Race

The Voices of Britain

In June 1948, the Empire Windrush landed, bringing the first shipload of immigrants from Jamaica to Britain. Fifty years on, this country has been irreversibly changed - as have those immigrants who decided to make the journey of hope. Curry is now the national dish and Trevor McDonald the national treasure. But the political élite has never engaged with the people about how these transformations affected their lives. How do the various tribes which make up the nation feel about these changes? For all our slavish dependence on focus groups, we don't know their views on diversity, family life, feminism, religion, identity or even love. Three years ago I embarked on a journey. I was writing a book, and in it I wanted to give a place to some of the people whose voices remain unheard, even in these clamorous times of confessional television. I spoke to black and Asian people, who have been endlessly researched when it comes to statistics on discrimination, but whose views are never sought on politics and socie

In June 1948, the Empire Windrush landed, bringing the first shipload of immigrants from Jamaica to Britain. Fifty years on, this country has been irreversibly changed - as have those immigrants who decided to make the journey of hope. Curry is now the national dish and Trevor McDonald the national treasure. But the political élite has never engaged with the people about how these transformations affected their lives. How do the various tribes which make up the nation feel about these changes? For all our slavish dependence on focus groups, we don't know their views on diversity, family life, feminism, religion, identity or even love. Three years ago I embarked on a journey. I was writing a book, and in it I wanted to give a place to some of the people whose voices remain unheard, even in these clamorous times of confessional television. I spoke to black and Asian people, who have been endlessly researched when it comes to statistics on discrimination, but whose views are never sought on politics and society. I spent hours with them, talking in Gujarati, Hindi and Kutchi, my own first language. And I spoke to white men and women, who had much to say about their country. There were unexpected alliances and some fraught moments - especially when a group of BNP supporters suddenly realised that I was not white. Not very perceptive, these race warriors. There was no formal research plan and I was not interested in my usual contacts; I simply wanted to converse with those outside the world I knew. I followed people from shopping centres to where they lived, and begged for a few minutes of their time. I went to school gates, self-help groups, university bars, community centres and clubs. And in all these places it was fascinating to see true friendships and love affairs sitting side by side with suspicion and contempt. I found that the various ethnic groups in this country - including the white English - are becoming more at ease with diversity, but are also panicking about identity. Many would not want to go back to the bland old days, but few - black and white - would go all the way and say that migration was the best thing that happened to them. The critic and writer Aamer Hussein once wrote: "In your cities lie invisible cities where things merge, blend, metamorphose. Find them. A blueprint for your future perhaps." I tried to do this and went beyond the cities. And yes, things did merge and blend and metamorphose; but at times they also spilt asunder, creating much fury and pain. Our country is at once both more at peace with difference, and desperate to divide into simple identities in what is at times an unbearably complicated world. And once again the élite is failing to provide the new narratives which could bind and reassure us all - black and white - as we grapple with these forces

Ivor, 70, a white English ex-railway worker: We believed that we were better than blacks and that's why we had the right to rule over them. Then they arrived to work with us on the railway with us. They were good men but you could not forget what you had learnt about them all your life, that they could never be as good as white Englishmen. I thought that they lived in trees and there they were dressed like Frank Sinatra. The government never asked us how we felt. I am not saying that we should not have let them in, no ma'am. My grandchild is half-Jamaican and he's family. But our feelings were ignored as they are now.

Maureen, 69, an Irishwoman who married black musician Ozzie in the Fifties. She attended the 1959 west-London funeral of Kelso Cochrane, officially the first black person in Britain to be killed by racists:

I was pregnant with my second child and I stood in line feeling the shame of my colour. Those near me were all white, all feeling that it was our fault for not stopping the poison. Ozzie changed from that day. He was so carefree when we met. I was a singer. He became dark, afraid, and sometimes he took it out on me. He saw me as white, not the woman he had fallen in love with. When he died, I was the only white woman at his funeral. That was in 1970.

Frank Crichlow, one of the black founders of the Notting Hill Carnival, ran the bohemian Rio Club in Notting Hill in the Sixties. He has suffered years of harassment by the police and knows racism all too well. But he also remembers some good times back in the early days:

It was amazing. White and black people socialising like you and I could not imagine today. Christine Keeler, who used to call me "dad", John Profumo - they all came to the club. Colin McInnes and all sorts of arty types came too - they loved the spirit of the place and felt released from their own stiff culture. Darcus Howe was there, and we would talk, drink, dance. The West Indian men were very popular with the ladies.

