Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812–1907 by Oscar Webber (review)

Reproducing the British Caribbean, by Juanita De Barros, maps the new concerns that emerged after slavery in the British Caribbean over control of the size of the population and focuses on the territories of Barbados, Jamaica, and Guiana. In the words of its author, “This book examines ideas about reproduction and the size and health of Caribbean populations in the British Caribbean from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s” (p. 14). This anxiety over the size of the population had profound effects on the development of policymaking, which governed the work of midwives as well as issues concerning health, hygiene, and sanitation and which also had implications for the building of infant welfare clinics in the region. It was in this sociohistorical context that colonial reproductive policies were formed. The primary apprehension of the postemancipation period revolved around “the effects of falling birthrates, rising rates of infant mortality, and population ‘degeneration’” (p. 8).The effects of emancipation on sugar production and profitability in the British Caribbean increasingly disillusioned the planter class there. Quite naturally, the blame for the region's economic decline had to be placed on the formerly enslaved. Blame was placed on their behavior and on the lifestyles of African-descended men and women. In this regard, De Barros makes a strong case for understanding the impact of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the creation of colonial policymaking. This confluence of social factors is also germane to the colonial distinctions made between African Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean people. Though poverty was recognized as a serious problem for the social reproduction of these countries, it did not exculpate the formerly enslaved for their alleged ignorance of modern sanitation and hygiene (p. 8). “Poor women in particular,” as De Barros notes, “found themselves condemned as ignorant and indifferent mothers whose poor mothering skills were seen as contributing to infant mortality” (p. 8).Reproducing the British Caribbean is clear in its analysis of how the colonial authorities and the planter class viewed the sexual and domestic practices of the formerly enslaved, who were characterized as uncivilized and immoral and therefore in need of colonial tutelage in the form of the assistance of British women in the colonies. Indeed, the argument might have been strengthened in this regard if the author had pointed to the literature, travel accounts, and novels of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean that viewed the British Caribbean as a site of sexual profligacy. Nevertheless, the author notes that “in Britain's colonies, white British women were believed necessary to solve a range of social problems that were attributed to the behavior of colonial people, including infant mortality” (p. 12). De Barros described the work of these British women as “maternal imperialism,” an adjunct to the “imperial ideological and administrative system” (p. 12).Given the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice by British Caribbean women of home births, the contracting of traditional midwives for their services was not surprising. As is to be expected, therefore, the formally trained nurses were critical of the traditional midwives, most of whom were of African or Asian descent. It was the midwives who were blamed for infant deaths, because they were deemed prone to superstition and lacking in adequate training and medical knowledge. Given their sheer numbers and relationships with local women, the midwives could not be eliminated and had to be integrated “into the regulated world of colonial midwifery” (p. 93). Whereas the early nineteenth-century discourse in the British Caribbean revolved around population size, infant mortality, and the general health of the region according to De Barros, the early twentieth-century concern began to focus on overpopulation. Thus a new set of anxieties began to emerge with respect to British Caribbean labor.Reproducing the British Caribbean makes a useful contribution to an understanding of the social and historical factors that shaped the colonial policy of the early nineteenth-century Caribbean. However, it would have been useful to tie colonial policymaking more specifically to the control of labor in the postemancipation era beyond a focus on the labor unrest of the 1930s. Indeed, a stronger critique of the need to oppress labor in the interest of reproducing capitalism would have been quite welcome in this text. Social control over the labor process was not restricted to slavery but was crucial to reproducing the status quo, whether through the regulation of sexual reproduction, population size, or health status. A more specific focus on how these concerns related to the development of peripheral capitalism in the British Caribbean would have added another layer of complexity to this important project.

