracterizing Black metropolitan activism. The activism of BLF members, as racially marginalized members of British society, most of whom were first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean or South Asia, does not fall neatly into Sajed and Seidel’s binary.
This article contributes to the field of global history by internationalizing the history of Black activism in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. British history should not be approached in a parochial manner, but rather as enmeshed in global events and processes, even in a period when Britain was no longer the seat of a large formal empire. British national histories, as well as local histories of Black communities in London, intersected with global and transnational anti-colonialism. Moreover, Black activists in Britain forged imaginaries and solidarities that destabilize the metropole–colony binary so often employed by scholars. Importantly, even activists who were not necessarily mobile were nevertheless important actors in imagining and attempting to create a decolonized world, and deserve the attention of global historians. The article achieves its interventions through an exploration of the Black Liberation Front’s anti-colonialism and Third World solidarities during the 1970s and 1980s. This is based on a reading of the BLF’s Grassroots newspaper and other publications, alongside subsequent memoirs by and interviews with former BLF members. The Young Historians Project’s heritage work about the BLF, including interviews with the group’s members conducted in 2016 and 2017, is especially useful in this regard. The interviews and the resulting documentary, created by young Black historians, are important examples of intergenerational memory building, as well as invaluable historical sources.Footnote 13 I begin with a broader discussion of the origins of the British Black Power movement, as well as the nature of anti-colonialism and Third Worldism during the 1960s and 1970s, to contextualize the BLF’s emergence. I then explore the BLF’s anti-colonial political philosophy, including discussions about whether or not Black people in Britain were themselves colonized. Finally, I examine the BLF’s practical anti-colonialism and Third Worldism. The BLF, as activists in Britain, identified their location as ‘inside the belly of the monster’.Footnote 14 They recognized that they occupied an objectively different position to their comrades in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Yet they nevertheless saw themselves as part of a global Third World solidarity. Anti-colonialism was central to their activism, and was intimately linked to their domestic anti-racist agenda. They understood racism and colonialism as global phenomena, which needed to be fought on multiple fronts. Solidarities could never be taken for granted; they ran up against ideological and material barriers. But, ultimately, what follows is the story of young women and men who were committed to the creation of a more just and equal world, and often made personal sacrifices in its cause.
Black Power in Britain, the Third World, and the Black Liberation Front
Britain’s Black Power movement emerged during the late 1960s. Its most immediate catalyst was the revolutionary rhetoric of Black American activist-intellectuals, especially Stokely Carmichael, who addressed the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London in July 1967. But there were other, deeper causes: the anti-colonial political cultures carried to Britain by migrants from the (former) colonies and the discrimination experienced by racialized people in practically all areas of life. The movement aimed for the unity of people of African and Asian descent under a ‘Black’ political umbrella. Important Black Power groups in London included the Universal Coloured People’s Association, the Black Panther Movement (BPM), and the Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP), as well as the BLF. These groups were divided to varying degrees by political philosophies and by geography, with organizations tending to pull their membership from different areas of the city.Footnote 15
Before the 1960s, few colonial migrants to Britain identified especially strongly with ‘Blackness’. However, Blackness became the glue that bound migrant communities and activists together. It gained purchase through its association with radical politics and aesthetics in the United States’ Black Power movement. In Britain, ‘Blackness’ became a political identity, rather than simply a racial identity. People belonging to various migrant groups—primarily, but not exclusively, from the Caribbean and South Asia—claimed a shared ‘Black’ identity based on a shared anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. This identity, as the historian Rosie Wild has observed, ‘rested on top’ of existing ethnic, religious, and national identities.Footnote 16 In the words of Zainab Abbas, a BLF member during the 1970s:
I wasn’t interested in a narrow definition of Black nationalism as I was inspired not only by the Vietnamese war of independence but also the Pan-African movement and the Palestinian struggle … The concept of Blackness was based on ideology as opposed to skin colour and so anybody who suffered from discrimination and was not white was Black. That encompassed not just people of African origin but the people of Caribbean, Chinese, Latin American, Asian and Indian origin too.Footnote 17
We can see from this quotation how political Blackness was tied to global struggles against colonialism. However, there was a tendency among some advocates of this philosophy to promote an Afrocentric understanding of Blackness. This was the case in the BLF, which emphasized African-derived cultures and aesthetics in its construction of Black identities in Britain. Ansel Wong—a leading BLF member, and a Trinidadian of mixed heritage—thought that some constructions of Blackness could not fully accommodate the diversity of his background, but felt protected from those people who challenged his place in the movement because of his belief in ‘the ideology’.Footnote 18 Understandings of Blackness were therefore fluid and contested. In this article, I use the term ‘Black’ primarily as a political identifier, in keeping with the practices of most of the activists discussed. But we must remain alert to the uncertainties and inconsistencies inherent in this terminology.
