The Jamaican 1970s and Its Influence on the Making of Black Britain by Eddie Chambers

THE JAMAICAN 1970S AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE MAKING OF BLACK BRITAIN

EDDIE CHAMBERS

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Small Axe, Volume 23, Number 1

DATE March 2019

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The Jamaican 1970s and Its Influence on the Making of Black

Britain

Small Axe, Volume 23, Number 1, March 2019 (No. 58), pp. 134-149 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/717717

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Eddie Chambers

The Jamaican 1970s and Its Influence on the Making of Black Britain

Eddie Chambers

While this essay is a contribution to a fascinating and timely conversation about Jamaica and the 1970s, I take the view that a decade is not just a ten-year period. The 1970s, in my opinion, extended well into the 1980s, when we consider the remarkable things that we come to associate with the 1970s. In this regard, the 1970s can more reliably be seen as something like a fifteen-year period, reaching a noticeable juncture in the mid-1980s. In the same way we can think of the 1950s ending in the early to mid-1960s, and the 1960s ending in the early to mid-1970s, we can, I believe, think of the 1970s as ending in the early to mid-1980s, having started, I would suggest, in the late 1960s.

The 1970s was the decade that witnessed the definitive creation of black Britain, resulting in large part from the coming of age of the children of the Windrush Generation of Caribbean migrants (coming to Britain between the late 1940s and the early 1960s).1 These youngsters

1 The MV Empire Windrush was a seagoing vessel whose most famous journey was carrying nearly five hundred Caribbean migrants, many of them Jamaican, to the United Kingdom in 1948. The ship docked in Essex and heralded the beginning of a decade and a half or so of Caribbean migration to Britain. In time, this pioneering body of Caribbean migrants came to be referred to as “the Windrush Generation.” In the spring of 2018, the Windrush Generation became much more widely known in Britain when the “Windrush scandal” occurred. It emerged that significant numbers of the Windrush Generation who had been born in, had been brought up in, or had arrived in the United Kingdom as British citizens were, decades later, wrongly detained, denied legal rights, deported, or threatened with deportation as a result of actions initiated by the Home Office. In truth, such discriminatory treatment was, historically, a far-from-uncommon experience for Caribbean migrants, but the racism and hostility routinely meted out to the Windrush Generation seemed to have taken on official

small axe 58 • March 2019 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-7374502 © Small Axe, Inc.

came of age during a decade that was, in equal measure, as fascinating as it was fractious. A number of factors contributing to a heightened sense of racial identity among young black Britons, factors that included newly embraced narratives of history, slavery, and anticolonialism (particularly antiapartheid). In very large part, it was the large-scale embrace of Rastafari by numbers of black British youth that facilitated this racial consciousness. With many migrants professing strong Christian faith, their children, when moving away from the organized religion of their parents, retained crucial fire-and-brimstone aspects of Christianity, making them fit for purpose through the fascinating belief system of Rastafari. As Paul Gilroy notes, “Soul and reggae still reveal the primary ethical and semantic influence of the Bible on new world black cultures.”2 Having emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s, few could have predicted that within four decades, Rastafari would have gripped black Britain, a demographic that found common cause with the Jamaican sufferer. This essay seeks to reflect on the influence of 1970s Jamaica on a particular section of the African diaspora. In so doing, I will utilize examples of British reggae music, namely, the music of Misty in Roots, collaborations between Dennis Brown and Aswad and between Johnny Osbourne and Aswad, a photograph by Vanley Burke, and the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson (with a citation from the poet Frederick Williams). Several occurrences and episodes, from postwar immigration itself through to “the New Cross Massacre” and episodes of rioting, are also considered in appraising this period of intense racial solidarity.

It is not difficult to summarize these matters as a compelling, fascinating mutation of the African diaspora, but certain complexities require us, or enable us, to go beyond this. In comprehending Jamaica’s influence on the making of black Britain, we see what is in effect the creation of a second diaspora, as a distinct transmutation of that which was a major contributory factor in the making of the African diaspora—the transatlantic slave trade and the making over of the New World as parts of the world primarily peopled by those of African origin. To much the same degrees to which linkages between the African continent and peoples of the diaspora are fractured, fractious, and contested, linkages between the Caribbean manifestation of the African diaspora and British people of Caribbean descent are fractured, fractious, and contested. But the making of black Britain could not have taken place without a complex embracing of strands of Jamaican culture. As much as we need to accept that within the influence of Rastafari on black Britain Jamaica was in no way regarded as a land of return (that status was conferred on the African continent), we need to accept that the hyperconsciousness of black Britain in the 1970s came about as a consequence of decidedly British circumstances.

dimensions. This was a political scandal, in that it was regarded by significant sections of the British press and populace as morally and legally wrong, causing general public outrage and bringing shame on the government. The furor caused the resignation of the then home secretary, Amber Rudd.

2 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 203.