Reviewed by: Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean by Randy M. Browne Matthew Blake Strickland (bio) Browne, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, 279 pp. ISBN 978-08122-490-8. Randy Browne states, "The basic premise of this book is that the struggle to survive was at the center of enslaved people's experience." Enslaved people lived in a milieu between the violence of white masters, harsh labour conditions, and the dictates of colonial administrators, all of which held considerable control over them. Taking the reader to the oft-ignored Berbice on the South American coast, Randy Browne uses an amazing treasure trove of documents to illuminate many of the actions and motivations of enslaved black people as they struggled to survive their bondage. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean is a welcome instalment in the historiography of slavery, British Empire, and Caribbean history. Although he does not challenge the historiography of resistance and rebellion by enslaved people, Browne does indicate that his work is meant to add more nuance to the lived experiences of enslaved people living in the British Caribbean. Abstract ideas of "freedom" were not the primary thoughts held by enslaved people; day-to-day struggle often involved coping with their current situation as chattel. The institution of slavery shaped actions and relationships. As enslaved people made decisions and connections, survival was often the foremost thought. Because of this, Browne's research examines actions and relationships in a new and intriguing way. Particularly, Surviving Slavery examines the lives of enslaved people during a period of amelioration in the British Empire. This was a time marked by greater metropolitan debate and intervention regarding the treatment of enslaved people living and working in the British Caribbean. In six chapters, Browne shows the ways and the multiple arenas in which enslaved people attempted to survive their enslavement in Berbice during amelioration in the 1820s. In chapter one, Browne provides background information about Berbice. A large number of books written about the British Caribbean have [End Page 177] tended to focus on Jamaica and Barbados. Berbice, a Dutch colony until the late 1790s, had a unique legal system that provided a few more protections to enslaved people than the British legal system. The fiscal and protector of slaves were colonial officials tasked with hearing and investigating complaints made by enslaved people, primarily against their masters. Because of these offices, Berbice holds a unique place in the study of slavery in the British Caribbean. With these offices present in the colony, white planters were often the subject of complaints made by enslaved people. As he elucidates in chapter two, Browne shows that enslaved people and their masters were at odds about the way in which black people were treated. This included complaining to the protector about physical abuse, neglect, and overwork. Working on plantations was immensely harsh. However, complaining to the protector was not the only way to escape some of the more terrible conditions on plantations. Continuing into the third chapter, one means by which enslaved black men could increase their standing in the eyes of their masters was to take on the role of a driver. Drivers were enslaved black men who helped maintain control of other slaves on plantations. Black men chose to become drivers even though it put them at odds with other slaves because there were certain perks and advantages to having a leadership role on a plantation. In the sources used by Browne, black drivers were often the subject of contempt for their role in doling out violent punishments. Chapter four turns to the more personal connections formed between enslaved people by examining marriages and sexual relationships formed between enslaved people. Monogamous marriage was not prevalent among enslaved people in British slave societies. Polygamy–primarily polygyny–flourished among the enslaved population and was a clear West African tradition that survived the dreaded Middle Passage. In forming sexual relationships, men had fewer options for finding a partner than women. The demographic in Berbice and many other plantation societies found more males than females. For this reason, women often left relationships they considered to be abusive. Browne has also found...