Many advocates of political Blackness identified with what we might call the ‘Third World’. Third Worldism was a political and economic project that pursued global transformations in a rapidly changing world. It was a particular strain of Cold War internationalism that sought cooperation between the emerging nation-states of Africa and Asia, as well as Latin America, where nations had been formally independent for over a century but remained in thrall to Euro-American capital. Third Worldism had its intellectual origins in the anti-colonial internationalism of the early twentieth century, and took shape after the Second World War, in the context of political decolonization and the Cold War. Third Worldists discerned the prevailing global conflict as running North–South, with a global economic and political system that favoured the developed countries in Europe and North America over the decolonizing nations, rather than East–West, between communist and capitalist blocs.Footnote 19 The Third Worldists of the 1950s and 1960s—with notable exceptions, such as the liberation armies of Algeria and Vietnam—drew primarily on the tools of diplomacy and statesmanship to fulfil their mission of decolonization. During the 1960s, Third World leaders and their supporters began to speak increasingly of neocolonialism—the idea that colonialism entailed economic, not simply political, domination, and therefore that political independence alone was insufficient to achieve decolonization.Footnote 20 Meanwhile, some peoples, most notably in the Portuguese and formerly British-ruled settler regimes in Africa, still suffered under direct colonial domination. What Mark T. Berger calls a ‘second generation’ of Third Worldists subsequently emerged during the 1960s. This generation ‘reflected a more radical, more unambiguously socialist, Third Worldism’.Footnote 21 This shift can be seen, for instance, in the contrast between the cautious diplomacy of the 1955 Bandung Congress and the revolutionary anti-imperialism of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana. The latter’s radical agenda ‘located the participants firmly in the socialist camp at the same time as they formally emphasized their independence from the USSR and Maoist China’.Footnote 22 Radical Third Worldists sought what Richard Drayton has called ‘secondary decolonization’, the pursuit of a more meaningful sovereignty than that granted by nominal independence.Footnote 23
The Black Liberation Front thus emerged at a time when both Black politics in Britain and some forms of transnational anti-colonialism were developing in revolutionary directions. The BLF was founded in January 1971 as a North and West London-based breakaway from the Black Panther Movement, and existed until 1993. London was a hub of Black Power activism. It was home to Britain’s largest Black population, and was more embedded in transnational circuits than other towns and cities. The BLF had more than fifty active members and many more supporters. Its members were generally disillusioned with what they saw as the BPM’s hierarchical structures and rigid Marxism, and instead embraced a more cultural-nationalist (if still socialist) form of Black Power. Despite a theoretical commitment to equality between Black women and Black men, its publications featured inconsistent analyses of women’s liberation, and some female members protested about being marginalized in the organization.Footnote 24
The BLF was headquartered first at Wightman Road in North London and from December 1972 at Golborne Road in West London. It faced the dual challenges of police repression and limited resources. Despite these obstacles, the BLF, as well as contributing to anti-colonial and Third World struggles, ran a number of projects around issues such as education, employment, and housing in Britain. It published the newspaper, Grassroots, which was run by volunteers and sold both within and beyond London, in English cities including Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Wolverhampton. The BLF also ran a bookshop called Grassroots Storefront, which became a site of pilgrimage for young Black Londoners who were curious about race, history, economics, identity, and culture. It was through visits to the Storefront that many activists were recruited to the organization.Footnote 25
Anti-colonialism and Third Worldism as political philosophies
There are challenges to pinning down the Black Liberation Front’s political philosophy. It was not an ideologically homogeneous organization, but rather housed a diverse range of political perspectives, which drew variously on Black nationalist, Marxist, and pan-Africanist ideas (often in synthesis). Contributions to the BLF’s Grassroots newspaper were usually anonymous or published under pseudonyms, making it difficult to trace the political thought of particular individuals. Manifestos and Grassroots editorials offer probably the best reflection of the BLF’s ‘official’ position and are thus foregrounded in the following analysis, but the ideas contained within even these documents remained in flux. It is relatively straightforward to identify the BLF’s predominant concerns, and to discern general shifts in its ideas and strategies, but it is difficult to identify a single, coherent political philosophy that animated the group, or to pinpoint precise moments of transformation or rupture.
The BLF resolutely opposed all forms of colonialism. But the question of exactly who or what anti-colonialism opposed, and, indeed, exactly who or what it supported, remained a point of contention. During the group’s early years, the BLF argued that it was not up to Black people in Britain to fight for a revolution in racist Britain; rather they should seek to survive in Britain and promote the struggles of Black people elsewhere. Indeed, Black people in Britain, together with Black Americans, were ‘the spearhead of the struggle due to our location inside the belly of the monster’, who might contemplate ‘supreme revolutionary sacrifice’ in the ‘cause of survival for Black people all over the world’.Footnote 26 Despite its commitment to Blackness as a political identity, the BLF was especially interested in African and Caribbean liberation struggles (though it was by no means indifferent to struggles in other parts of the world). Reflecting on the unsatisfactory Proposals for Settlement agreed by the British and White-minority Rhodesian governments in 1971, Grassroots reported that ‘The lesson of the Rhodesian settlement is that white will always choose white, and that we blacks cannot depend on whites for our freedom.’Footnote 27 The BLF identified race as the major dividing line that structured the world, and sided with ‘we blacks’ wherever they might be. This was, therefore, a particularly racialized Third Worldism: the conflict between North and South could also be interpreted as a conflict between White and Black. But the BLF would become divided between those who viewed anti-colonialism primarily as opposition to White people, and those who viewed anti-colonialism primarily as opposition to capital. The most significant tensions developed during the late 1970s. Interviewed in 2017, the former BLF member Tee White remembered:
Those people who were more like, capitalism is the problem, let’s look at how we can develop something that addresses that, went one way. And those people who were more like, White people are the problem, let’s look at how we can build Black institutions to serve Black people, went one way. So obviously they split.Footnote 28