The black population of Britain (which is to say, the proportion of the population that is of African descent) is, in relation to the overall population, small (while we might be cautious about figures, the black Caribbean and African proportion of the population is something in the region of 3 percent).3 Interestingly, John La Rose regarded black Britons as having turned their supposed “minority” status on its head by way of becoming some sort of cultural/political majority because of black Britain’s engagement and empathy with assorted struggles in the international arena:

In Britain, even today, the blacks behave as though they are a majority after a presence of thirty years in Britain where they are in fact a minority, because the sense of majority consciousness and its relationship to the black struggles in the world at the time of the Vietnam struggles, the black power struggles, African struggles for independence, still remains rooted in its consciousness and in its past. This makes it very different and carries with it a power which is unusual.4

The children of Caribbean migrants came of age during the 1970s and found themselves facing challenges on multiple fronts. While factors such as police harassment, discrimination, societal racism, unemployment, and educational underachievement contributed to a certain sense of alienation experienced by large numbers of black British youngsters, perhaps the most formidable challenge they faced was the insistent questioning of their Britishness. Born or brought up in Britain they may have been, but the message that they were not British, in any unfettered sense of the term, was telegraphed loud and clear, far and wide.

Emerging into visibility in the 1970s, a far-right political party known as the National Front gained widespread popularity with its calls to stop immigration and start repatriation. Black immigration, in significant numbers, had ceased in the early 1960s, but the National Front’s mantra “If they’re black, send them back!” struck a chord with racist and xenophobic elements of British society as well as with politicians in the main political parties. The 1970s brought with it seemingly irrefutable proof that to be black and to be British were apparently irreconcilable and mutually exclusive states of being. The African American journalist William Raspberry penned a series of articles on black people in Britain for the British newspaper Observer. The most memorable of these features was the first one, published on 5 September 1976 and titled “Young, Bitter, and Black.” The piece, as with similar texts, chronicled the woes and frustrations of a generation grappling with assorted manifestations of alienation. “Young, Bitter, and Black” concluded with the pithy, dispiriting summation that for many black youth, “England [was]n’t home.”5

3 In 2011, among the 56 million residents in England and Wales, 86 percent were white, 8 percent were Asian/Asian British, and 3 percent were black/African/Caribbean/black British. See Office of National Statistics, “2011 Census Analysis: Ethnicity and Religion of the Non-UK Born Population in England and Wales,” 18 June 2015, www.ons.gov.uk /peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/articles/2011censusanalysisethnicityandreligionofthenonukborn populationinenglandandwales/2015-06-18.

4 John La Rose, The New Cross Massacre Story: Interviews with John La Rose (London: Alliance of the Black Parents Movement, Black Youth Movement, and the Race Today Collective, 1984), 21.

5 William Raspberry, “Young, Bitter, and Black,” Observer (London), 5 September 1976, 19. The feature looked into the fractious existence of the newly emerging demographic of black Britain, particularly young black males.

But if England wasn’t home, where was? Finding themselves strangers in a strange land, black British youth enacted a range of extraordinary strategies in attempts to create, or shore up, a viable, robust, and dynamic sense of identity. Black youth, from the black neighborhoods of cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, and London, reached out to find common cause with the African American struggle for civil rights and Black Power; reached out to support the continent of Africa, in particular those suffering under the brutal antiblack bastions of white power in Southern Africa, Rhodesia, and South Africa; and reached out to embrace the countercultural belief system of Rastafari. Rastafari in particular became a means by which alienated black youth in Britain could fashion new forms of identity. Jamaica (though in no way, as previously mentioned, cast as a land of return or promise) became central to these new expressions of identity, with black youth finding common cause especially with the Jamaican sufferer. There was a distinct creative and intellectual agility at work in the formulation of this new identity, as could be evidenced, for example, in black Britain’s attitude toward the poor-quality housing that was seemingly reserved for it. In Britain, the tower block had emerged as the dumping ground of choice for local councils wishing to deal with their housing “problems.” But black youth saw these tower blocks as having an equivalence to the decidedly ground-level living conditions of the poorest elements of Jamaican society. Rastafari offered itself as a compelling template in all sorts of ways, though it was perhaps Rastafari’s embrace of the sufferer that most struck a chord with elements of black Britain. The sufferers—those poorest, most despised, darker-skinned black people of Jamaica—were among those most convinced by, and most attracted to, Rastafari.