Reviewed by: Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, and: Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912, and: Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, and the British West Indies Philip A. Howard Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 198 pp. Fernando Martínez Heredia, Rebecca J. Scott, and Orlando F. García Martínez. Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912. Habana: Unión, 2001. 359 pp. Rebecca J. Scott, Thomas C. Holt, Frederick Cooper, and Aims McGuinness, eds. Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, and the British West Indies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 198 pp. After decades of research on the central characteristics of African slavery, the experiences of slaves themselves in the Americas, and the processes leading to their emancipation, beginning in the late 1980s, some scholars turned their attention to what happened to the slaves immediately after abolition. Recently published postemancipation studies have examined the social, political, cultural, and economic status of the ex-bondsmen and -women in Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, and the British and French Caribbean. These studies have generally explored the position of the ex-bondsmen and -women and their relationship with members of the dominant European colonial society. They have also looked at the problems former slaves encountered because of race and class, and how they attempted to remedy their problems. Scholars' examination [End Page 146] of racial attitudes has illuminated the influence played by Auguste Comte and a host of pseudoscientists who sought to prove the biological inferiority of Africans. What these studies have discovered is that the former slaves continued to be marginalized. The majority have never been integrated into the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions of their societies. By dealing with members of the subaltern, and people who until recently had no history, the three books reviewed here make a balanced contribution to our understanding of what ex-bondsmen and women confronted in freedom from the abolition of slavery until the 1930s. More importantly, they seek to fill a gap in the historiography by illuminating how the former slaves themselves felt about their freedom. Finally, they explore how former slaves thought about the concepts of modernity, citizenship, and nationalism, notions that informed their attitudes toward their liberty as well as their status. Beyond Slavery and Espacios, silencios begin their examination by exploring the conditions, social status, and material life of slaves and freedmen and women before and during abolition. They next discern the changes that occurred in postemancipation rural society more than in the urban context. Beyond Slavery does this with three brief yet well-written essays on the British Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, written by Thomas Holt, a comparative study of Cuba and Louisiana written by Rebecca Scott, and a piece on British colonial East Africa, written by Frederick Cooper. The essays highlight the different forced labor systems such as the apprenticeship, indentured servitude, gang labor, and sharecropping that the colonial powers and elites employed in order to gradually replace slavery and to ensure that planters still had an adequate labor supply to produce sugar at a profitable level. How these labor systems influenced the daily lives of former slaves, plantation owners, and society and economy in general are also discussed. In both Jamaica and Louisiana they led to collective resistance that took the forms of worker organization, and work stoppages in the sugar-producing parishes. In Cuba, black exploitation encouraged Cubans of African descent to resist as well by joining the ranks of the revolutionaries between 1895 and 1898. But what both books share is the focus on what freedom and citizenship meant to the ex-bondsmen. Beyond Slavery examines this issue within the broader context of the former slaves' relationship with the colonial metropolitan government and elites, while Espacios, silencios is a micro-history of the postemancipation experience of black Cubans in Cienfuegos, located in the province...

The three essays in the third section cover the impacts of slavery in the British, French, and Dutch Caribbean. The British-Trinidadian historian Bridget Brereton elegantly and unflinchingly assesses English colonisation of the Caribbean (St Kitts, Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Jamaica) between 1624 and 1670. Starting with tobacco and sugar plantations, indentured English, Scottish, and Irish labour was eventually replaced by enslaved Africans, following the launch of the “Sugar Revolution” in Barbados from the 1640s. Britain exported about 3.3 million slaves from Africa to the Caribbean to grow sugar, cotton, cocoa, and coffee. Brereton also exposes the dreary life – with diverse but rigidly assigned roles – of the enslaved, particularly the widespread abuse of female slaves, on brutal plantations across the Caribbean, which destroyed and dislocated African families. She nevertheless highlights the rebellions and resistance of slaves across the region, particularly from the eighteenth century.

ABSTRACTAs demobilization gathered pace in 1919, the colonial authorities in both the British and French Caribbean fretted about the reintegration of thousands of men imagined to have been rendered volatile and dangerous by their time overseas. By 1939, however, the situation appeared quite different. Veterans in the British islands were restive and dissatisfied, while their French Caribbean counterparts were comparatively settled. This contrast was not simply about disparities in state generosity. Rather, the article explores how differing conceptions of the relationship between military service and citizenship shaped the actions of the colonial and imperial governments. Where the governments of Martinique and Guadeloupe helped to foster the growth of veterans’ associations which were then incorporated into local policy-making and, more broadly, an imperial network of state aid, the British colonial authorities sought to suppress veteran identity in pursuit of the ultimately unachievable ideal of a final settlement with the demobilized men. An analysis of the interwar veterans’ movements therefore opens up questions of colonial governance, citizenship, and identity.

