“It’s so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,” the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country.
But what if the contributions of black Britons were not carelessly neglected, but rather, as Lanre Bakare identifies in his estimable first book, We Were There, a history that has been more purposely obscured?
The roots of the current Black Lives Matter-fuelled renaissance of black artistic practice in Britain were established decades ago in the relatively under-reported past. Bakare focuses on the Thatcher era of the late 1970s and 80s, “the most restive period in postwar history”, when, he argues, modern black Britishness was forged. The Bradford-born author complicates and deepens this story by shifting attention away from London, writing with quiet enthusiasm and sharp intelligence about black communities, including those in Bradford, Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh.
He unearths forgotten stories of black participation in cultural movements such as northern soul, whose popularity coincided with the emergence of reggae sound systems in the 1970s. One such story is that of Steve Caesar, a Leeds-based teenage migrant from St Kitts and winner of the inaugural northern soul dance competition at Wigan Casino in 1974. “Northern soul helped me find a sort of way of belonging,” says Caesar, and yet his story was excluded from the narratives of a movement historically cast as a white working-class phenomenon by music journalists.
Building on the work of cultural historians such as Stuart Hall, Bakare champions advances made by social activists. These include grassroots campaigners who in 1979 overturned the miscarriage of justice suffered by Bakare’s fellow Bradfordian George Lindo, imprisoned after he was framed by racist police for a robbery he did not commit.
The toppling of the statue of the transatlantic enslaver Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020 was a very public reckoning with the city’s toxic past. Bakare shows that this direct action had been rehearsed in Liverpool three decades earlier. In 1982, protesters tied a rope to the statue of the former Liverpool MP William Huskisson, who had links to the Atlantic slave trade, and dragged it to the ground. Bakare puts that toppling into the context of the riots in Liverpool 8 (Toxteth) the previous year. The violence was sparked by police brutality, neglect and the kind of prejudicial thinking expressed by Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of the riots, which she characterised as the unlawfulness of young men “whose high animal spirits” had “wreak[ed] havoc” on the city.
Bakare ably demonstrates the key disadvantage faced by black people – a lack of information about their predecessors. In my experience, the interventions and successes of our forebears have been cynically obscured, creating the impression that nothing had come before. This discontinuation has often followed short-term initiatives by white cultural gatekeepers who pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment, which only lasts until the novelty wears off and the next worthy group emerges to attract their attention.
We Were There acknowledges the true tapestry of British culture by shining a light on committed activists/artists, such as the documentarian Bea Freeman, the producer of They Haven’t Done Nothing, a film about the aftermath of the 1981 riots. But the publication of books about the forgotten cultural history of black Britons can only come about if commissioning editors recognise previous blind spots.
We Were There bridges the gaps to missing links and admirably achieves what it sets out to provide: further evidence of “Black people’s influence on the UK”. If these stories are only shown in isolation, “they can be dismissed as curiosities”, writes Bakare, “that don’t alter our sense of what constitutes British culture”.
• We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