Within these considerations, due regard must be given to the importance of reggae music—both what came from Jamaica and what was produced in Britain. A number of writers, among them Paul Gilroy, have detailed various aspects of the cultural, social, economic, and political dimensions of reggae, both in Jamaica and internationally, including, of course, Britain, and the many ways the music can be listened to and mined for its cogent yet complex messages.6 Of great relevance in this regard is an essay by William “Lez” Henry, “Reggae, Rasta, and the Role of the Deejay in the Black British Experience,” which explores the role of Reggae music and Rastafari in the creation of alternative public arenas that served as spaces of resistance and sites of transcendental edification in post-war Britain. The approach suggests that wherever there were significant African Caribbean communities in the UK, Sound System deejays used the Reggae dancehall arena as an alternate site of learning. Significantly it was the practised use of “oral skills” in Creolised languages, couched in Rastafarian and Garveyite sensibilities, that underpinned and ensured the perpetuation of these politically driven, vernacular cultures. It is argued that expressive musical cultures opened access to an alternative world view which, in turn, provided a space where the African diaspora thought themselves into being in a more conscious manner than has been previously recognised. The suggestion is that black music often spoke to the lived experiences of the disenfranchised in

6 See for example, Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, esp. chap. 5, “Diaspora, Utopia, and the Critique of Capitalism.”

a racist society, and thus furnished a site for various types of inter/intra-cultural exchanges to take place, enabling them to debate and discuss their own “problem” status in a language owned and controlled by them. At no point was this more apparent than during the perceived collapse of the post-war “consensus” in the 1970s and early 1980s.7

It is with contexts such as these that we can consider the songs of Misty in Roots, one of a number of black British reggae groups to emerge in the 1970s that consistently presented, through their music, messages of redemption for the righteous and condemnation for the unrighteous. One of several songs by Misty in Roots to emphasize a commonality of living conditions between the hapless British citizen, corralled into living in tower blocks, and the poverty-stricken Jamaican sufferer was “Food, Clothes, and Shelter”:

Whether living in skyscraper, or even sleeping under cellar, the cry is for Jah-Jah, break the yoke of the oppressor.8

Black British reggae music of the 1970s was very much centered on “sufferation”—that is, the state of suffering that characterized the existence of so many black people the world over, though perhaps locating Jamaica as an epicenter of the notion. One of the major influences of Rastafari in Britain was to assert that black people in Britain, in their own ways, were as economically challenged as the ghetto sufferers of Jamaica or as the black South Africans buckling under the weight of apartheid. Though Rastafari scorned organized religion and its collusion with the state and crony politicians, it believed that only through its followers’ own efforts and the intervention of the Almighty could the world’s poor and needy be rescued and saved. With its distinct messianic messages, another song by Misty in Roots, “Poor and Needy,” looked to only one source for salvation, even as it seemed for all the world that the closing decades of the twentieth century were the biblical last days:

Jah, Jah

Jah, Jah

Jah

Deliver the poor and needy, out of the hands of the wicked.

Deliver the poor and needy, out of the hands of the wicked.9

Though black British reggae had in so many ways taken its cue from Jamaican reggae, there were important differences between the two that served to make British reggae a

7 William “Lez” Henry, abstract for “Reggae, Rasta, and the Role of the Deejay in the Black British Experience,” in “Youth Culture, Popular Music, and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post-war Britain,” special issue, Contemporary British History 26, no. 3 (2012): 355–73. Other notable texts include Chris Potash, Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub (London: Books with Attitude, 1997); Christopher Partridge, Dub in Babylon: Understanding the Evolution and Significance of Dub Reggae in Jamaica and Britain from King Tubby to Post-punk, Studies in Popular Music (Sheffield: Equinox, 2010); Chuck Foster, Roots Rock Reggae: The Oral History of Reggae Music from Ska to Dancehall (New York: Billboard, 1999); and Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King (London: Viking, 2000).

8 Misty in Roots, “Food, Clothes, and Shelter,” written by Delbert “Ngoni” McKay, Musi-O-Tunya (People Unite, 1985).

9 Misty in Roots, “Poor and Needy,” written by Walford “Poco” Tyson (People Unite, 1983).

foundational dimension of black British identity during the 1970s. One of the most important difference was that young black musicians in London, Birmingham, and other cities were the children of migrants from all across the English-speaking Caribbean and not just Jamaica. For example, Aswad’s Drummie Zeb and Brinsley Forde were of Grenadian and Guyanese parentage, respectively, though people tended to assume British reggae singers and musicians to be Jamaican because of the way they spoke and sang. In British reggae artists’ speech patterns and of course in their music, there were distinct articulations of Jamaican elements, but a pronounced London Pan-Caribbeanness characterized black British reggae of the 1970s and beyond. This in turn led to a sense of blackness among black British youth that was particularly strong, sophisticated, and fit for purpose, even as it contrasted with their parents’ generation, who were said to lack “a single cohesive culture which could bind them together.”10

In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Caribbean migrants had perceived Britain—the “Mother Country”—as a land of promise, a Promised Land of near-biblical proportions in which they could fulfil their hopes and dreams. Within a generation, many of the children of these migrants were aspiring to an altogether different Promised Land—this one, of actual biblical proportions. As much as Rastafari created notional and actual means by which its adherents could survive and live righteous lives in Babylon, it also created a tangible and attractive idea of a Promised Land straight out of the Old Testament, one in which Africa was radically and dramatically recast. Instead of the continent of misery, warfare, and wretchedness beloved of the mainstream media, Africa was recast as a solution to black people’s woes—the land to which black people should “return” to fulfil their hopes and aspirations of a life free from degradation and thwarted ambition. And not just Africa as a continent, but specifically, or particularly, Ethiopia itself, the seat of the Emperor Haile Selassie, the cornerstone of Rastafari. Jamaica thus existed as a complex space from which black Britons drew much inspiration, while falling considerably short of regarding it as any sort of land of return.

