Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  The mantra of activists in Europe and the United States fired up by Third World revolution was that at some point they would be able to ‘bring the revolution back home’. British activist John Hoyland, who had visited Castro’s Cuba, thought that ‘during the May events in Paris for ten days a revolution was very possible. I mean, the students were fighting the police. There were pitched battles every single night. They’d occupied the centre of Paris. And then there was a general strike. The workers went on general strike. I mean, you thought, “crikey it really is happening”.’43

  The defeat of the 1968 movement was not the end of the story. For some militants it was only a beginning. Alain Geismar, secretary of the lecturers’ union and one of the key leaders in May 1968, became convinced that revolution proper was just over the horizon. He co-wrote Towards Civil War and was one of the founders of the clandestine Gauche Prolétarienne (GP) whose aim was ‘the fusion of anti-authoritarian revolt and proletarian revolution’.44 This linked up with a new wave of Third World revolution, generated this time among Palestinians.

  The Six Day War of June 1967 was in some way Israel’s revenge for the Suez Crisis. It defeated an Arab coalition of Nasser’s Egypt, Jordan and Syria and settler colonialism was reinforced as Israel now occupied Egypt’s Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights taken from Syria and the Left Bank of the River Jordan, taken from the Kingdom of Jordan. Over 300,000 Palestinians were uprooted and driven into exile, most notably into Jordan, where they crowded into refugee camps. The United Nations passed Resolution 242 in November 1967 calling for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, but the United States, which backed Israel as the only reliable pro-Western power in the Middle East, supported her refusal to withdraw.

  The failure of the Arab states in war meant that leadership of the Arab struggle now passed to Palestinian fedayeen or freedom fighters, organised in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Solidarity with their cause was organised in 1969 through Palestine Committees which brought together Maoist students of the Gauche Prolétarienne on the one hand and students of Near East and North African origin on the other. The movement was galvanised by the Jordanian Army’s attack on Palestinian refugee camps to root out PLO militants, in what became known as ‘Black September’ 1970. Pro-Palestinian activists attacked the Jordanian embassy in Neuilly on 23 July 1971, and hoisted the Palestinian flag, and demonstrations were held in the north Paris Arab heartland of the Goutte d’Or. An activist report on the work of the Palestinian Committees said that Algerian workers were now recast as Arab workers, fighting against imperialism, Zionism and ‘the suffering and misery inflicted on them by French imperialism […] The bidonvilles are inspired by the way the fedayeen have transformed refugee camps into resistance camps.’45

  On 27 October 1971 a 15-year-old Algerian boy, Djellali Ben Ali, was murdered in the Goutte d’Or district by the husband of the concierge of the building where he lived. The killer clearly took the view that the Algerian War was still being waged and that he was entitled to use repressive measures on a daily basis. On the day of the boy’s funeral, 7 November 1971, a demonstration 4,000 strong waved Palestinian and Algerian flags and sang FLN songs.46 ‘A police cordon, which had never been seen here since the Algerian War’, said the Nouvel Observateur, was thrown around the demonstrators. On 27 November another demonstration was held and both Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault came to Barbès to show their solidarity.47

  In the same period the state and municipalities began to bulldoze the bidonvilles and clear slums in order to build homes for more desirable residents. Immigrants were left homeless and began to occupy empty housing. A squatting movement began in Issy-les-Moulineaux in January 1972 and spread to miners’ dwellings in Douai, where the pits were being closed.48 In 1975 a rent strike swept SONACOTRA hostels in the Paris region, and in Dijon and Strasbourg. ‘These hostels are veritable prisons and the managers are prison warders’, declared the strike committee of a Saint-Denis hostel. They were not allowed to meet together or to receive visitors. ‘The managers are always army veterans who have served in Indo-China and Algeria. They are racists and colonialists.’49

  The so-called Marcellin-Fontanet circular of September 1972 tackled the problem of immigration and immigrant political activity at one and the same time. Immigration was restricted and jobs were reserved for French nationals and foreigners who had appropriate residence and work permits. Immigrants who were in trouble with the police for political activity were liable to be denied the right to stay. When immigrants without papers marched through Grasse in Provence on 12 June 1973 to protest they were scattered by fire-hoses ordered by the mayor. ‘The Arabs are behaving in the old town as if in a conquered territory’, the press reported. ‘These people are very different from us. They live by night. It is very painful to be invaded by them.’50

  Fears of this ‘invasion’ from the Third World were captured by the novel The Camp of Saints, written near Saint-Raphaël in Provence by Jean Raspail, who combined exploring the Americas with a Catholic and royalist hatred of the modern world, and published in 1973. Dystopian and darkly obsessive, it describes the landing of a ‘last chance armada’ of a hundred ships from Calcutta, carrying a million immigrants, which moors on the Mediterranean coast of France. As the French government fails to resist and the French population flees north, an ironic inversion of the defeat of 1940, and the United Nations in Hanoi fails to act, a Multiracial Popular Assembly takes power in Paris, a postcolonial version of the 1871 Paris Commune of Paris, while a Non-European Commonwealth Committee takes control in London. White women marry non-white men, spelling ‘the death of the white race’.51