412 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) machine translation. Its substantial bibliography and its author and subject indexes are useful research tools in themselves. However, it cannot be considered a pedagogically-oriented introduction to the theory and practice of translation for the earlier stages of translator training. The book results from a lecture series given by the author in Finland in 1993 and is pitched at quite a demanding level although the claim that the 'individual chapters are relatively self-contained [and] can be read largely independently' (xiii) is justified. For this reason, it will be a very useful source of supplementary readings in advanced translator training. Also, teachers of translation, translation critics, and translators looking for some time out to reflect on the nature of their craft will benefit from it. They may end up agreeing, however, that at times W is not completely innocent of the 'pretentious, glutinous, heavily metaphorical or extremely abstract prose' (3) that he chides others who write about translation for using. Also, readers who know German will benefit more than those who don't from the fairly large sections of German text that are sometimes included to exemplify a point. While we should be surprised at a book on translation that doesn't include at least some other-language material, the growing internationalization of TS means that authors can no longer assume familiarity with particular languages by their readers. In such cases, interlinear glosses and/or literal back translations should be provided. While rejecting the impossibility of translation, W' s consideration of the text-related and translatorrelated problems inherent in translation in no way diminishes his appreciation of the complexity of the task. However, his balanced perspective always encourages a positive and hopeful outlook that interlingual communication is indeed possible, e.g. translation 'contains both culture-specific and cultureuniversal components' (90). Compensatory linguistic behaviors and adaptive skills and strategies can be acquired to enable the interlingual/intercultural gap to be bridged where necessary. W has little use for (sentence-based) generative theory which allows for a linguistic creativity that is both inapplicable and uninteresting to TS. On the other hand, modern cognitive linguistics is seen as having a most useful input into (text-based) translation theory and practice which should seek to operate in 'an interdisciplinary, cognitively embedded framework' (xiii). Such an approach will allow for the creativity displayed in linguistic performance to be given the central significance it deserves. W reminds us that the modern phase of 'TS . . . is still a fairly young and methodologically unstable field of research' (2), but this volume is indeed a most useful advance. [Robert Early, University of the South Pacific, Vanuatu.] Dictionary of Caribbean English usage. Ed. by Richard Allsopp. (French and Spanish supplement edited by J. E. Allsopp .) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. lxxviii, 697. This dictionary (hereafter referred to as DCE) is a groundbreaking publication derived from fieldwork and approximately one thousand bibliographic sources. It presents extensive data on English spoken in the Anglophone West Indies (including the Bahamas , Belize, and Guyana) and is certain to become a valuable resource in the fields of both Creole and English studies. Allsopp should be congratulated for finishing what must have seemed a daunting project when begun more than 25 years ago. The aims of DCE are different from an earlier landmark in lexicography, the Dictionary ofJamaican English (ed. by F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, Cambridge University Press, 1967). That dictionary established the goal ofhistorically describing the lexicon of Jamaican English, including both creóle varieties as well as more standard forms. DCE, however, is less devoted to historical principles than to language planning, seeking to establish a norm for Caribbean English while identifying some regional variation. What is identified as 'Caribbean English' is in fact a narrowly-defined representation of lexical entries and idioms associated primarily with 'acrolectal ' and 'mesolectal' varieties. DCE purposely excludes entries associated with 'deeper' creóle forms, and consequently, it assumes an uncomfortably (and admittedly) prescriptive tone (see xxvi). A should keep in mind that the bundle of features which creolists often consider as constituting the so-called basilect , mesolect, and ACROLECT are ambiguous at best and artificial at...

The Windrush scandal refers to the mistreatment of British citizens, notably those born in the Caribbean and arriving in Britain as children between 1948 and 1971 (the so called ‘Windrush generation’), who were wrongly accused of living in Britain illegally. Despite widespread awareness of their plight, we know little about the lives of the children of the Windrush. Here, we examine social inequalities among this group in five life domains: education, employment, occupation, housing, and health. Our aim is to provide an overview of the different types of social inequality experienced by the children of the Windrush. We fit a series of logistic regression models on a 5% sample of the resident population of England and Wales from the 2011 Census. We examine two outcomes per domain and analyse both baseline and adjusted levels of inequality among three generations (the G1.5, G2, and G2.5) of the children of the Windrush. We find evidence of inequality in each life domain, with variation by sex (men of all generations are uniformly disadvantaged) and generation (G2.5 men and women are the most disadvantaged). Our multi-generation, multi-outcome study provides evidence that inequality among the children of the Windrush generation is both pervasive and persistent.