During the 1970s, London emerged as a destination of choice for Jamaica’s reggae singers and musicians keen to travel, tour, collaborate, and, in the case of a figure such as Bob Marley, seek exile. With the city’s particularly robust and energetic black presence, it was inevitable that dynamic music, oriented toward strident diasporic understandings, would emerge from London. As Rosanna Masiola and Renato Tomei note,

The ’70s and the ’80s were years of an unheralded explosion of reggae, and Marley was universal and global in sound, music, and message. Paul Gilroy tagged it “anti-politics and universal sufferation” and Rastafarianism. . . .

London was the first international stage for Bob Marley and reggae music outside Jamaica. From London it expanded into other Western European countries. Though Marley was acclaimed in Italy and Sweden and found mass favour in western universities, social and ethnic barriers still persisted. Marley, however, had an extra appeal as being more “European”

10 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black,161.

than any U.S. international star because of Jamaican Britain and the 200,000 Jamaicans that had migrated to Britain. This is something very special that Afro-American performers did not have. As Lloyd Bradley notes in his book, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital, the new generation of black Britons of the 1970s were “exposed to cultural influences ranging across a broad cross-colonial spectrum, and of course to the U.S. as well, via TV, this generation was characterized by a huge internal diversity. Jamaican music was especially prominent in the mix, and formed the basis of the first totally British black music.”11

Jamaican reggae singer Dennis Brown joined forces with London reggae band Aswad in the popular song “Promised Land.” The pairing of Dennis Brown and Aswad was typical of the sorts of interplay between Jamaican artists and their black British counterparts. London became, as mentioned, a veritable home away from home for a significant number of Jamaica’s singers and musicians. Perhaps most memorable in this regard was Marley’s sojourn in London in the mid-1970s, following the attempt on his life in Kingston. It was in London that one of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ finest albums, Exodus, was recorded and released in 1977.

Returning to “Promised Land,” the song is full of developed, articulate, and compelling references not only to Ethiopia as a land of return, a land of promise, but also to other countries in that northeastern part of Africa. By definition, this framing emerged from a decidedly diasporic rather than continental context. Consider as examples the following informative, educational references to which the song makes mention:

Livity—a word used by Rastafarians to refer to righteous living

Shashamane—the portion of land in Ethiopia given to the black people of the world, in return for their support of Ethiopia during its invasion by fascist Italian forces in the 1930s; the land was given by the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie

Asmara—the capital city of Eritrea

Addis Ababa—the capital of Ethiopia

Cairo—the capital of Egypt

“The King” (as in “riding on the King’s Highway”)—Emperor Haile Selassie

Moving from music to the visual arts, no single image encapsulated the widespread appeal of Rastafari to black British youth better than a particular photograph taken by Jamaica-born, Birmingham-based photographer Vanley Burke.12 One of Burke’s most celebrated photographs was of a multitude of people, taken in Handsworth Park, Birmingham, at an Africa Liberation Day rally in the late 1970s (see fig. 1). Perhaps counterintuitively, Burke has made the focus of the photograph not the speechmakers addressing the multitude but the multitude

11 Rosanna Masiola and Renato Tomei, “Language Redemption: Bob Marley in Translation,” Descriptions, Translations, and the Caribbean: From Fruits to Rastafarians (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Springer International, 2016), 114. Masiola and Tomei quote Paul Gilroy, “Could You Be Loved? Bob Marley, Anti‐politics, and Universal Sufferation,” Critical Quarterly 47 (2005): 226 (italics theirs), and Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), 212; as for Marley being “more ‘European,’ ” Masiola and Tomei cite Mark Sebba, London Jamaican: Language System in Interaction (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993).

12 Burke was born in St. Thomas, Jamaica, in 1951, and came to the United Kingdom in 1965. His interest in photography apparently began when he received, for his tenth birthday, a Kodak “Box Brownie” 127 camera.

itself. In this sense, though the focus of the gathered throng’s attention is located somewhere beyond, or outside, the right side of the image, Burke chose to make the attentive multitude the subject of his picture. Within this image, Burke produced a compelling and remarkably cogent document of a particularly culturally and politically charged moment in the history of black Britain. The majestic, panoramic photograph effortlessly evokes Bob Marley’s sentiment, expressed in his challenge and admonition to the black people of the world to “wake up and live.”13 Within the song of that title, Marley declares, as Burke’s photograph does, “We’re more than sand on the seashore, / We’re more than numbers.” The mass of “blessed youth” in the photograph are indeed “more than numbers,” and they nearly all—to a man, to a woman—betray about themselves or their person some evidence of the influence of Rastafari. Dreadlocks abound, as do tams, wraps, and numerous other signs of Rasta. As with all great photographs of large numbers of people assembled together, we see not so much a crowd as a multitude, a group of individuals finding common cause with one another. This was testament to the influence of Rastafari on young black Britains.