  In this embattled climate, racist attacks became more and more frequent. These were often concentrated in Paris or the Marseille region, where both immigrants and pied noir populations were concentrated. On 25 August 1973 a French tram driver in Marseille was killed by an Algerian who had himself been the victim of a racist assault four years earlier. The local press was quick to denounce the evils that immigrants were bringing into the country, a consequence of the loss of Algeria. ‘Enough Algerian thieves, Algerian rioters, Algerian big mouths, Algerian syphilitics, Algerian rapists, Algerian madmen’, trumpeted Le Meridional. ‘We have had enough of this scum from the other side of the Mediterranean. Independence has brought them only wretchedness, the opposite of what they were led to believe.’52 Local French activists set up a Marseille Defence Committee which defended their community by killing at least ten Algerians. The Algerian community responded by forming an Arab Workers’ Movement (MTA), and organised strikes in both the Marseille region and Paris in September 1973.53 Former OAS militants and partisans of French Algeria now founded a club named after Charles Martel, who had held the Arabs at bay at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD. They launched a bomb attack on the Algerian Consulate at Marseille in December 1973, killing four and injuring twenty-two. They then issued a communiqué declaring that ‘There are more Arabs in France than there were pieds noirs in Algeria. They expelled us by violence, we will expel them by violence. The cowardice of our pseudo-governments is responsible. Down with Algerian France!’54

  Partisans of French Algeria supported extreme Right groups such as the Ordre Nouveau, which held a meeting at La Mutualité hall in Paris on 21 June 1973 with the demand ‘stop uncontrolled immigration’. This was met by a counter-demonstration of the Trotskyist Communist Revolutionary League (LCR), which came onto the streets helmeted and armed with coshes. As a result of the violence that ensued the government banned both the Ordre Nouveau and the LCR. The banning of the Ordre Nouveau was counterproductive. It was a major constituent of the Front National, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who now had his hands free to convert the Front National from a street-fighting force to a powerful electoral organisation. His breakthrough took another ten years, and had to wait for the victory of the Left and the defeat of the traditional right-wing parties in 1981, but it was no less impressive than the transformation of Br
itish politics by Enoch Powell.

  Assimilation or Exclusion?

  The immigrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s were often single male breadwinners who sent some of their earnings to their families back home. Immigration restrictions imposed by governments in the 1960s and 1970s limited new migration but stimulated families to join the breadwinner in the metropolis.55 These families struggled against prejudice to try to find a place in the metropolis. The first generation of immigrants tended to work hard, remain close to their own community and to keep a low profile. The second generation, however, born in the 1950s and 1960s, were exposed to the powerful and exciting youth culture around them. They often wanted to break away from their immigrant roots, and integrate with the youth and youth culture of their own generation.

  In Liverpool, said Colin McGlashen of The Observer, these young people were ‘Afro-English, and more English than African. They speak Scouse. Most have white mothers.’56 They saw the world as full of opportunities for themselves and refused to accept the lot their parents had to endure of being second-class citizens. In France the new generation of home-grown immigrants became known as Beurs, ‘Arabs’ written backwards in the Verlan slang of the suburbs. They were divided between their Algerian roots and French school and youth culture, not quite belonging to one or the other. One young woman, Fatima, aged 22, was Algerian but had always lived in France. ‘My soul is much more Algerian than French’, she declared. On the other hand, she was inspired by the myth of the French Revolution: ‘It was the beginning of freedom of expression and the end of monarchy and oppression […] It could begin again, on the estates where we live.’57

  Unfortunately, young immigrants’ desire to assimilate was too frequently met by colonial hierarchies and exclusions. These were clearly manifested in housing, education and employment. In Britain, as we have seen, black and Asian populations lived in poor districts of cities, such as Toxteth in Liverpool, Oldham in Greater Manchester, Handsworth in Birmingham, Tower Hamlets or Brixton in London. One junior school in Handsworth, where 75 per cent of the children were black, staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore around 1970. According to Grenadian researcher Augustine John, the most common comment was, ‘I think it’s a bit rich to have all these black kids singing, “For he is an Englishman”’.58 It did not occur to the school to stage anything less overtly nationalistic. Meanwhile, a Liverpool employment agency admitted in 1975 that an unofficial colour bar operated in the job market:

  out of every hundred black people who come to Liverpool in search of jobs, only twenty succeed. The skilled ones find jobs as ship’s cooks or in restaurants after taking a catering course at Liverpool College. Others, after training, as spray painters or mechanics. These are the few. The majority have to work as porters, dish-washers, cleaners, and even these jobs are hard to find because of the employers’ preference for white employees.59

  As a result of such discrimination, in Brixton in 1981 average unemployment stood at 13 per cent, but ethnic unemployment was nearly twice as high, at 25 per cent.60