When the BLF split, the anti-capitalist wing of the organization retained the BLF name.Footnote 29 During the 1980s, the BLF became increasingly vocal in challenging ideas that equated anti-colonialism with anti-Whiteness, while continuing to recognize that colonialism was a racialized form of oppression. In contrast to its earlier position of repudiating the possibility of revolution in Britain, it argued ‘that the major contribution Black people in Britain can make to the liberation of Black people worldwide is the destruction of British imperialism and the establishment of socialism in this country’.Footnote 30 Tensions between different Black organizations were reflected in the annual Africa Liberation Day celebrations during the late 1970s and 1980s. Many of these celebrations were organized by the Pan-African Committee, which brought together various organizations from across England, including the BLF, the Afro Caribbean Self Help Organisation (from Birmingham), George Jackson House (from Manchester), and Harambee (from Birmingham). In 1978, this committee was transformed into a national organization called the Pan-African Congress Movement, which, from the BLF’s perspective, ‘supported the idea that the struggle of the African People was against white People and not primarily against the inhuman capitalist system’.Footnote 31 As the BLF’s Jackie Daniels later recalled, the organization was aware that there were White people struggling for African liberation.Footnote 32 It broke from the Pan-African Congress Movement, and began to organize an alternative Africa Liberation Day, held on the basis that ‘the struggle for African Liberation is a crucial part of the international struggle against Capitalism and for Socialism’. In this account, capitalism was not merely ‘anti-Black’ but ‘anti-human’, and exploited ‘all the working people throughout the world.’Footnote 33 Several former members interviewed by the Young Historians Project recalled tensions around the question of the particularity of the Black struggle and its relationship with broader socialist and liberation movements, especially during the late 1970s. In general, however, the BLF was able to accommodate an eclectic mix of ideas. The interviewees believed that there was limited internal conflict, while practical activist work remained paramount.Footnote 34
In promoting anti-colonial and Third Worldist philosophies, Black activists in Britain were influenced immensely by African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American thinkers and activists. Black meeting halls and newspapers were routinely adorned with portraits and profiles of revolutionary heroes from across the world. British-based activists drew on intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah to think about the role played by foreign capital and local elites in sustaining (neo)colonialism. For instance, writing about India in 1972, the BLF bemoaned that ‘although the country got its so called independence in 1947, Black people here have been persistently denied the fruits of the land’, and that ‘a minority of large land owners still own the bulk of the land’.Footnote 35 Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, translated into English by Constance Farringdon in 1963, was especially popular. Following Fanon’s critique of the ersatz national bourgeoisies of newly independent countries, the BLF’s Revolutionary Black Nationalism: A Paper for Discussion (1973) argued that former colonies were now ruled by ‘imperialist minded persons who do not themselves have the means to be imperialist’.Footnote 36 Indeed, critiques of neocolonialism and national bourgeoisies became the stock-in-trade of Britain’s emergent Black Power movement more widely.
Many Black activists also had a great attraction towards China and Maoism. An earlier generation of anti-colonialists had largely been drawn into the orbit of the Soviet-led Communist International.Footnote 37 But during the Cold War period, and especially after the development of the Soviet theory of peaceful coexistence and the resulting Sino-Soviet split, Communist China increasingly came to be seen by many Black radicals as representing the vanguard of global opposition to imperialism.Footnote 38 The BLF praised Maoism as an anti-colonial and Third Worldist development of Marxism: ‘Orthodox Marxism’ was irrelevant to the class struggle, and it was the peoples of the Third World who would overthrow global capitalism.Footnote 39 The BLF frequently praised Maoist insurgent movements, such as the Naxalites in West Bengal and UNITA in Angola, for their rural bases and their defence of authentic indigenous cultures and practices.Footnote 40 (The BLF, unsurprisingly, broke with UNITA after it allied with apartheid South Africa, and instead backed the Soviet-aligned MPLA during the Angolan Civil War.)Footnote 41 Upon Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, an obituary in Grassroots opined that ‘the oppressed people of the world have lost their finest leader’. It identified Mao’s ‘two greatest contributions’ as ‘the ideological development of Marxism-Leninism’ and ‘the successful application of guerrilla warfare to seize power’.Footnote 42
Several historians have observed the influence of Black American thinkers, such as Stokely Carmichael and George Jackson, on Black activism in Britain.Footnote 43 The BLF was, in its early years, especially close to the Black Panther Party’s International Section, headed by Eldridge Cleaver in exile in Algiers. The Black Panther Party had, in turn, also been deeply influenced by Fanon and Mao. BLF leaders Tony Soares and Ansel Wong developed contacts with Cleaver and his wife, Kathleen, and the BLF became a ‘cell’ within the BPP International Section’s Revolutionary People’s Communication Network. The BLF published works by Cleaver, including his pamphlets On Lumpen Ideology and Revolution in the Congo.Footnote 44 Inspired by the Black Panther Party’s identification of the revolutionary potential of the Black lumpenproletariat (an underemployed, unorganized, and often criminal underclass), the editorial in the first issue of Grassroots explicitly aligned itself with ‘the lumpen’.Footnote 45 We can see in the BLF’s political thought the repeated global circulation of ideas, flowing between Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, each time being reinterpreted by any given actor, before being dispatched again into this oceanic eddy.
Given that I draw extensively on BLF publications for my discussion of anti-colonialist and Third Worldist political philosophies, it is worth reflecting a little more on the role of print culture in promoting these ideas. Bill Schwarz has argued that in the pages of the West Indian Gazette, edited in London by the Trinidadian Marxist Claudia Jones between 1958 and her death in 1964, stories about the global and the local were positioned together in such a way that Cape Town, Accra, and Birmingham, Alabama, became ‘proximate locales in the mental maps generated’ by the newspaper.Footnote 46 Indeed, we can study the newspapers of the Black Power era to extend Schwarz’s analysis. As John Narayan has observed, ‘The interlinking of the domestic anti-racist struggles in Britain and anti-imperialism permeated the various [British Black Power] groups’ publications.’Footnote 47 Black radical periodicals created powerful spatial imaginaries. An issue of Grassroots featured a page titled ‘News From Back-a-Yard’ (meaning ‘news from back home’).Footnote 48 The page featured stories about Dominica and Mozambique—places that would not literally have been home for the vast majority of readers—but the page’s framing created a sense of diasporic Black kinship. Grassroots therefore conveyed a sense of urgent connectedness and simultaneity to various struggles occurring across the world. Through the placement of stories on Grassroots’ pages, police harassment in London was positioned as part of the same racist and imperialist system as the arrest of revolutionaries in Dominica and the prospective South African and Rhodesian invasion of Mozambique.