In the far reaches of Burke’s photograph, at the edge of the multitude, one can see the massive speaker boxes of the sound system, there to entertain the gathering. The speakers have fallen silent while speechmakers address the gathering; but within time, shortly after the

13

Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Wake Up and Live,” written by Anthony “Sangie” Davis and Bob Marley, Survival (Island Records, 1979).

Figure 1. Vanley Burke, Africa Liberation Day rally, Handsworth Park, Handsworth Birmingham, 1977. Used by kind permission of Vanley Burke

© Vanley Burke

photograph was taken, one imagines, the speaker boxes will again be pumping out the potent, infectious, righteous, judgmental brand of roots and culture message-laden reggae music that was popular at the time. Intriguingly, given that everyone depicted in the photograph is British by birth, upbringing, or location, Burke’s photograph presents us with an Inglan story, an Inglan history, and was very much an encapsulation of Paul Gilroy’s observation that Rastafari’s “influence increased steadily in Britain between 1970 and 1981 and its Pan-African, Ethiopianist ideology [could] be considered to have formed the core of a mass movement in this country during the mid 1970s.”14

For the influence of the Jamaican 1970s on black Britain, we need to also look at the fascinating manifestation of language in the cultural evolution of black Britain. Mid-1970s Britain and Jamaica saw the emergence of a new group of poets who unashamedly embraced patwa as a foundational aspect of their poetry. In so doing, these poets, spearheaded in Britain by Linton Kwesi Johnson, elevated the supposedly rough speech of Jamaican peasants to the status of preeminent countercultural articulation. Within the United States, poetry had emerged as one of the foundational art forms of the Black Arts movement of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, and many poets declared their art form to be as relevant to black people as any other, boldly challenging the association of poetry with rarefied, ivory-tower environments—an association that effectively alienated poorer and working-class people from the art form. And it was during this mid-1960s to mid-1970s period that a fearless, devastatingly articulate poet of the people, Gil Scott-Heron, emerged. Here was a poet who not only spoke the people’s language but saw, and condemned, the wider society for its chronic dysfunctionality, a state of being the society itself seemed blind to. Heralding the emergence of another fearless, devastatingly articulate poet of the people, the cover of British music magazine sounds of 2 September 1978 carried a full-page photograph of Linton Kwesi Johnson (hereafter referred to by his moniker, LKJ), a British poet of Jamaican origin.15 Brixton-based LKJ was known locally as “Poet,” and the band with which he sometimes performed was known as “the Roots.” Making a subtle play on these names, the feature on LKJ was titled “Poet of the Roots.”

The cover photograph, taken by another Jamaican-born photographer, Dennis Morris, trailed this substantial feature on LKJ.16 The photograph appeared to show him holding on to and looking out from behind two vertical bars, giving the appearance of a prison cell. The cover declared LKJ to be “the voice of black Britain.” Within the text itself, this sentiment was reiterated, with him being introduced as “the first artist to deal with the reality of the black experience in Britain.” By the early 1980s, a number of books had been written that sought to articulate or comment on the nature of the “Negro,” “Colored,” “West Indian,” “black,” “Afro Caribbean,” or “immigrant” presence in Britain. However, these books were in the main of a

14 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 187.

15 Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Chapleton, Clarendon, Jamaica, in 1952, coming to England a decade later. His education included a degree in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It was, however, in the arena of poetry that Johnson made his mark.

16 Dennis Morris was born in Jamaica in 1960 and moved to London as a child.

sociological bent and, pretty much without exception, framed the new black presence as a “problem.” Relatively little appeared in print that sought to discuss the multidimensional importance of cultural politics in the formulation of a unique black British identity. And yet, as magazine features such as the one on LKJ demonstrated, by the late 1970s artists using a variety of media were producing dynamic, charged expressions that earnestly and cogently reflected on an intriguing new presence and the somewhat fractious experiences of the children of Caribbean migrants, who routinely cast themselves and were in turn cast, as mentioned earlier, as strangers in a strange land. At the heart of dub poetry (the art form with which LKJ came to be associated) lay a profound embrace of Afrocentric or black consciousness, which did much to strengthen and carry forward black British cultural identity of the mid-late 1970s onward.

