The name Windrush has become synonymous with scandal since the government detained, deported and ruined the lives of countless immigrants living legally in the UK. The British historian and scholar Professor Hakim Adi has spent decades trying to correct what he calls the Windrush myth – the idea that Black migration to the UK began in 1948, when the famous ship landed with several hundred Jamaicans at Tilbury docks.
His latest book, African and Caribbean People in Britain, is his crowning achievement; a meticulously researched tour de force that charts black presence on the British Isles from Cheddar Man through the African Roman legions and Black Tudors and into the present day. In the age of Black Lives Matter, and following books such as David Olusoga’s Black and British, the Windrush story has been under increasing strain. Adi’s work should represent the final nail in the coffin for those who think that Britain was ever truly white and should be kept that way.