Such juxtapositions invite the question of where BLF members understood their position in relation to colonial and imperial power. The political theorist Barbara Arneil has recently critiqued the conflation of ‘colonialism’ with ‘imperialism’ during the post-war period. She argues that both terms came to be understood almost universally as ‘overseas racialized domination’, which foreclosed the prospect of self-determination to those subject to internal colonialism.Footnote 49 While the BLF certainly held that colonialism was a form of racialized domination—the expression of a global imperialist system—they were not proponents of the United Nations’ salt-water thesis (respect for territorial integrity so that only territories geographically separated from their ruling powers were eligible for self-determination), and sought a more radical reconfiguration of global power than simply national independence. They promoted self-determination for those they argued were still subject to internal colonization, not least Black people in Britain themselves. Such arguments mirrored those that postulated that Black people were colonized within the United States, made by the likes of communists during the interwar period and Black Power activist-intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 50 The argument that Black people were colonized within Britain was sometimes simply a useful rhetorical device. But at times such diagnoses of Black people’s situation in Britain were the result of deeper analysis (if not quite as developed as the equivalent theories in the United States) of the continuities in the labour exploitation and social oppression of Black people upon their migration from colony to metropole. Historians need to take such analyses seriously. A recent intervention by leading historians of race in Britain has compellingly argued that ‘the post-war reworking of connected but uneven racial formations in Britain and the colonies [was] part of an ongoing history of colonial extraction and the restructuring of an imperial labour market, not the denouement of empire and the emergence of a post-imperial nation with a “new” race relations problem’.Footnote 51
Such arguments about the place of Black people in Britain are important, because they compel us to think about the relationship between the domestic and the global politics of race. Because the BLF contained an eclectic mix of political philosophies, it is difficult to tease out totally consistent and coherent theories of colonialism and imperialism in the group’s political thought, but we can nevertheless discern some important threads. Colonialism was generally understood within the organization as a method of racially differentiated rule, in which particular groups of labourers were more exploited than others based on putative racial differences, and a set of attitudes and values that asserted the superiority of the culture and history of some racially defined groups over others. Following these logics, the relationship between Britain and its Black residents could certainly be characterized as ‘colonialist’. And if Black people in Britain were colonized (or as long as the activists themselves thought this was the case), then a distinction between domestically oriented anti-racist politics, on the one hand, and internationally oriented anti-colonial politics, on the other hand, was difficult to sustain. From this perspective, the British mainland was simply one front in a global struggle against colonialism and imperialism, and Black people in Britain were part of a global anti-colonial or Third World solidarity. Indeed, the BLF’s pamphlet, The Black Community in Britain (1986), defined ‘the relationship between Britain and Black people as an imperialist one’, and stated that ‘the struggle of Black people does not take place in a vacuum, but in a country and a world divided into the struggle between the oppressed peoples and the capitalists and their supporters’.Footnote 52 The BLF argued that oppressed people across the world shared the same enemies, whether the capitalist-imperialist system as a whole or the particular military and law enforcement personnel who were active in various arenas of insurgency and counterinsurgency.Footnote 53
The BLF nevertheless sometimes implied a disconnect between Black Britain and the rest of the Black world. A fundraising appeal for national liberation movements admonished Black people in Britain for spending their money ‘dancing, drinking, betting, and smoking’, while people in Southern Africa were ‘fighting a bitter war for survival and liberation’.Footnote 54 Indeed, Grassroots made other occasional complaints about the inertia and indifference of Britain’s Black people, many of whom, in the BLF’s eyes, did not sufficiently identify with their ‘brothers and sisters’ in Africa.Footnote 55 While the BLF maintained that Black people in Britain were oppressed and exploited by the same imperialist system that afflicted Africans, they recognized that the effects of colonialism were experienced more sharply in some places than others. These commonalities and differences were teased out in a number of articles in Grassroots, which did not always reach the same conclusion. One article suggested both continuities—such as labour exploitation—and discontinuities—such as legal freedoms—in the Black experience upon migration to Britain. Another warned that the material comfort enjoyed by Black people in Britain might act as an obstacle to solidarity with the ‘poor world’. Yet another argued that Black people in Britain had a fundamentally colonial experience, characterized by the super-exploitation of labour: post-war Black migration to Britain was simply ‘a new, but more sophisticated slave trade’.Footnote 56
Tensions between domestic anti-racism and global anti-colonialism were evident in a letter to Grassroots from a reader named Marlene. In the early hours of 18 January 1981, thirteen young Black people were killed in a house fire in New Cross, London.Footnote 57 Many Black people thought that the fire had been started by White racists, and accused the police of not taking the case seriously. Marlene had wanted to contribute towards the New Cross Fire Fund, but wrote ‘I did not feel it right to send money to Barclays bank when they are already doing us so much harm.’ Grassroots published a positive response, with an explanatory note that ‘Barclays in fact is the largest bank in the apartheid racist state and therefore plays a major role in the oppression and exploitation of our people in Africa.’Footnote 58 Solidarities could not be taken for granted, and activists—even those who maintained that Black people in Britain and the rest of the world were oppressed by the same system—sometimes had to make difficult decisions about which struggles to prioritize.
