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Colin Grant

Colin Grant is the author of several books, including Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa. His latest book, Homecoming: Voices of the Wind­rush Generation, was published last year.
 (April 2020)

Follow Colin Grant on Twitter: @colincraiggrant.

IN THE REVIEW

The Women’s War

Maaza Mengiste; illustration by Johnalynn Holland

The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste
In a black-and-white photo taken in December 1935, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia stands at ease in a smart khaki military uniform and pith helmet, with a cape draped over his shoulders. Pensive men brandishing rifles remain a respectful distance behind him in dry, rough terrain. Selassie looks as if …

Chanting Down Babylon

Kingston, Jamaica, 1983

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim

by Marcia Douglas
A photograph from Jamaica’s One Love Peace Concert in 1978 shows an ecstatic Bob Marley, dreadlocks flashing like lightning conductors, at the center of the stage. Beside him stand Michael Manley, the country’s grim-faced prime minister, and Edward Seaga, the equally tense-looking leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), which …

NYR DAILY

Peter Fryer & ‘Thinking Black’

Two men talking in a Brixton street; in the background, the graffiti stands for “Keep Britain White,” London, June 9, 1952

Before the 1980s, a manuscript that began, as Fryer’s Staying Power did, with the sentence “There were Africans in Britain before the English came here” would have been deemed laughable, heretical nonsense. With the exception of a handful of intellectuals like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, there were few black authors or historians, to my knowledge, writing about the history of black people in Britain. Into that vacuum walked Peter Fryer, a white journalist. But his color appears more important now than it did in 1984. It’s doubtful whether, in today’s political climate, a British publisher would be rushing to print such a manuscript by a white author.

Britain’s Debt to the Windrush Generation

RAF officials from the Colonial Office welcoming Jamaican immigrants disembarked from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks, June 22, 1948

Some seventy years after the first arrivals of immigrants from Jamaica, the “Windrush generation” has returned to the center of attention in Britain—not this time in a spirit of optimism and hope but of hurt and anger. The Caribbean-born children of those who came to England in the 1950s and 1960s are now threatened with dispossession, even deportation. Despite their having lived in the UK for decades, working and paying taxes, many of these black Britons lack the paperwork to prove their immigration status—thanks to a very British bureaucratic anomaly. As a result, many have lost jobs, as well as access to benefits and healthcare; some face losing their residency rights.

1968: Enoch, Bageye, and Me

Graffiti expressing support for Enoch Powell after his inflammatory anti-immigration speech of April 20, 1968

My father felt that the British, with their faux politeness—polite to the point of rudeness—were hypocrites. “Give the American what him due,” Bageye would say approvingly, “not like the Englishman, he will tell you to your face how much he hate you.” But then, on April 20, 1968, just before my seventh birthday, a stern politician from the upper echelons of British society named Enoch Powell delivered with extraordinary intensity an anti-immigration speech that shocked the nation by articulating what the black population had suspected all along: we were feared and despised.