The key characteristic of LKJ’s poetry was a fearless and unswerving reflection on the challenges faced by black youth in London. In one of his signature poems of the mid-1970s, “Come, wi go dung deh,” LKJ speaks out against unemployment, made all the worse by there being a seeming abundance of jobs for certain people; speaks out against the pains of hunger, made all the worse by supermarkets with food to waste; and speaks out against homelessness in a city in which, just a few miles away, were a number of royal palaces. Perhaps the most well-known of these was Buckingham Palace, with its 775 rooms, which included 19 state rooms, 52 royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices, and 78 bathrooms. In alluding to homelessness and the conspicuous opulence of nearby palaces, LKJ declared his sympathies to lie with republicanism.17 He may have been a poet of the people, but he was not, and never would be, a British Poet Laureate, the honor bestowed by the state on an eminent poet appointed as a member of the British royal household.

In “Come, wi go dung deh” and, indeed, in all his poetry, LKJ took the King’s English, the Queen’s English, or even BBC English and made it fit for purpose:

Come, wi go dung deh

Mek wi tek a ride dung deh

Come, wi go dung deh

Mek wi fahwahd dung deh . . .

De peeple dem a bawl fi food dung deh

Dem cyaan get no food but food dung deh

De peeple dem a bawl fi work dung deh

Dem cyaan get no work but work dung deh

De peeple dem a bawl fi shelta dung deh

Dem cyaan get a room but palace dung deh

De peeple dem a bawl fi mercy dung deh

Dem cyaan get no mercy, mercy no dung deh18

17 This was not of course the Republicanism of the party commonly referred to as the GOP (Grand Old Party), but the Republicanism in the United Kingdom, which refers to the political movement that seeks to replace a country’s monarchy with a republic.

18 Poet and the Roots, “Come, wi go dung deh,” Dread Beat an’ Blood (Virgin Front Line Records, 1978).

No one poet signified the extraordinary emergence of black Britain in the 1970s as much as did LKJ. While poets such as he, when performing in Jamaica, tended to be regarded as having pronounced Anglicized accents and speech patterns, when performing in Britain they were heard by their audiences as having decidedly Jamaican accents. (Language and speech patterns were frequently the means by which the profound but scantly recognized disconnect between Jamaica and its second diaspora was manifest. When visiting Jamaica, British people born of Jamaican parents were for the most part heard and regarded as “English” or “Englishman,” rather than as people with imagined links to the island. This disassociation even extended to British people who were Jamaican by birth but had moved away as children or youngsters.) Returning to the significance of LKJ and others, it took a new generation of poets to get straight to the heart of the matter and offer the frankest, most succinct of commentaries on the black-British experience, a commentary that was decidedly unvarnished and not the least bit celebratory. Who else but a dub poet (in this instance, Jamaican-born Frederick Williams) could articulate, in just a few lines of poetry, several decades of disappointment: “De street weh dem seh pave wid gold / Pave wid sou-soh daag shit.”19

Mention was made earlier of the extraordinary collaboration between Dennis Brown and Aswad that led to “Promised Land.” In this same early-1980s time period, Aswad collaborated with another Jamaican singer of note, Johnny Osbourne, on a remarkable work of empathy and sympathy. The context of the song was a tragedy of a few months earlier that had galvanized the black community, acutely increasing its sense of purpose and cultural identity. Peter Fryer outlined the incident and the bold, confident response it drew from a traumatized black community: “In January 1981, 13 young black people perished in a fire at a house in Deptford, an area where other black homes had been attacked and a black community centre had been burnt down. As usual, police discounted the possibility of a racial motive; but the entire community, not just the anguished parents, were convinced that the fire had been started by fascists.”20

Some three years after the tragic events, Stephen Cook, in a publication that sought to “reconstruct the events of that night and set out the (apparently) conflicting evidence,” penned a brief introduction that pointed to battle lines and tensions that surfaced in the wake of the seismic events:

19 The lines come from a poem by Williams, “A Pressure Reach Dem”: “De street weh dem seh pave wid gold / Pave wid sousoh daag shit.” Frederick Williams, Leggo De Pen (London: Akira, 1985), 14. The lines translate into Caribbean immigrants’ despondent realization: “The streets they told us were paved with gold / were actually paved with dried-out dog shit” (or “only paved with dog shit”).

20 Peter Fryer, “The New Generation,” in Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984), 398. The following people lost their lives: Humphrey Brown (4 July 1962–18 January 1981); Peter Campbell (23 February 1962–18 January 1981); Steve Collins (2 May 1963–18 January 1981); Patrick Cummings (24 September 1964–18 January 1981); Gerry Paul Francis (21 August 1963–18 January 1981); Andrew Gooding (18 February 1966–18 January 1981); Lloyd Hall (29 November 1960–19 January 1981); Lillian Rosalind Henry (23 August 1964–18 January 1981); Patricia Johnson (16 May 1965–18 January 1981); Glen Powell (19 January 1965–25 January 1981); Paul Ruddock (19 November 1958–9 February 1981); Yvonne Ruddock (17 January 1965–24 January 1981); Owen Wesley Thompson (11 September 1964–18 January 1981).