If the material position of Black people in Britain vis-à-vis those in the (former) colonies was open for debate, there was relative unanimity among Black radicals that Black people in Britain were psychologically and culturally colonized. As Desrie Thomson-George remembered of the BLF’s promotion of African identities: ‘It was wonderful because it meant that I belonged to something else bigger, and something that I could be proud of as well because Africa had a history, that there was a precolonial history, there was a history before slavery.’Footnote 59 BLF members were excited to discover and promote an African diasporic culture. Grassroots published features promoting African names, on the basis that ‘The use of African names is a step forward toward the breaking of the colonial chains and a positive assertion of our African heritage and cultural identity.’Footnote 60 For much the same reason, Grassroots also published articles about traditional African hairstyles, and the BLF ran a series of history classes in 1972.Footnote 61 A number of poems affirming African identities in the diaspora were published in Grassroots, such as ‘They Tell Me I Am Not African’ by Maxine E. Detinaud. These poems highlighted the identities and sense of belonging held by many young Black people in Britain during the 1970s. ‘Britishness’ was rejected in favour of internationally-oriented Black and African identities.Footnote 62 While Grassroots’ current-affairs journalism was generally critical of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, it recognized the burgeoning significance of Rastafarian ideas and symbols to Britain’s Black youth. As such, it regularly published material with a Rastafarian orientation, especially poetry and music reviews.Footnote 63 The newspaper also published articles by and about figures such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Ivan Van Sertima, whose anthropological, archaeological, and historical works were foundational to Afrocentric theories about ancient civilizations.Footnote 64
The BLF often linked the promotion of Black culture and history to concrete political, economic, and social changes. For instance, in January 1980, a four-day ‘Cultural Awakening’ was held in Tavistock Hall in Harlesden, London. The event featured bookstalls, exhibitions of paintings, earthenware and pottery, poetry readings, and fashion shows, and illustrated the Rastafarian influence on such cultural forms. The event culminated with an address from a representative from ZANU—the organization that had recently emerged victorious in the Zimbabwean War of Independence.Footnote 65 It was clear that for many Black activists, African culture and history was not to be celebrated simply for its own sake. As explained in the BLF’s Revolutionary Black Nationalism, again reflecting the influence of Fanon, Mao, and the Black Panthers:
Culture and history are very important to the struggle.
They can serve as the basis for unity, for identity and building a national consciousness. But wearing a dashiki alone or speaking Swahili will not change our oppression. We need the gun as well because power grows out of the barrel of the gun.Footnote 66
The BLF promoted Festac ’77, a month-long celebration of African culture held in Lagos in January and February 1977, and offered guidance for people wishing to travel to Nigeria to experience the event. For the BLF, the event was intimately linked to ongoing global Black liberation struggles.Footnote 67 The Barbados-born filmmaker Menelik Shabazz travelled to Lagos for Festac ’77, and wrote a report for Grassroots upon his return to Britain. Shabazz, in keeping with the BLF’s conception of the relationship between cultural and political change, was ambivalent about the festival. He saw in the various dance performances evidence that Black people ‘all come from the same source’. In a telling inversion of racist tropes about the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean (the Caribbean was sometimes depicted as more ‘civilized’ because of the greater influence of European culture), he remarked that the Trinidad contingent ‘showed the people of Africa that we in the Caribbean still have some culture left’. In Shabazz’s account, the Caribbean’s cultural worth was measured by its non-European influences, such as African survivals and Caribbean innovations. Nevertheless, Shabazz pivoted: ‘While we, the participants, enjoyed the luxuries at Nigerian expense, the ordinary people were still suffering.’Footnote 68 Culture alone was insufficient to decolonize.
Reading Grassroots, therefore, it is difficult not to be struck by the juxtaposition of romantic celebrations of African pasts with an unsentimental ‘scientific socialism’. BLF activists certainly struggled to walk this tightrope. Indeed, Harry Goulbourne, an early member of the Black Unity and Freedom Party, remarked that although history and culture were important for the BUFP, they placed greater emphasis on class struggle and regarded other groups as ‘cultural nationalists’.Footnote 69 The BLF’s founder, Tony Soares—who was born in what was then the Portuguese colony of Goa—withdrew from the organization in 1977, in part because it had become ‘very Afrocentric’. In his words: ‘I was one of the last Asians left there, so my own personal position was getting difficult.’Footnote 70
Practical anti-colonialism and Third Worldism
Black activists in Britain thought deeply about how they could provide concrete support to anti-colonial and Third World struggles. In doing so, Black radicals had to reflect on their own positionality and the particular forms of leverage they could exert. The BLF argued that Black people in Britain—despite also facing exploitation—gained better wages than those in the (neo)colonies and could support revolutionary governments and organizations financially.Footnote 71 Many activists, for example, wished to support the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada, which came to power in 1979 and aimed to achieve economic development and modernization in the face of Western hostility and subversion. The BLF’s Grassroots journal promoted a Grenadian government initiative to issue bonds for the construction of an airport. It advertised that the bonds were on sale at the Grenada High Commission in London.Footnote 72 The Caribbean diaspora in Britain thus became a resource for the financial support of a revolutionary government.
The fiercest Black anti-colonial struggles during the BLF’s existence were those in lusophone Africa (Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea) and the anglophone White-minority-ruled nations of Southern Africa (Namibia, South Africa, and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe).Footnote 73 The BLF’s practical support for these struggles provides an insight into the relationship between intellectual theories about colonialism and capitalism and everyday forms of activism. Many African liberation movements had headquarters in exile in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where BLF leaders such as Ansel Wong travelled.Footnote 74 As he later remembered:
At the time, we were also bringing a lot of aid and supplies through with our luggage to the liberation movements. So, as part of our activity for example, before I left, we asked Black nurses to liberate needles and antibiotics and all the different things for us and plasters and so on, which I filled up with my suitcase and we took back to Dar es Salaam, because that was our contribution to the liberation movements.Footnote 75
Such political action offers a profound insight into the global geographies of race during the second half of the twentieth century: the British National Health Service depended on the labour of nurses drawn from its colonies and former colonies, who then used this position to get medical supplies to African liberation movements.
