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May 16 - June 15, 2019
It was a hectic, inventive and brilliantly stage-managed tour that turned three unknown African kings from minor southern tribes into national celebrities and unleashed a great torrent of press coverage in which Rhodes and the British South Africa Company were largely vilified.
Rhodes responded to the government’s recognition of the rights of the kings to rule over their own land and people by complaining that it was a humiliation to have been ‘utterly beaten by these niggers’.
Khama, Sebele I and Bathoen I are recognized by Botswanans as founders of their nation. Had they not embarked upon their tour of Britain it is probable that Cecil Rhodes would have annexed the protectorate and incorporated it into what became Rhodesia.
They look unmistakably Victorian, and yet as they have so often been written out of our vision of that period they can appear incongruous and out of place, as if a modern photographer has used an old camera to photograph twenty-first-century black Britons in costume.
West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native: A Vindication of the African Race (1868). This eloquent denouncement of the pseudo-scientific racism of the Victorian age is a forgotten classic.
Since the sixteenth century and the life of the royal trumpeter John Blanke, black people in Britain had been involved in the world of performance: music, dance and the stage.
The impact of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was all the greater because black music performed by black people was a novelty to British audiences who, ever since the 1830s, had become accustomed to minstrel tunes – a distorted and appropriated form of black music – being sung by white men in blackface.
It’s now suggested that she was around six feet eleven.
Fanque gave numerous benefit performances in aid of local charities or even individuals who found themselves in distress, including an 1843 performance in Town-Meadows Rochdale that was billed as ‘BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE’.
In the last years of the nineteenth century minstrelsy was still going strong but by then the men in blackface competed for custom and coins with other troupes performing other musical forms.
the popular German ‘Oompah’ bands that – for obvious reasons – abruptly disappeared from the British street in early August 1914, never to return.
It was during wartime that black people from parts of Africa and the West Indies gained new and first-hand experience of the racism and racial hierarchies that both informed and, for many, justified colonial rule.
This, combined with deep resentment at the unequal and unjust treatment black soldiers and sailors experienced during the conflict, ensured that many returned to their homes profoundly disillusioned.
In 1914, war was understood as both a chance for the islands to demonstrate their loyalty to the empire and as an employment opportunity for their unemployed and underemployed men.
The War Office regarded West Indians in the British army as highly undesirable and in late 1914 they called upon the Colonial Office to discourage volunteers from believing that if they travelled to Britain they would be welcomed into the army.
black Africans and black West Indians were not to be permitted to fight against white men, as this, it was feared, would undermine white racial prestige, and threaten the security of white settlers in the colonies.
In all, 26,637 Jamaican men volunteered to serve in the new regiment but 13,940 were rejected on medical grounds, testimony to the hardship and poverty that blighted that island in the early twentieth century.
They dug, repaired, and worked in the munitions depots; critical work but not what they had been trained to do and not what they had hoped for.
A BWIR soldier from Trinidad complained that he and his comrades were ‘treated neither as Christians nor as British citizens, but as West Indian “Niggers”, without anybody to be interested in or look after us.’
Despite relying so heavily upon Indian soldiers in 1914 and 1915 and despite having at their disposal vast reservoirs of potential manpower from Africa and the West Indies, the generals and politicians remained determined that war on the Western Front was to be ‘a white man’s war’.
Captain J. C. Dunn, a medical officer and Boer War veteran, whose memoir The War the Infantry Knew is one of the great social histories of the trenches,
A shocking number of would-be British recruits had failed the rudimentary medical examination that was undertaken in the recruiting offices.
recruitment crisis during the Boer War, when it had been estimated that 60 per cent of the male population were unfit for active military service.
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The formation in November 1914 of the first ‘bantam’ battalions was indicative of the malnutrition and sickliness that had blighted the health and development of millions of Britons. These were units made up of men under five feet three inches, the minimum height for a soldier at the start of the war.
There was, in certain circles, a fear that if the black troops were deployed on the Western Front, their supposed primitive vitality would be set alongside the emasculated sickliness of many British recruits in a way that would damage white racial prestige.
This should be done, he stated with shocking candour, ‘because we do not want all the whites killed – to put it bluntly.
– to break once for all the colour bar. Comradeship in danger will do what the education of centuries would never effect.
a West African native trained to use of arms and filled with a new degree of self-confidence by successful encounters with forces armed and led by Europeans was not likely to be more amenable to discipline in peace time.’
In 1914 there was a tiny black middle class mainly living in London, many of whom had connections to Sierra Leone.
It was largely a matter of chance as to which type of unit a black soldier was dispatched.
by the summer of 1919 the memory of the black men from Africa and the West Indies who had fought or laboured in the war was already being expunged from the official record and popular memory.
No troops from the West Indies were permitted to march; neither were any black African units.
After four years of mistreatment it was in Italy that the humiliation of the men of the BWIR was the most systematic and deliberate.
and then to clean the latrines of the white troops. Once again, they were tacitly and deliberately demoted from soldiers to labourers.
Another was sentenced to twenty-one years and one man was executed by firing squad. After the mutiny the army relented and awarded the black troops the pay increase that had been denied to them.
Madison Grant published his now infamous book The Passing of the Great Race, a clarion call for the isolation and preservation of what he called the ‘Nordic Race’.
further purified, in Grant’s vision, by a rigid programme of eugenics.
Although a number of police officers were at the scene on the night of the murder of Charles Wootton no arrests were made.
the most appropriate term is also the most disturbing – his death was a lynching.44
In Britain, there were riots and violent disturbances in nine cities as returning soldiers and local men turned upon the country’s black population,
Particularly well represented were Danes, Swedes, Poles and Russians, many of whom had been working on British ships, and between periods of shipboard employment they settled in the poorer districts around the ports,
Men of African descent from the Caribbean and from West Africa were therefore merely the most visible of the new immigrants. The colour of their skin made them an easy and obvious target for resentment and ultimately violence.
Huge numbers of white British workers and former soldiers – men who only months earlier had risked their lives in the name of their country – felt a powerful sense of economic betrayal. Some, perhaps only a minority, were on the lookout for a scapegoat.
Within weeks of the end of the war white sailors who had served alongside black seamen during the conflict had begun to inform their employers that they were now unwilling to work with them. Ship-masters and factory managers tended to respond by dismissing the black men.
Black men who had volunteered for military service had done so in the firm belief that they were members of the empire and British subjects – not aliens.
Within months of the end of the war the Arab sailors, despite being British subjects and union members, were abruptly refused work on British ships.
Two months later there were riots in London’s dockland when black sailors were attacked on Cable Street, later the site of a much more famous riot in the 1930s,
The following month, hostels housing black sailors were attacked in Limehouse,
The police estimated that between three and five thousand people took part in those riots.48 In May, Asian and Chinese communities were also targeted, as were white women who lived with or who had married black men.
Troops were secretly put on standby as huge gangs patrolled the streets on the hunt for black men and Arabs.