Brenda Dole, a Jamaican and an NHS midwife for 40 years, explains how her optimism was knocked out of her:

How can I explain all those winds that were blowing through our hearts at the time? I was in love with this country and that love only grew when I came here and became attached to the National Health Service. I loved the clean hospitals, the efficiency and order. I hated the disorder I had left behind. I was in love with this very nice white churchman, so all those feelings of love and pride were there. But they were beaten down again and again by racism, ignorance, abuse - such unfairness to us, Christian people who had fought in the war with the best of them.

Andrew Gibbs, now in his late eighties and once a member of the National Front, describes the anger that he felt:

We read about our women being raped, and ritual murders and blood-drinking by the Mau Mau. Thugs like Kenyatta stood up to us like we were nothing. So one night I went into the streets with my friend Ken and we beat up two black men, one of them so badly that he was blowing bubbles of blood out on to the pavement. We didn't want them here, not after the Mau Mau. They could do the same here, you know.

Mangit Singh Gill, a shopkeeper in Birmingham, explained their horror at the idea of integration:

We did not want to become English in any way. Not like the blacks who thought they were already English, except for their colour. We had a better culture, better morality and we wanted to keep our children away from these bad habits. We saw a mess in this country. The horrible short skirts, those young people having sex in Hyde Park like they are dogs. So all that admiration disappeared and we just wanted to keep to ourselves because society was collapsing.

Rahim, the son of affluent Muslim parents who sent him to a top public school, is a medical student who is totally disenchanted with life in this country:

You have one place if you are black, another if you are an Asian and another if you are white. Another too if you are working class. Nothing has been shaken up for centuries, yet they are proud of this rather than ashamed. In the US things are not fixed in that way. You look around at Clinton, the generals, the Hollywood stars, and you don't see a purely white world like you do here. They are more successful because their feet are not weighed down with the concrete of historical inequality. I am emigrating from this country. There is nothing for us here.

An Asian woman optician has other criticisms of the land in which she was born:

Is this progress? I see white people drowning in drugs, divorce and depression. They cannot control their children. They produce filth and violence and call it freedom. Love between men and women has evaporated. Why should I want to be like them?

Debbie, 28, is a white Londoner and a television researcher with a young child, who is also seeking to cling to what she sees as her own, endangered ways:

We are moving to Cambridge because I want Victor to grow up English. Not part of some meaningless melting pot where he will never learn his identity. I am not a racist but I think this multicultural thing is not working. It is making us all unhappy. I think black people will be happier if left alone in Brixton with their traditions.

Anisa, a young Muslim girl living a life of loneliness in a refuge, bitterly counts the cost that she has had to pay for her traditions in the name of holy multiculturalism:

I am treated like a "Paki" by immigration people and my own family. I was not yet 15 when they took me to Pakistan and married me off to a 30-year-old cousin. He raped me so many times that I nearly bled to death. A doctor helped me to escape. The Foreign Office said I was not British because I have dual nationality. My parents think I should not be British either. I hate both their traditions.

My wife is an English graduate and she speaks two Indian languages. I marvel at her ability to absorb various cultures. But her parents see this as being a loss. As if there is something dangerous about opening up your world too much. In that way they are just the same as my parents - whose faces turnedto stone when I told them about seeing Bharti.

Peter Brown is a big, hairy, tattooed and now unemployed 48-year-old from Glasgow. His wife ran off with a lorry driver, leaving him with three children. Today the people who most support him are his Asian neighbours, Shanu and Rehman. Shanu thinks he is a hero:

How can a mother do this? What is happening to English women? No Asian man would be able to manage three children, and Peter is a good man who worked hard and bought this house for the family. She will sure go to hell.

Gay twentysomething lovers Sam Patel (the son of a Ugandan Asian newsagent) and Jon Smith (white) have problems with what they see as the real foreigners. As Jon says:

Sam and me here, we share a history, like. I love Indian food, clothes and Hanif Kureishi. When I go to Europe, especially as a gay bloke, it is crazy and strange. We are British. We have our own music, our ways. I could never sleep with a German. I mean, we are enemies for ever. I can never be comfortable with them, not like with Sam.

'Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain' by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is published by Allen Lane at £18.99