  In France, immigrant families were moved in the 1960s and 1970s from bidonvilles, inner-city slums or rural internment camps for harkis to high-rise flats on estates build on the fringes of large cities. In Azouz Begag’s semi-autobiographical novel about an Algerian boy who moves in 1966 from the bidonville of Chaâba outside Lyon to a new housing estate and attends the lycée, the hero comes top of the class although he is ‘the only Arab in it. In front of the French boys’.61 And yet, as he confessed in an interview, his novel was ‘a story of humour and suffering’ because of forty friends from his bidonville, he was the only one who succeeded.62 Among those who did not was Toumi Djaïdja, a harki born in Algeria in 1962. He was brought up in internment camps in the south of France until in 1971 his family was moved to a flat in Les Minguettes, an estate in Vénissieux, a suburb of Lyon. He left school to be apprenticed as a metalworker, reflecting ironically that ‘all the immigrant and working-class youths who had had a patchy education became metalwork apprentices but it led nowhere. Isn’t that curious?’63

  Often unemployed, living on the streets, taking to petty crime, young immigrants were frequently in confrontation with the police that confirmed colonial hierarchies. Not only societies, but also politicians and governments made it difficult for young immigrants to integrate. Pressure continued to tighten controls on immigration from former colonies or the Commonwealth. Panic set in about the erosion of national identity by immigrants who, it was felt, could not be assimilated.

  In Britain the rise of Margaret Thatcher signalled a fresh commitment to immigration control, the policing of immigrant communities, and the strengthening of national identity. In February 1975 Margaret Thatcher ousted Edward Heath from the leadership of the Conservative Party and was one of forty-four Tory MPs to oppose Labour’s 1976 Race Relations Act. Interviewed on Granada television in 1978 she expressed her fears on immigration. Citing a prediction that ‘if we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here’, she continued, ‘Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ After she came to power in 1979 she made a strong ally of the police force and it is no accident that the police operation to control racial unrest in British cities in 1981 was called ‘Operation Swamp 81’. In Brixton the police imposed a systematic stop and search policy. Squads made 943 ‘stops’ and arrested 118 people. Of these over half were black and two-thirds were under the age of 21.

  Rejected by the so-called host society, young black immigrants had a tendency to fall back on a culture that defined a separate identity and expressed their struggle with the discriminating and brutal British system. This might be the Rasta cult of Ethiopia, symbol of black independence and escape from the Babylon of slavery. It might be reggae, popularised by the Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff in the 1972 film The Harder They Come, with its line, ‘So as sure as the sun will shine / I’m gonna get my share now of what’s mine’.64 Or it might be black power, modelled on the movement in the United States. Linton Kwesi Johnson, born in Jamaica in 1952, followed his mother to Brixton in 1963. While at Tulse Hill Comprehensive School he joined the Black Panthers. He expressed his anger in dub poetry, delivered to a reggae beat. It was a response to Louise Bennett’s comic lyrics, expressing alienation and a desire for liberation. In 1980 he wrote ‘Inglan is a bitch’:

  Well mi dhu day work an mi du nite work

  Mi dhu clean work an me do dutty work

  Dem seh dat black man is very lazy

  But if yu si how mi wok you woodah seh me crazy

  Inglan is a bitch

  Dere’s no escaping it

  Inglan is a bitch

  Dere’s no runin fram it65

  Black discontent exploded in the Brixton riots of 10–12 April 1981, which were echoed by riots in Handsworth and Toxteth in July 1981, when police used tear gas to quell disturbances.66 Lord Scarman later reported that Operation Swamp was a ‘serious mistake’, undertaken without consultation with community leaders, demonstrating ‘racial prejudice among officers’ and a failure to adjust police methods to the needs of policing a multiracial society.67 A German observer, Werner Glinga, noted in his 1983 book Legacy of Empire that ‘racial hatred is not innate, it is incited. This is part of the legacy of colonialism.’68

  The Falklands War, coming less than a year after the riots, generated a colonial nationalism that was also exclusionary. On 3 July 1982 Mrs Thatcher made a victory address to a Conservative rally in Cheltenham:

  We have learned something about ourselves, a lesson we desperately needed to learn. When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts. The people who […] thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did, [who] had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well,
they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history […] What has indeed happened it that now once again Britain is not prepared to be pushed around.69

  On one level this apotheosis of the British nation might have included everyone within its shores. But as Bombay-born writer Salman Rushdie pointed out, built on empire and tempered by war, Britain was sharply defined against an ‘other’:

  She felt able to invoke the spirit of imperialism, because she knew how central that spirit is to the self-image of white Britons of all classes. I say white Britons because it’s clear that Mrs Thatcher wasn’t addressing the two million or so blacks, who don’t feel quite like that about the Empire. So even her word ‘we’ was an act of racial exclusion, like her other well-known speech about the fear of being ‘swamped’ by immigrants.70

  In spite of these conscious and unconscious colonial attitudes, some progress was made in the 1980s towards thinking about Britain as a multicultural society. Anthony Rampton, who had blamed racism for the underachievement of immigrant children, was sacked by the Thatcher government, but the Swann report of 1985 reiterated many of his findings in more moderate terms. It argued that ‘Britain is a multiracial and multicultural society and all pupils must be enabled to understand what this means.’ It stipulated that education was not for ‘the reinforcement of the beliefs, values and identity which each child brings to school’, but should develop ‘multicultural understanding [in] all aspects of a school’s work’.71