the focus onto a specific urban space, the aim is to foreground the significance of those whom Michel de Certeau described as the “ordinary practitioners of the city.”26 In part, this is a story of how the black practitioners of Handsworth sought to negotiate the practical consequences of the racialized anxieties of a particular postcolonial moment. It is also a study that encapsulates the political campaigns that were fought within black Handsworth to redress the damaging inequalities that existed in areas such as housing and education, as well as the emergence of reappropriated versions of “blackness” that were used as the basis for cultural and political movements. Finally, it represents an examination of a more opaque habitus, of what Raymond Williams characterized as the “impulses, restraints [and] tones” of everyday life.27 This book is about the experience of both living and articulating race in a particular locale: politically, culturally, and in everyday practices and patterns of sociability. In black Handsworth, I argue, this was structured by the routes, ideas, and “open horizons” that constituted the diasporic imaginary. And most significant of all was that this sensibility was being played out on Hamstead Road, Villa Road, Lozells Road, and countless other nondescript, often impoverished inner-city topographies across the country. Away from the political mobilization of what has been termed the “Powellian legacy of guilt-free British nationalism,” and contrary to Britain’s enduring inability to come to terms with the legacies of its imperial past, the black globality was restructuring Handsworth and similar localities across the country. In so doing, the diasporan consciousness was being established as a core presence in the landscapes of postcolonial Britain.28
The period under consideration constitutes what might be understood as a “long” 1980s that reaches back to encompass much of the previous decade. Certainly the mugging panic that erupted in late 1972 not only contributed to a climate in which the politics of Thatcherism was eventually able to thrive. More specifically, it prepared the ground for the heightened anxiety over the black inner city that crystallized around the disturbances of the 1980s. If this discourse had “entirely real” consequences for Britain’s black population in terms of the establishment of a terrain that black people had to occupy, black communities were in this period also able to draw on an expanded range of resources with which to negotiate it.29 This was symbolized most spectacularly by the arrival from Jamaica of Rastafarian reggae music, which had begun to make serious inroads into international markets in the early 1970s. In Britain this helped stimulate the birth of a domestic reggae scene and a cultural revival of a Pan-Africanist imaginary that popularized, often in loose, discursive terms, the political platforms and ideologies that during the interwar period had established London as a locus of Pan-African organization. And there are other factors that mark the period from the early 1970s to the later 1980s as a distinctive conjuncture. By this time, for example, many of the social clubs, churches, and other spaces that had often initially been set up as a first line of defense against the aggressive workings of the British color bar had begun to function as increasingly well-embedded institutions in areas like Handsworth, and as important facilitators of everyday sociability. By 1978 more than half of the black population of Handsworth owned their own homes, and a discernible cohort of young people—who had often been moved to Britain as infants in order to preempt the 1962 introduction of strict immigration controls—were beginning to reach school-leaving age.30 In many ways, these themes are testaments to a significant shift having taken place among the black population, as those who had arrived in Britain as immigrants increasingly recognized themselves as settlers, rather than sojourners, and their children began to reach political maturity. With the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act, which finally outlawed indirect discrimination in employment, education, and elsewhere, even the government had seemingly recognized the dramatic changes taking place within the “colored population,” a growing proportion of which now constituted people born in Britain.31 The consequences of these changes were only beginning to become clear in the context of the long 1980s.
By the 1990s a different atmosphere had seemingly emerged. The racialized moral panics continued, along with the police harassment of black communities and racial violence, of which the 1993 murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London is just one shocking example. But this was played out in the wider context of Britain’s multicultural drift: the increasing prominence, particularly in the sphere of popular culture, of black public figures such as the newscaster Trevor McDonald and the footballer Paul Ince, who in the same year as Lawrence’s murder became the first black player to captain the English national team. These examples had little to do with government policy, but they were indicative of an increasing, organic sense of familiarity with diversity in Britain and a recognition—in many cases a begrudging one—that this constituted a “natural and inevitable part of the ‘scene.’”32 By the end of the twentieth century, the official inquiry into the police’s handling of the Lawrence murder had forced civil society into a belated recognition of the endemic problem of institutional racism, while the cultural reach of reggae and Rastafarianism in black communities had long since been overtaken by African American hip-hop and contemporary rhythm and blues (R & B).33 It is an earlier diasporic formation that concerns this study, as well as its concurrent emphasis on the activities of the Friday night drinker, attendees at a Saturday evening reggae event, and the Sunday morning worshipper. In focusing on the long 1980s, this book takes the story of the black globality in Britain beyond the context of high imperialism that has hitherto largely preoccupied historians.34 In so doing, it unearths a lived experience that testifies to the shifting landscapes of postcolonial Britain.
The African village that in 1981 became a feature of the Handsworth landscape was the brainchild of Bob Ramdhanie, a Trinidad-born probation worker who had run the Handsworth Cultural Centre, to which the village was attached, since its opening three years earlier. Based on one of the area’s busy thoroughfares, which was made up of an increasingly dilapidated Victorian housing stock, to Ramdhanie was a space that could offer creative channels for black youth to navigate their experiences in inner-city Birmingham by locating them within a historical, transnational framework that encompassed the black globality. His “village” was in some ways an inversion of the exhibitions that were commonly held in Britain and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century, in which the ethnological ideologies of empire were communicated to Western audiences through displays of colonial subjects and installations offering supposedly authentic re-creations of native villages and exotic landscapes.35 Ramdhanie’s Handsworth village, in contrast, was aimed at the children of colonial immigrants and envisaged as just one element in a wider initiative that would enable his constituents to express themselves through a Pan-Africanist emphasis on “roots” culture, whether through music, dance, or other art forms. It was to be a space, Ramdhanie explained, where the “people who come and use our Centre, who may be in search of a cultural identity” would have something “more tangible”: a physical nexus within Handsworth’s urban geography.36
With its thatched huts and faux crocodile, the village was undoubtedly unconventional. But it spoke to a much more pervasive ethos in Handsworth, one that resonated on its streets, in the work of its artists and musicians, in the ideologies of its political organizations, and inside its pubs and social clubs. When in February 1965 Malcolm X visited the region, for example, a matter of weeks before his assassination in New York City, his presence acted as a boon to moves already afoot to develop British and regional iterations of Black Power. When eight years later Bob Marley and the Wailers released Catch a Fire, the album’s Rastafarianism-inspired oeuvre helped make African iconography and styles an unmistakable feature of the Handsworth locale.37 By the mid-1980s, the extent to which black Handsworth was shaped by a particular reading of the black globality was, one observer reflected of a visit to the area, emphasized by the colors of the flags and pendants that hung among the cafés and takeout joints on Lozells Road and Soho Road, Handsworth’s main shopping streets, and from the rearview mirrors of its cars. These colors were the Jamaican yellow, green, and black, alongside the national colors of Trinidad and other Caribbean islands; the red, gold, and green of Ethiopia, the focus of Rastafarian and Pan-Africanist thought; and the red, green, and black associated with Marcus Garvey’s historic brand of black nationalism.38 It is this specifically African Caribbean formation that this book seeks to address.