In 1974, as the Portuguese empire teetered on the brink of collapse, Grassroots reported on South African intrigues with regard to Mozambique. The paper suggested that its readers should donate money, clothes, and medicines to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Committee in Dar es Salaam (either directly or through Grassroots), and even raised the prospect of forming a ‘Black International’ so that Black people in Britain could ‘return to Africa to fight or die for the liberation of the Mother Country’.Footnote 76 Grassroots made a similar appeal after the onset of the Angolan Civil War in late 1975.Footnote 77 The proposed Black International never materialized, but Grassroots continued to call for donations for the liberation movements. In making such appeals, the BLF followed the lead of the African liberation movements. At the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam, attended by several BLF representatives, Hashim I. Mbita, the executive secretary of the OAU Liberation Committee, had appealed for material such as ‘arms, medical equipment, medicine, clothes, footwear, blankets, first aid kits, school equipment and materials, foodstuff, and means of transport’.Footnote 78
In January 1977, the BLF launched its SALSA and SALT appeal (acronyms for Southern African Liberation Support Action and South African Liberation Tax). Under the SALSA campaign, Black people were urged to donate old clothes, shoes, and school books; to volunteer for collection duty; and to organize jumble sales, dances, and other fundraising events. SALT was a ‘voluntary tax’, for which the paper supplied a coupon for contributors to fill out to set up a regular contribution by post, standing order, or collection. A committee of six trustees (composed of three representatives from Grassroots and three from the liberation movements) decided how the donations would be used. Initial donations went to refugee camps in Mozambique.Footnote 79 Updates on the campaigns appeared in Grassroots into the early 1980s as a perennial back-page feature. Initial donations mainly took the form of clothes and books, with only £12 raised in cash (mostly collected by a single activist) during the first month of the appeal.Footnote 80 This perhaps indicates the paper’s readers were in a financial position in which they could donate items but not cash. By the June/July 1977 issue, Grassroots had raised £40 and was ‘happy to say that we have been receiving a steady flow of clothing for our brothers and sisters in the refugee camps in Mozambique’.Footnote 81
The following issue featured a photograph of a Grassroots representative, Brother Hannibal, handing a cheque for £50 to a ZANU representative, and a message of gratitude received from the ZANU headquarters in Maputo.Footnote 82 After a further donation to ZANU, the appeal was directed towards the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), who, Grassroots reported, were in need of ‘books, typewriters, taperecorders etc.’Footnote 83 The appeal raised £66 for SASM, before turning again to ZANU and refugees in Mozambique. Grassroots declared a particular interest in receiving ‘antibiotics such as penicillin, as well as useful medical equipment, such as syringes etc.’Footnote 84 At the climax of the Zimbabwean war, the BLF organized a fundraising dance in Acklam Hall in Notting Hill on 9 November 1979. The event, attended by ZANU representatives, raised £200.Footnote 85 Although the SALSA and SALT appeal would be wound up shortly after Zimbabwean independence, its spirit continued in different forms. For instance, in 1985, the Africa Liberation Committee, of which the BLF was a constituent member, raised donations to buy medical supplies for the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), which was fighting a guerrilla war against the occupying South Africans.Footnote 86
London was a useful base from which to run such appeals. The BLF could draw on the city’s large Black population for fundraising events, while many liberation movements also had representatives in the city. So, for instance, a ZANU representative could go to the Grassroots headquarters in Notting Hill and fill up a van with donated books, clothes, and shoes.Footnote 87 But there were some logistical challenges to the SALSA and SALT appeal. The SASM had no representatives in Britain to collect the £66 donation, and asked instead for donations to be sent directly to a bank in Gaborone.Footnote 88 Furthermore, many Grassroots readers were not in a financial position to make donations. A letter from a reader in Peckham declared: ‘I would like very much to send a contribution to your Salt and Salsa fund but I can’t really afford very much now but I sincerely promise to do so in the near future.’ Another reader apologized ‘for not being frequent with my contributions but lately I been broke’ [sic].Footnote 89 While the Grassroots appeals generally held a tone of confrontational optimism, letters to the paper about the campaign sometimes revealed feelings of helplessness, guilt, and remorse. Nevertheless, the poverty experienced by many Black people in Britain could sometimes be held up as facilitating solidarities. As the British delegation to the Sixth Pan-African Congress declared: ‘We have little in the way of material resources to give to the liberation struggle. We do not apologise for this because this very poverty makes it possible for us to share the imperative of the African masses, that of complete freedom.’Footnote 90 The BLF’s Nkrumah Pepukayi thought that the group offered important moral, not just material, support to African liberation movements.Footnote 91
The presence of the British delegation at the Pan-African Congress illustrates a rerouting of radical anti-colonial circuits. During the early twentieth century, anti-colonial nationalists mingled in the cosmopolitan melange of European capitals. These circuits persisted to some extent, most notably in the case of exiled Southern African revolutionaries. But in addition to this, BLF activists—many of them recent migrants from colony to metropole—found themselves leaving Britain to witness and contribute to the new societies being created in Africa and elsewhere. For instance, the BLF sent delegates to the World Festival of Youth in Cuba in 1978, with one of their number concluding that ‘Cuba is a beautiful expression of what a people can do for themselves once they are left alone, we would do well to follow their example.’Footnote 92 The Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Dar es Salaam in June 1974, was the first Pan-African Congress to be held on African soil; the previous congresses had all taken place in Europe or North America. The BLF housed the steering committee for the British delegation at its headquarters on Golborne Road, and was represented at the congress by Zainab Abbas (of Egyptian heritage), Gerlin Bean (from Jamaica), and Ansel Wong (from Trinidad).Footnote 93 Abbas’s partner was Emil Appolus, a London-based SWAPO representative, who introduced BLF members to various other representatives of Southern African liberation movements, including Herbert Chitepo of ZANU and Marcelino dos Santos of FRELIMO. Abbas and Appolus published a book about the congress upon their return to Britain.Footnote 94 The experience undoubtedly helped to catalyse much of the BLF’s practical anti-colonial and Third Worldist activity.
Alliances could nevertheless be fragile. Appolus was dismissed from SWAPO in 1976, and the February/March 1977 issue of Grassroots accused him and Abbas of having connections to the CIA and the South African government.Footnote 95 The precise circumstances of the BLF’s falling out with Abbas and Appolus are unclear, but it seems that divisions within Namibian politics were essentially transplanted to London—further evidence of the determining role played by global anti-colonialism in Black politics in Britain.