In the early hours of a winter morning, in a terraced house in South London, a boisterous allnight party was coming to an end when fire broke out on the ground floor. Within minutes, the whole three-storey house was in flames; thirteen young black people died, most of them only in their teens. The inquests three months later returned an open verdict—and despite a lengthy police inquiry the cause of the fire has never been ascertained. Was it a tragic accident or was it arson? Members of the black community have accused the police of ignoring evidence that the fire was started deliberately by a white racialist attacker; the police in turn have accused black organisations of making political capital out of the tragedy.21

From the start, mystery seemed to surround the cause of the fire and speculation was rife, though circumstantial evidence suggested that the fire might well have been the work of violent racists. The cause of the tragedy was either arson or an accident; many black people opted for the former and discounted the latter. Among the particularly unpalatable and, to some, offensive scenarios said to have been favored by the police was that one of the victims, Owen Thompson, was involved in setting a fire that rapidly engulfed the house. Such were the apparent depths, in the minds of some, to which the police were prepared to stoop. Significant numbers of black people were convinced that, in the long-standing tradition of police denial of racist motives when black people were attacked, the police did little more than designate the fire an accident. Protestors against perceived police indifference carried placards stating, “We’re not dumb—We know it’s a bomb.” Protestors also rallied around in defense of Thompson, whom they felt had been horribly slandered, even in death: “Thompson Murdered, Not Murderer” and “Thompson Murdered—No Black Scapegoat.”22

The Deptford fire exposed an uncomfortable reality of the widespread indifference shown to the deaths by royalty, the mainstream news media, senior politicians, and the police themselves. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the establishment failed to extend condolences to the families of the victims. This indifference, coupled with what were regarded as lackluster efforts made by the police to establish the cause of the fire or to investigate possible suspects, enraged many black Britons, giving rise to the cry “Thirteen Dead, Nothing Said.” It appeared as if black lives did not matter (see fig. 2).

Her Majesty the Queen, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and other heads of government and church had no words of sympathy for the victims of the fire and their families. Into this painful void stepped Johnny Osbourne and Aswad, with a mournful song that simultaneously managed to offer strength and succor to black people, traumatized and violated by the state’s indifference. The song utilized the poignant sentiment “Thirteen Dead, Nothing Said,” and indeed, this was its title.

13 dead and nothing said Oh, what we gonna do?

21 Stephen Cook, “The Deptford Fire, Accident or Arson?,” Unsolved magazine, no. 42, 1984, 829. Cook’s use of “boisterous” was somewhat presumptuous and problematic.

22 See, for example, the Stephen Cook investigation, “Deptford Fire, Accident or Arson?”

13 dead and nothing said Oh, what this world is coming to 13 dead and nothing said Don’t you know it could happen to you?23

One of the first publications to document the tragedy and its aftermath was The New Cross Massacre Story: Interviews with John La Rose, published in 1984 by the Alliance of the Black Parents Movement, Black Youth Movement, and the Race Today Collective. Conspicuous by

23 Johnny Osbourne / Black Lion Band, “13 Dead (Nothing Said)” / “Murder” (Simba, 1981).

Figure 2. Demonstrators at the Black People’s Day of Action, 2 March 1981, London, called to protest police inaction and government indifference to the New Cross Massacre. Among the signs and posters held by demonstrators were placards that declared “Blood Aga Run if Justice Na Come.” © Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock

its absence from the publication were references to expressions of condolence or offers of assistance from High Commission representatives of the Caribbean countries from which the parents of the deceased came. This threw into sharp relief the nature of the second diaspora referred to earlier. As much as black Britain might have looked to the international arena, including Jamaica, for inspiration, ultimately the demographic had little to no choice but to fall back on its own resources and sense of self. Yet were it not for the extraordinary collaboration “Thirteen Dead, Nothing Said,” the Deptford fire would have been all the more tragic.

Mention was made earlier to the importance of Bob Marley in these narratives. I would like to conclude with, among other ideas, considerations of a particular track by the Wailers, from the early 1970s, and its influence on black youth and the readiness of some of them to “riot” as a way of protesting and fighting back. (Riot is of course a somewhat loaded and difficult term, but I use it advisedly, particularly since no substitute or alternative word quite works.)

William Raspberry’s key text in the Observer, mentioned earlier, had taken as its starting point the riots that erupted during the course of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. The manifestation of these and subsequent riots took as their rationale and blueprint the seminal and influential track by the Wailers, “Burnin’ and Lootin,” from their 1973 album Burnin’. In “Burnin’ and Lootin’,” Marley names and identifies the riot as a positive act of purification, redemption, and political integrity. This audacious and profoundly empathetic act struck an international chord with fractious black British youngsters and Jamaican ghetto sufferers alike. Thereafter, rioting would never be considered by many of its perpetrators as being the negative, destructive, and anarchic act that others, particularly the mainstream media and the forces of “law and order,” took it to be. When the Wailers sang “Burnin’ and Lootin,” rioting was, for some people at least, forevermore transformed from merely or simply a violent expression of protest against perceived injustices into an almost sacred act of righteousness, of purification, of judgment, with which numbers of people widely empathized:

(That’s why we’re gonna be)

Burnin’ and a-lootin’ tonight;

Burnin’ all pollution tonight;

Burnin’ all illusion tonight24

As Paul Gilroy notes, “Bob Marley’s connection between the remoteness of the boss and the liberatory rationality of burning and looting has been repeated and expanded by many artists in the different genres which together make up reggae.”25

The narrative assembled here does perhaps have something of a gendered perspective. I mean by that that recollections of the emergence of black Britain, and the influence of the

24 The Wailers, “Burnin’ and Lootin’,” written by Bob Marley, Burnin’ (Island Records, 1973).

25 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 200.

