The Trials, Traumas and Triumphs of the British Black Press
Posted by Govender on Jul 16th, 2010 and filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
The veteran journalist, Robert Govender, one of the first and major players in a fascinating drama, provides a highly subjective view of the cultural, political, social and economic imbalances which demanded a media and political response to the assault on black dignity and human rights.
The black press has a long and courageous history. The first newspapers in the form of leaflets in prose and poetry, protesting against slavery, economic exploitation and global injustice appeared in the early part of the 19th century. This continued sporadically through-out that century and well into the twentieth century, reaching its nadir after the settlement of the Windrush generation.
The earliest newspapers like the African Times, the Orient Review, the Pan African and the African Telegraph were of the highest journalistic standard with some fine writers who could match the best of those in the white media. They were also the first representatives of what I would like to call the idealistic period in journalism which survived well into the late 20th century.
The papers of this period, lacked capital, had no advertising hinterland and had, of necessity, a rudimentary distribution system. They were clearly not out to make a profit. Many of the publishers, largely professional men, met printing and running costs from their own pockets. Their writers, again mainly doctors, lawyers and businessmen, passionately driven by a love of freedom and a hatred of oppression, toiled for free. They scorned Dr. Johnson’s famous adage that “only blockheads wrote for nothing.” This mercenary approach, however, was to be a feature of black journalistic life in the more materially advanced conditions dating from the 1990s.
Africa was in chains. Slavery had been “officially” abolished but persisted under new forms in the Caribbean. Imperialism was at its inglorious height and racism was rampant everywhere.
The first Black publishers and writers did not take too kindly to this preposterous, unacceptable and unscientific imperialist world view. They also had to contend with British racism. Black politicians, too, zealously campaigned against domestic and international racism, particularly against the infamous racism of the white-dominated and unfree Caribbean and the lynching and the insolent racism of the Dark and Deep South of America, the so called headquarters of that monstrous fiction the Free World. The pioneers – media and politicians – did not succeed in their ambitions to liberate their people in this country, the Caribbean and Africa but they made a huge and indispensable contribution to the eventual enforced retreat of imperialism and colonialism from these lands.
The 20th century was dominated by intellectuals of the calibre of the brilliant George Padmore, the charismatic CLR James, the very learned Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of free Trinidad and the incorruptible Cheddi Jagan of Guyana. All these men were widely admired and greatly respected by the people whose cause they championed – through agitation and articles in the Black press in Britain – and also by some of their opponents in the Empire who probably knew that the game was up. What endeared and still endears these Caribbean-born titans to Africans and people of African descent all over the world is their noble crusade for the liberation of the Continent from which their ancestors came though many of them had never set foot on African soil.
There was no break in the historic continuity of what the heroic Winnie Mandela of South Africa was later to call The Struggle. This was not just local, but universal with black political leaders in this country, particularly Bernie Grant and Dianne Abbott, two of Britain’s most effective and incorruptible politicians, taking up the baton from another uncompromisingly committed leader and journalist, Claudia Jones. The latter set a fiercely matchless and much emulated pace with her professionally produced and vigorous West Indian Gazette.
The politics of the Caribbean and Caribbean British politics are not straight forward. They are characterised by moderation which translates into reactionary, Uncle Tommist conservatism of the formerly plantation-owned Jamaican Gleaner, the astute pragmatism of the highly influential Christian Church to the radical, anti-colonial socialism of George Padmore, CLR James and Cheddi Jagan. These strands were sensibly reflected in the black press well into the 1990s when there was an abrupt about turn in favour of the conservatives.
Claudia Jones was an articulate and intelligent Marxist who made no secret of her views. She was convinced that race prejudice was a vile carbuncle on the political body and only socialism with its class view of history and the brotherhood of man would, in the long run, eliminate this virulent disease. She was an able reporter, a brilliant analyst and commentator, and she had an expert hand on the pulse of the black community. She was the first to tackle the issue of police brutality, which until then had been swept under the carpet by a cowardly and frightened white media. The Gazette regularly and fearlessly exposed police crimes against black people and other human rights abuses. Claudia did not have to go out on investigative forays to unearth the reality of the black human condition – the victims of abuse, encouraged by the honest reporting and searing exposures of racist crimes, came to her office to tell her about their own painful experiences.