As well as aiding liberation movements, the BLF contributed to development and nation-building projects in the decolonizing world. Post-war anti-colonial leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius Nyerere, argued that true independence hinged on modernist socialist development, which would allow decolonizing nations to provide materially for their citizens and to establish themselves as the equals of the former colonizing powers.Footnote 96 The BLF, in their pursuit of modernization, thus belonged to an important tendency within global anti-colonialism. The group helped to organize a series of travel schemes to Africa during the 1970s. In 1972, the BLF organized a trip to Tanzania for Black people in Britain to work on the Tanzam Railway. Costs were met by fundraising dances and contributions from the participants themselves.Footnote 97 The BLF organized other trips from 1975 onwards, beginning with ‘a pilot project to send black volunteers to workcamps in West Africa’. Three volunteers visited Senegal and Guinea-Bissau to build ‘schoolrooms, dispensaries, clinics and roads in remote African villages’.Footnote 98 The following summer, the Grass Roots West Africa Project was expanded to between fifteen and twenty volunteers and five countries (the Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone).Footnote 99 Other British-based organizations, George Jackson House in Manchester and Harambee in Birmingham, joined the BLF in running a joint scheme from 1977 onwards, with prospective participants in the new Pan-African Exchange Scheme encouraged to write either to Djibril Diallo at the International African Institute in London, or to an address in Handsworth, Birmingham.Footnote 100 It is important to note that not all applicants were selected to participate in these initiatives, and that many of the funds were raised by people who remained in Britain.Footnote 101 The workings of such schemes thus stand as a useful reminder of what can be obscured when we focus only on mobile individuals in the histories of anti-colonial and Third Worldist projects.
Were those who organized and volunteered for these travel schemes any different to the White paternalistic humanitarians so often decried by Black radicals? Grassroots’ language of ‘remote African villages’ certainly seemed to evoke a certain vision of Africa. But in the words of Grassroots, the aim of the West Africa Project was ‘to develop greater links at grass roots level between the people of Africa and young blacks in Britain. Another objective is to promote a better understanding of the real problems of development facing present day African societies.’Footnote 102 Young Black people in Britain—especially those of Caribbean heritage—had to forge a new relationship with Africa based neither on European stereotypes of ‘the Dark Continent’ nor on ‘romanticist concepts’ of Africa. The travel schemes aimed at horizontal, solidaristic relationships founded on experience and history. The BLF thought that the projects would benefit the young Black volunteers, who, having had their culture and history repressed in Britain, would now be able to draw inspiration from Africa.Footnote 103 BLF-sponsored travel schemes thus present an alternative history of humanitarian aid. Histories of humanitarianism in (former) colonies and the Third World usually focus on corporations, missionaries, and non-governmental organizations, whose efforts often aligned with capitalist interests and the maintenance of European moral authority.Footnote 104 The BLF, by contrast, pursued modernist development as a form of anti-colonial solidarity.
Some returning volunteers published their reflections on their travels. The scheme seems to have made some positive impressions, providing volunteers with a great insight into local cultures. Some volunteers praised their hosts’ hospitality and the comradely work environments. But, if anything, the scheme seems to have solidified in the minds of young Black radicals the need for a more meaningful decolonization. As one returnee from Ghana—who had worked in a village where the local police and elites were bribed by a White timber merchant—wrote: ‘Even in Africa hundreds of miles from the racist European, we are still not free.’Footnote 105 Julia Hoyte, who visited Sierra Leone, bemoaned that Sierra Leone was ‘unfortunately’ a capitalist country. She complained that the farming project in which she participated ‘was not very successful as the farmers didn’t see the point of building up land which could be easily taken away’.Footnote 106 Such experiences no doubt reinforced the BLF’s ideas about neocolonialism.
Black activist travel could lead to disillusionment as much as inspiration. In the January 1978 issue of Grassroots, Winston Williams reported on his visit to Tanzania the previous summer. This was not Ghana or Sierra Leone, but a country thought to be at the forefront of the socialist transformation of Africa. Nyerere—Tanzania’s president—and his ujamaa policies were widely celebrated in Black radical circles. As Williams wrote:
For any revolutionary Pan-Africanist a visit to Tanzania can only really be a chance to see first hand, how ujamaa is working in Tanzania. It was, with all that I had heard of ujamaa and socialist development in Tanzania pounding in my head, that I arrived there at the end of June. For the next three months I lived in Dar-es-Salaam, capital of Tanzania, and at the end of it I felt as if I had been through an experience of great significance, for in a way many of my old ideas had been shaken up, and new ones had taken root in their place.Footnote 107
Williams was struck by the friendliness and hospitality of the people, which reaffirmed his belief that ‘the African people really are one people’. But he was disappointed to find that Chama Cha Mapinduzi (the ruling party) ‘didn’t really seem to attempt to politicise or mobilise the people, or even to provide sessions for discussing political questions together’. Instead, Tanzanians were more likely to turn to what Williams regarded as religious superstition to make sense of the world. Moreover, he found Tanzania to be an extremely corrupt society, where, although major banks and industries were owned by the state, ‘the people who administer these enterprises have become like a new bourgeoisie’. Williams concluded that Tanzania was not a ‘revolutionary country’, but a ‘progressive country following social democratic policies’. He recognized some positive features of Tanzanian society, but looked forward to the day ‘when the working people of Africa can take power fully and completely’.Footnote 108 Gerlin Bean, a sometime BLF member, was similarly disappointed by the lack of transformation she found while living in Zimbabwe during the 1980s.Footnote 109
Another avenue of campaigning in Britain was for the release of political prisoners in colonies and neocolonies. Most notably, the arrest, imprisonment and sentencing to death of Desmond Trotter in Dominica during the 1970s became a cause célèbre for Britain’s Black activists. Dominica, a small island in the Caribbean, was at the time of Trotter’s arrest an associated state of the United Kingdom. In February 1974, an American tourist named John Jirasek was killed on the island. Trotter, a 21-year-old man associated with the radical Movement for a New Dominica, was arrested and tried for murder alongside another young activist, Roy Mason. Mason was found not guilty, but Trotter was convicted and sentenced to death. (Trotter’s death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and he was eventually released in 1979.)