Slavery was the central institution in the British Caribbean. No West Indian colony, Barbara Solow emphasizes, “ever founded a successful society on the basis of free white labor.” The region owns the dubious distinction of being the first in the Americas to give rise to the sugar revolution, which in turn rested on slavery. Nowhere was the influence of the unholy trinity of slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system more systematically and intensely felt. Until the slave trade was abolished, about five times as many Africans as Europeans arrived in the British Caribbean. A quarter of all Africans transported to the New World reached the West Indies. Slave-grown products dominated Atlantic trade, with sugar the single most important of the internationally traded commodities. Slavery became the source of reliable labor and of capital accumulation. It made the planters rich, and slaveholders dominated not just the economy but the region's politics and culture. “Nothing escaped” the influence of slavery, as Frank Tannenbaum put it, “nothing and no one.” Slavery is, as Richard Dunn pithily notes, “the essence” of British Caribbean history. This chapter demonstrates the centrality of slavery in the British Caribbean in various ways. First, it traces the origins of slavery in the region. Second, it explores the peopling of the region and its domination by slaves. Third, it probes the work that slaves performed and the commodities they produced.

Abstract: Alcohol use was widespread in the slave societies of the British Caribbean. Enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles drank to facilitate communication with the spiritual world, to remove barriers to social interaction, and to escape the many anxieties of building a life on the unpredictable Caribbean frontier. Plantation owners in the British Caribbean made contrasting claims about the level of drinking among enslaved peoples. Some described them as heavy drinkers, while others described them as abstemious. The disparity in descriptions highlights universal uncertainties about alcohol drinking and its unique ability to generate both harmony and discord. On the one hand, planters in the British Caribbean feared that drinking among enslaved workers was liberating; a fomenter of insurrections that threatened the social order. On the other hand, they saw it as a tool of domination; a way to placate frustrations and soothe social tensions by allowing enslaved peoples to drink and regularly blow off steam. Uncertainties about the conduct that accompanied alcohol consumption help explain why colonial legislatures enacted laws to curb drinking among enslaved peoples, yet planters continued to dole out large amounts of rum to the enslaved peoples on their estates. Travellers' accounts, plantation records, and archaeological evidence indicate that drinking did indeed provide enslaved peoples with a momentary release from the pressures that built up in these societies. As with forms of short-term flight from the plantation (or petite marronage), drinking acted as a safety valve that provided temporary relief from the challenges of daily life and, thus, helped ease tensions between planters and the enslaved. Yet, the evidence also indicates that the sociability and the disinhibition that accompanied alcohol drinking may have, at times, incited civil unrest within enslaved communities. As a result, planters in the British Caribbean had reason to be ambivalent. An ideology of white racism, as well as an economic structure based on the systematic and coerced extraction of labour further increased the planters' ambivalence.

In December 1896, a full-scale Royal Commission was convened to assess a widespread economic malaise in the British Caribbean. It was the first comprehensive investigative commission to deal with the British Caribbean in its entirety since 1842. Late in the 1800s a severe economic depression, owing to the decline of the local sugarcane industries, had created misery throughout the British Caribbean colonies. Especially in the smaller places, antiquated infrastructures and worn-out soils could not compete with the new economies of scale that were by now producing enormous quantities of cane sugar with modern equipment in such rival tropical areas as Fiji, Natal, Brazil, and Java, as well as Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the greater Caribbean region itself. Even worse, European beet sugar, supported by government subsidies that came to be known as “bounties,” had undercut British Caribbean sugar on the London market; a precipitous drop in the price of sugar in 1884 was attributed to the dumping of beet sugar in London, mainly by German producers. The resulting low wages and unemployment in the British Caribbean led to terrible local conditions. This chapter briefly outlines these conditions, yet its main focus is on the formation of the 1897 commission, its activities and conclusions, and the early implementations of some of the commission’s suggestions.1

[Second and third pragraph]While much has been written on the significance of British Caribbean activists in various movements associated with black diaspora politics in the twentieth century, particularly their important roles in Pan-African struggles, little has been written on how the various British Caribbean colonies themselves were envisioned among diaspora activists and within the scope of black diaspora politics. Did such Caribbean activists, especially those interested in and connected to diasporic movements beyond the British Caribbean, and their African American and African counterparts forsake the British West Indies as a focus of political engagement for other lands and causes? If not, what was the place of “West Indian liberation” and nation building in the British Caribbean in relation to black diasporic struggles in the early twentieth century?This article address these questions through an examination of how the idea of a united “West Indian nation” (via a federation or closer union) among British Caribbean colonies was envisioned within black diaspora politics from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s, and the ways in which racial consciousness and motivations informed conceptualizations of such a nation among black political activists of the British Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora. This study argues that efforts to create a federationin the Anglophone Caribbean were much more than simply imperial or regional nation-building projects. Instead, federation was also a diasporic, black nation-building endeavor intricately connected to notions of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination.

