Africans say to know how well you are doing in life you should compare your achievements with those of age-mates, or contemporaries. To assess the impact of the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948, that would mean comparing its impact with other events that unfolded around the same time. Almost a year before, a blood-soaked India slipped out of the orbit of the British empire, gaining its independence. A year after Windrush, in October 1949, the Chinese Communist party won the long civil war, establishing primacy over Chinese affairs. Three-quarters of a century later, these two countries are producing seismic transformations that are slowly, suddenly unravelling the dominant 500-year transatlantic global order.
Sandwiched between these two event colossi, Windrush would seem on the surface to measure poorly against its age-mates. But the celebrations beginning on Thursday, Windrush Day, will highlight two aspects of its impact. First, the arrival of a group of 500 people from the Caribbean, which signalled the beginning of mass migration to the UK from the colonies. And second, that migration’s knock-on effect of unleashing a multiracial society that, 75 years later, has so transformed these islands that we now have a prime minister of Indian descent by way of Africa, and Scotland’s first minister and Labour leader both of Pakistani heritage.