The British-based Defence Committee for Political Prisoners in Dominica issued a press statement on 24 June 1974, which was published in Grassroots. The statement identified the upcoming trials of Trotter and Mason as politically motivated, an attempt of a ‘neo-colonialist regime’ to repress radical movements that opposed ‘imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation’.Footnote 110 The committee issued another statement the following day, asking for readers to help by sending financial contributions to the New York-based Dominicans in Support of Progress, messages of protest to the Dominican government, letters to the editors of Dominican newspapers, and statements of solidarity with the Movement for a New Dominica.Footnote 111 In December 1974, the London-based Free Desmond Trotter Campaign Committee, of which the Trinidadian activist Altheia Jones-Lecointe was secretary, organized a meeting at the Metro Club in Notting Hill to raise support for Trotter. The committee identified Trotter as a ‘convenient scapegoat’, and issued an appeal for cash donations for his defence campaign.Footnote 112 The committee gained the sponsorship of five MPs, held weekly Friday evening pickets of the Eastern Caribbean High Commission, and raised £270 for Trotter’s trial and appeal.Footnote 113 The Free Desmond Trotter Campaign worked closely with the umbrella anti-colonial pressure group, Liberation, and continued to press for Trotter’s release from prison after his reprieve from the death sentence.Footnote 114
Grassroots published a number of features in defence of Trotter, including a poem by Imruh Caesar, which concluded with the rallying call ‘De future a fe we!’Footnote 115 It also published letters from Trotter in prison, in which he offered an analysis of his and Dominica’s situation that fused Rastafarian and socialist influences—discussing, for instance, both ‘the reign of Babylon’ and the need for the ‘scientific’ utilization of land ‘considering all our needs’.Footnote 116 After Trotter’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, a Grassroots editorial opined: ‘That Trotter lives is hardly a signal for support of his case to cease; on the contrary, it is a signal that support should be conducted with greater energy.’ It was unsurprising that a jury of property-owners had found Trotter guilty, as middle-class West Indians ‘still subscribe[d] to the view that the white man’s word is gospel’ and wished to ‘suppress the so-called “rebellious” section of society’.Footnote 117
Conclusion
The Black Liberation Front did not come to a dramatic end. As one member put it, the organization ‘kind of faded away, rather than any huge explosion. I think people just started to move on.’Footnote 118 By the time the BLF ceased to exist in 1993, both political Blackness in Britain and transnational Third Worldism had significantly declined as forces. The precise reasons for this decline remain contested. Third Worldism is variously said to have suffered at the hands of neoliberal economics, the rise of political Islam, and politicians’ loyalties to their own nation-states, or some combination of the above. The end of the Cold War further compounded the sense for many activists and commentators that alternatives to the capitalist world-system were increasingly out of reach.Footnote 119
These visions and struggles for a different kind of world—even if they remain unfulfilled—are nevertheless crucial to understanding the nature of Black activism in Britain. While the anti-colonial sensibilities, ideologies, and aesthetics of post-war Black radical politics in Britain have been examined by historians, this article has, through a case study of the BLF, also demonstrated the significance of practical anti-colonial and Third World solidarities to Black activism in Britain. The two were, of course, interlinked: anti-colonial ideas inspired anti-colonial activism, the experience of which fed back into the BLF’s ideas about how freedom could be attained and what it should look like. BLF activists recognized that they occupied a different position to their comrades in the (former) colonies within the global capitalist-imperialist system, but nevertheless envisaged their anti-colonial activism as a form of horizontal solidarity, premised on shared experiences of racialized oppression and exploitation that linked the local and the global.
Historians of decolonization must therefore attend to how twentieth-century geographies of race and migration created the conditions for solidarities and exchanges that do not fit within a metropole–colony binary. Moreover, global historians must remain alert to how the transnational and the global were experienced and shaped by people who remained stationary. Some of the activists discussed in this article were mobile, border-crossing individuals. The importance of human movement to the connected histories of decolonization should not be underestimated. The delegates to the Sixth Pan-African Congress and the volunteers on the Pan-African Exchange Scheme were profoundly changed by such experiences. But they were not the only activists who contributed to anti-colonial struggles and Third World projects beyond Britain’s shores. Those women and men who raised funds for liberation movements, who campaigned for the release of political prisoners, who ‘liberated’ needles and antibiotics from hospitals, were also a part of transnational movements, even if they remained in London. Anti-colonialism and Third Worldism were lived, material realities for many Black Londoners, whether experienced in the hard graft of an exchange scheme, in the selection of clothes and books to donate to liberation struggles, or in the throng of a protest or fundraising dance.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Benjamin Bland, Liam Liburd, Rochelle Rowe, and Sam Wetherell for their helpful feedback on a draft version of this article. Anonymous peer reviewers and the journal editor Elisabeth Leake offered thoughtful and constructive comments that helped sharpen the article’s arguments and interventions. Finally, the author thanks archivists at the Black Cultural Archives and the George Padmore Institute for their assistance, and Lana Crowe for accessing some archival material on his behalf.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Theo Williams is a lecturer in social history at the University of Glasgow. He works on the histories of race, empire, and political radicalism. He is the author of Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (Verso, 2022) and co-editor of Anti-Racism in Britain: Traditions, Histories and Trajectories, c.1880–Present (Manchester University Press, 2024).
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