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.
This is a dramatic story, and although it would appear to have little to do with the bigger stories of its generational peers, China and India, and their rise to globalism, they are intricately linked. The historical forces that enabled the emergence of China and India were the same forces that resulted in the Windrush arrivals. The fratricidal second world war had left the European continent exhausted, shifting the power axis in the Atlantic space to the US, and in the eastern Eurasian space to the Soviet Union. Britain, the power that had previously been at the centre of configuring the global order – colonising new territory, capturing and trafficking enormous numbers of Africans and putting them to work as enslaved labour in the newly colonised territories; as well as recruiting Chinese and Indian indentured labourers in the 19th century to build the railways and to harvest the sugar and other produce that the newly emancipated Africans were reluctant to continue doing – was now sending out appeals for labour.
Rather than the labour being put to use in those conquered territories abroad, it was now needed in a shattered Europe, which needed rebuilding at the same time as it was retreating from empire. In other words, the colonial project was reversed back into the European, and specifically British, centre.
Windrush and the return of this labour force to the centre is a small part of the big story of global recalibration – big enough, arguably, to be understood alongside the rise of India and China. However, by and large the narrative remains purely personal – a story of the 500 or so ex-service personnel arriving in the UK dressed in their Sunday best, trilby hats for the men and smart hats for the women, suitcases in hand. They arrived with hope in their hearts. As individuals they were seeking an opportunity to remake themselves, to escape a past of brutality and humiliation, and for eventual transcendence. Many had wanted to stay a number of winters, perhaps five or 10, and then to return home and rebuild their countries, now on the brink of independence.
But, as John Lennon noted, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, and 75 winters later most of their descendants remain. The story of Windrush is now also the story of the betrayals of this heroic generation by the Home Office-organised Windrush deportation scandal. The opportunity many had seen of coming to the UK, and making peace with their past and with the British, has been left in shreds by continuing racism and structural disparities. Increasingly, there are now demands for apologies and reparations as a way for the UK to atone for a difficult past.
But such feelings also ebb and flow depending on the age. The Windrush at 50 celebrations in 1998 were much more optimistic. That was the moment when the black population itself woke up to the Windrush phenomenon, partly because the generation who came over were dying or retiring to the Caribbean, and people began finally to name the experience they were living through. As well as the naming, that anniversary coincided with the heady 1997 Labour landslide, with its promises to halt imperial decline by harnessing multicultural Britain as part of a reinvented Cool Britannia. It was to be an anti-imperial globalism driven by humanitarian impulses. Of course, it was in many ways a contradictory fraud. By the time it reached its apogee at the 2012 Olympic Games, it had already been dissolved by the classic imperial gambit of the Iraq war, and more fatally the financial crash of 2008. The destruction of trust the former engendered, and the austerity induced by the latter, created the conditions for Brexit in 2016.
So here we are at 75. The optimism of 25 years ago has melted away, the globe is reordering itself and a multipolar world arises. China and India march on, with India’s GDP now overtaking that of the UK.
Meanwhile, what about Africa? Although it’s from there that most of the Caribbean Windrush generation and myself are descended, I initially only mentioned it here for the wisdom it can provide about how to measure progress among peers. But Africa represents much more than that.
As someone from Nigeria, what has been astonishing to me, during this period of renegotiation between centres and peripheries, is the reconnection in the UK between continental Africans and the descendants of those who left the continent in the most tragic and traumatic of circumstances. It’s perhaps the biggest Windrush story of all. And this has not just been at meetings of intellectuals, who have always formed alliances and plotted together for freedom and independence in pan-African congresses. This time, it has been a reconnection at a popular level – not always without tension, but a necessary reknitting of a 500-year-old African-Atlantic breach.
So what should we expect at Windrush’s 100th anniversary? Will the 2048 iteration of ChatGPT generate an optimistic picture, amid climate and other technological challenges? Will it locate the Windrush experience much more firmly, where it belongs, within the ebb and flow of the big story of the evolving multipolar world?
Hopefully, the African-Atlantic world will finally begin to fully articulate its story of the past 500 years, including the weight of its loss and its many triumphs – exemplified here in the UK by the Windrush generation and their descendants.
• Onyekachi Wambu edited the anthology Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience
