by Linda Ali

How many of us arriving in Britain from the West Indies in the fifties and sixties, felt that our arrival was no more than a continuation of life. Not aliens arriving in a foreign land because our passports described us as “British subjects: Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies”. A status granted to colonial people by the 1948 Nationality Act. Furthermore our education, churching and values as we knew it then under British rule mirrored that of the people we were about to encounter

The SS Empire Windrush, a vessel with its own diverse history was built in Germany as a passenger carrier and then as a troop ship with hospital facilities during the second world war. There were a variety of other vessels such SS Cuba bringing migrants to Britain but they rarely get a mention but they were jus as important to those many Caribbean migrants at the time. Furthermore a minority of those mid-twentieth century arrivees travelled by air, the main carrier at the time being BOAC – British Overseas Air Corporation. This was a time when air travel was a sophisticated undertaking when passengers wore well tailored suits, hats and gloves, and stewardesses were hand-picked beauties in stilletoes

The people too, were diverse coming from among tradesmen, farmers, skilled or white collar workers, students attending a variety of courses or universities. These migrants did not see themselves as impoverished ‘third world’ adventurers but men and women with a host of ambitions and aspirations. They came to work as nurses, transport workers or caterers, to fill essential areas of employment that the host population no longer chose to do as heroes of their recent world war experience.

The ethnicities of the migrants were also diverse. There are few of us from the Caribbean who can claim a mono-ethnicity. Small islands with a total populations of some 10 to12 million peope most with multiple heritage. Ours is a heritage that is extraordinarily rich – African, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Lebanese, South & North American and European.

We Caribbean people are an evolved population of mixtures and re-mixtures of ancestors and forefathers of whom many of us know little. The colonisers did a great job at denying us of even that! So is it any fault of ours if we struggle to write our history, let alone come to terms with our true identity. Unlike celebrities appearing on the television programme “Who do you thing you are” who consult a wealth of documented evidence, most of us have to rely on what is handed down orally by parents and grandparents, aunties and uncles in their present state of varying memory loss.

I interviewed a number of retired Caribbean nurses for my Masters in History. Everyone of them from different islands but significantly of multi-heritage. We are a rainbow people, let us acknowledge the great gift we have inherited. This richness of ethnicities has become our identity, we should be proud of it and it is that we should be handing down to the generations of children we have brought into this world. Many of those children here in Britain are struggling to place themselves because those who educate, formal and informal, have failed to tell the full story.

So, to give the impression that the ‘SS Empire Windrush’ and the many other vessels arriving in Britain carrying Caribbean migrants eager to find their place within ‘English’ society, were only of African descendants, is yet another bit of mis-education. In today’s world where nations engage in bitter conflict in the name of ‘ethnic cleansing’, has the time not come for us to embrace our identity as proud Caribbean people! We have to deny our political masters their quest for votes by segmenting us – we must grab hold with both hands the diversity that has honed us to shape us into today’s Caribbean people.

Linda Ali/2008