Detention under mental health law is based on professional assessments of risk but impacts on patients’ trust. Little attention has been paid by sociologists to the operation of risk, trust and racism during mental health detention processes. Our study addresses this gap through thirteen qualitative interviews with professionals, conducted in England in 2023 focusing on the mental health detention of British African Caribbean men: a group disproportionately detained. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and the SILENCES framework. Participant accounts highlighted mistrust between British African Caribbean men and mental health services. This group’s mental health was seen to be affected at a macro level by poverty, drug misuse and racism, as well as cultural mistrust and bias. Negative assumptions of British African Caribbean men were seen to operate at a meso level through institutional practices within risk management processes that discriminated against them, leading to coercive treatments and poorer outcomes. Micro level factors were largely absent from interviews. Participants stressed the need to rebuild trust with British African Caribbean communities, but the strategies they described overlooked the macro and meso factors identified elsewhere within interviews. The article is significant in highlighting cultural drivers of (mis)trust between mental health services and British African Caribbean men at macro and meso levels.

After the British Nationality Act was enacted in 1948, the legislation expanded the pathway to immigration. In the same year, HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury with 1,027 Caribbean immigrants that were, later on, referred to as the Windrush generation. As the turning point of the UKs migration history, this specific historical period from 1948 to the 1970s had been studied thoroughly by scholars. However, only a limited proportion of them are about the 200 or more women on the Empire Windrush. Thus, this paper, through a method of literature review, explores and analyzes the roles played by women in the Windrush generation. The paper finds that Windrush women, firstly, often join the public phase and work as a paid workforce after immigrating to London through chain migration. By doing so, they not only provided additional income to their family but also contributed to the post-war recovery of the British Empire. Meanwhile, they served as community builders who not only managed chores but also bonded their family members and even the entire immigrant community. Moreover, the Windrush women became active advocates that voiced for racial and gender equality and social justice.

This chapter describes weave together threads of memory and haunting pasts along with dynamics of dis-/re-placement. It shows that the rediscovery of the works of Phillips, Francis, Kenlock and Morris documents the urban life of Windrush immigrants in ways that, from their contemporary perspective, ascribe them to an unavoidable and sustained movement of instantiation. The chapter sets out towards a reflection on the intersectionalities between the Windrush legacies with other groups. The Windrush generation is doubly metonymic: the boat standing for its passengers, and for all the passengers of other boats having crossed the last stretch of the former slave trade, from the West Indies to Europe, after 1948. The Windrush generation is difficult to place and its first predicament was indeed to find lodgings. The transformation of the neighbourhood and subsequent departure of the Windrush immigrants is all but complete: there is the Carnival and its performers.

The narratives of people who arrived in Britain from the Caribbean islands—referred to as the ‘Windrush generation’—has tended to make invisible, if not overlooked the lived experiences of ‘Black Africans’ from the African continent between the period 1948–1973. The ‘single story’ of the ‘Windrush era’ dominates and homogenises the experiences of all Black and Brown people living in Britain. Even though Black Africans are now the largest ‘Black’ demographic group in Britain, the various ‘Windrush’ commemorations have overshadowed their presence and contributions to British society. Through oral narratives, autobiography, novels, memoirs and film, this article illustrates that while there were distinct differences in the experiences of post-war African and Caribbean people in Britain, such as reasons that brought the two groups to Britain; affiliation to African ‘identities’; there were also shared experiences of disappointed imaginings of Britain, cultural shock and institutional racism. Black British history cannot be built on people perceived as ‘Black’ living in post-war Britain as possessing a single narrative, but on myriad narratives reflecting the multiplicity of their identities, communities and experiences.