Reflections on Radical History (original) (raw)

2001, Radical History Review

My identity and outlook have been very much shaped by my roots in the skilled working class of Jamaica, my experience of colorism in the Caribbean, and racism in Europe and later the United States, and my early encounter with and attraction to Pan-Africanist and Marxist ideas. I was not quite six years old when Jamaica gained its independence from Britain in 1962. So I am also very much a product and beneficiary of the anticolonial movement that swept the postwar world. I have been very inspired by the work of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Ché Guevara, and perhaps above all by the work of Amilcar Cabral, George Padmore, Claude McKay, and Walter Rodney. My encounter with Marx and Engels at the age of about sixteen was a great epiphany, and I still regard their work as indispensable to the understanding of capitalism and imperialism. Most of my generation of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain was in one way or another profoundly affected by the Rastafarian movement that swept across the Atlantic to Britain in the early 1970s. Beseiged as we and our parents were by British racism, we welcomed its attack upon white supremacy and its attempts to decolonize our minds. From the United States, Black Power also came to Britain and we became familiar with the writings and struggles of George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael. Malcolm X was also important to us, but my first encounter with his work was a shocking disappointment. I first read his posthumous collection The End of White Supremacy, with its nonsensical Nation of Islam creation myths. It was an unfortunate introduction to his work. It took me a good while to return to Malcolm and appreciate his more mature work and thinking, including his autobiography. With the benefit of hindsight, I now think that a key part of my intellectual and political formation was my coming into contact with the rest of the Caribbean and Africa through not just study, but also through friendship and collaboration with people from different parts of the archipelago and the continent. At university in particular, I met people from every part of the British Caribbean. And because I was for several years the president of the West Indian Society on campus, I worked closely with my fellow Caribbean students and the local Caribbean community. Under my leadership we established even closer ties with African students on campus. My closest friends at the University of Leeds, where I did my first degree, were from Grenada, Guyana, and South Africa. I also had a close friendship with a comrade from Chile who had been driven into exile by Pinochet and I knew a number of Palestinians on campus. I also developed close friendships with Asian comrades from the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, many of whom had been radicalized by the insurgent and murderous fascism of the far-right National Front in the 1970s