Jamaican 1970s on that process, tend to articulate and privilege male sentiments and experiences. With the sorts of poetry and music referenced in this text having dominated black British culture of the 1970s and 1980s, it is perhaps inevitable that the voices of women, along with other voices, were somewhat sidelined or overshadowed by decidedly masculine articulations. While sections of black Britain took roots reggae to its heart, it was also the case that other cultural expressions, other forms of black music, were loved and appreciated during the black 1970s. In Britain, Lovers Rock was a form of reggae much appreciated, though it was regarded by record companies and others as being noticeably lighter on social narratives, apparently preferring songs that reflected on affairs of the heart, falling in and out of love, and so on.26

Paul Gilroy summarized the genre as “a more melodic form of music dominated by female singers and songwriters and produced for couples to dance to together, a close relationship developed with soul sub-culture which served the same purpose.”27 It might not be difficult to recall roots reggae and Lovers Rock as separate genres, each with its own followers and appreciators. In truth, the musical tastes and, indeed, the wider cultural makeup of black Britain in the 70s was complex and multilayered, as it was in other parts of the African diaspora. Mention should, in this respect, be made of a popular reggae song that seemed to bridge the gendered binary of masculinist Rastafari and its attendant dread culture and the perhaps more feminine form of reggae known as Lovers Rock. The song in question is Brown Sugar’s “I’m in Love with a Dreadlocks,” from 1977.28 The song, which remains a staple in the canon of Lovers Rock, has the lead vocalist happily declaring herself to be in love with a man with dreadlocks, despite society’s displeasure and demonization of those who chose to locks up their hair and wear clothes that loudly proclaimed an embrace of the dread culture:

I’m in love with a dreadlocks, I’ve never felt this way before; I’m in love with a dreadlocks, and every day, I love him more and more. We live righteously, in love and harmony.29

Listening to the song, it is not difficult to create an image of the love-struck singer as coming from a respectable home, holding down a decent job, wearing her hair in accordance with dominant societal expectations, and possibly even being from a church-going family. The song was at once a recognition of the appeal of the dread culture and a rebuttal of any simplistic binaries we might be tempted to indulge, in our recollections of the influence of the Jamaican 1970s on black Britain.

26 The genre also had its male stars, such as Victor Romero Evans.

27 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black,189.

28 Brown Sugar was a Lovers Rock trio formed in the mid-1970s, comprising Pauline Catlin, Caron Wheeler, and Carol Simms.

29 Brown Sugar, “I’m in Love with a Dreadlocks” (Lover’s Rock, 1977).

In closing, it is worth mentioning another aspect of the complicated relationship that Jamaica had to black Britain in the 1970s. The early 1960s, particularly the moment of independence in 1962, saw the Jamaican project of nation building develop in earnest. The newly created national flag and anthem took their places alongside the national motto, national bird, national flower, and national dish. Such concerted attempts at nation building contrasted sharply with a noticeable ambivalence within the second diaspora to anything that resembled allegiance to any sort of fixed, rigid, nationalistic definition of a nation-state, particularly one that required and sought the allegiance of compliant citizens. This ambivalence was something Paul Gilroy referred to as “a multi-faceted desire to overcome the sclerotic confines of the nation state as a precondition of the liberation of blacks everywhere,” elaborating further that “the African Diaspora’s consciousness of itself has been defined in and against constructing national boundaries.”30

The nearest black Britain came in the 1970s to declaring any sort of allegiance to a flag was when the colors of Rastafari—red, gold, and green—became a familiar sight in the urban spaces black people occupied. The colors were of course, first and foremost, the colors of the Ethiopian flag, though many other African countries also had the tricolor dynamic in their flags, in horizontal or vertical bands of equal width or depth. In this regard, it was a combination of colors that, for a period of time within Britain, very much demarcated African diasporic territory or space, as much it pointed to the particular embrace of Rastafari. From badges, belts, scarves, and crocheted tams to painted street signs, lampposts, and the decor of community centers in black neighborhoods, red, gold, and green seemed to be everywhere, reflecting an embrace of a consciousness of Africa, courtesy of and via Jamaica, never before and never since seen in black Britain. It was, above all else, Rastafari that fostered a bold form of black identity in 1970s Britain, straight from JA.

30 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, 157,158.