Seeing through glasses darkly
Tony Gould
THE STORY OF BLACK BRITAIN by Roy Kerridge The Claridge Press, £5.95, pp. 72 On the back cover of this slender paperback is a quotation from Darcus Howe of Race Today: 'Roy Kerridge is mis- chief interminable'. Many years ago, the small, bespectacled Kerridge bearded the big, black Howe in his Race Today den in Brixton and wrote up the encounter — it was hardly an interview —for this journal. At one point Kerridge has himself asking Howe, 'Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?', to which, if my memory serves me right, Howe did not deign to reply. Kerridge succeeded in making out of their mutual incomprehension and distaste a richly comic article.
Regular Spectator readers will be familiar with Kerridge's line on race, his loathing of racial politics and all talk of 'the black community', and his fondness for black churches and for older immigrants, the simple dignity of whose lives he compares favourably with the strident militancy of the younger, British-born generation. This particular volume, he tells us, was prompt- ed by the transformation of London's Willesden Green public library into 'a nest of "Black Triumphalism" ' — a phase now apparently over.
Kerridge detects four main varieties of British black history: Windrush History, 'in which the ship Empire Windrush occupies the place held by the ship Mayflower in White American history'; Black Presence History, 'in which the existence of a few black people in Britain at any given time from the Roman Conquest to the Empire Windrush cut-off date (1948) is milked for all it is worth'; Nubianism, or Eddie Mur- phism, which `puts Africa first, as the home of all black people'; and the true history of black people in Britain and the world, `which takes in elements from the three preceding views'.
But if there are four varieties of black history, there are two Roy Kerridges. One is a clever and perceptive writer with unique insights and a lively turn of phrase; the other is a controversialist who ridicules the absurdities of hare-brained extremists as a means of undermining perfectly rea- sonable attitudes. This can involve him in some strange contortions.
For instance, he tells of a young black woman of his acquaintance whose interest in history took her to a meeting of the Sealed Knot, the people who dress up as Roundheads and Cavaliers to re-enact Civil War battles, where she was rebuffed.
Sadly [he writes] the young historian turned away, tried to forget she was English and re- created herself as 'a member of the black community', looking no further for the mean- ing of life than the message of a 'rap song'.
Incidentally, I make it a rule to beware of writers who use inverted commas in this fashion. But to continue: Kerridge com- pares this woman's predicament with his own easy access to English history and rightly sees that 'were it not for colour prejudice, there would be no Black Pres- ence History'. Then, having demonstrated how the frustration of exclusion can lead to exaggeration of the black presence in pre- Windrush Britain, he asserts:
If History is seen as a Black History and a White History, at war with one another, each continually trying to 'score off the other side, then an unpleasant racial consciousness will poison all our feelings.
Quite so, but who is to blame for that? On the one hand, Kerridge writes sensitive- ly of the plight of black people in Britain, on the other his sympathy vanishes when faced with the false consciousness which, however regrettable, is an understandable response to it.
Nobody would deny that
most tales of immigration have a nobility and pathos to them that belie the Black Triumphalist sneers of 'dupes'.
But Kerridge himself is guilty of sneering when he writes, of black plays performed at the Hackney Empire:
Why anyone needs to have 'self-esteem' [those telltale inverted commas again] poured into him in the huge quantities pre- scribed by Black Triumphalists and their allies, I cannot think.
Roy Kerridge's unique perspective has so much to recommend it, and this essay so accurately pinpoints some fashionable absurdities, that it is a pity it should be marred by so polemical a tone. This means, I fear, that those who would most benefit by reading it won't even look at it.
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