The Establishment did not like Claudia or her paper, but they could do little to stem the tide of accurate and unfavourable publicity. The police harassed Claudia, stopping her car and sometimes taking her to the “station” for questioning but Claudia was more amused by these acts of desperation than annoyed.
Claudia Jones died tragically young and the Gazette died with her but her immortal spirit survived, manifesting itself in succeeding publications from 1975 with the emergence of the highly principled and selfless publisher and editor Aubrey Baynes to the late 1990s when Arif Ali who was in the same deeply idealistic mould, eventually sold The Caribbean Times, The Asian Times and the African Times to a non-Caribbean company. This move was condemned by, among others, committed journalists like me and leading black politicians led by Bernie Grant.
Bernie Grant deplored the sale and predicted that the The Caribbean Times, for which he wrote and gave interviews regularly, would lose its campaigning sting and become a tame, money-making paper. Others said the same of the once hard-hitting and brilliantly analytical Asian Times. And so it has come to pass with both papers a pale emaciated and bloodless caricature of their former selves.
The Caribbean Times and the Asian Times were in my time lively, irreverent and hard hitting papers which always had their hands on the throat of a hypocritical and uneasy Establishment which found it increasingly difficult to break away from the institutional racism that so malevolently scarred the troubled landscape of multiculturalism. Both newspapers energetically exposed and held up to ridicule the Establishments pious pronouncements on the virtues of multiculturalism while on the other hand holding back its advance in the face of hostility from the tabloids and an unreconstructed right wing led by troglodytes of the pro-apartheid, Hang Nelson Mandela pack.
Aubrey Baynes, in my view The Father of Black Journalism in Britain, was the finest personification of publishing idealism in this country. The prematurely balding Baynes was a member of the famous Baynes clan of St. Kitts. They ran some very successful farms, factories and wholesale and retail outlets. Although born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Baynes was the outsider. He was restless, adventurous and fiercely proud and independent. He could have stayed in his small and beautiful island and grown rich, very rich in fact, not only because of the inheritance but because of what appeared to be inherent business acumen.
But he wanted to conquer new worlds. His first stop was New York where he joined a college graduating with a degree in business administration. He did not like America with its ugly and stultifying racial intolerance and proceeded to England. He used to say over endless cups of coffee, his favourite drink and his chain smoking which was to eventually kill him when he was in his early fifties, that the English for all their faults were far more subtle, sophisticated and intellectually and culturally emancipated than “the damn thick, stupid and dim-witted Yankees.”
Baynes oozed charm and confidence and was a lady’s man. He won friends and influenced people of all races effortlessly. He spoke with an Oxbridge accent which seemed more natural than contrived. He had a fund of anecdotes and was one of the wittiest and fluent conversationalists I have ever known.
We first met in 1958 in the office of Flamingo magazine in Marylebone just behind the old railway station. The magazine was run by a man called Ross one of the many West Indians who had served as pilots in the Royal Air Force in World War II. Flamingo was edited by the enterprising historian, Edward Scobie, a writer who spent a lot of his time in the British Museum unearthing some inspiring stories of black achievement throughout history.
Flamingo was for that time, when colour and glossy paper were as rare as gold dust, well in advance of its time. Its cover and some inside pages were in full colour on glossy paper, beautifully illustrated and with some outstanding literary, historical and political contributions by writers like Andrew Salkey, Scobie, Baynes and me. Flamingo was professional in another important sense – it actually paid its contributors and generously too.
Besides Flamingo the only other black publication was West Africa owned and run by the IPC Group which published the Daily Mirror and scores of other publications. It was in the good old neo-colonial spirit of the times edited by a white Welshman. Baynes quickly spotted an opening. Neither Flamingo nor West Africa were properly distributed in what is now called the inner city. He set up a highly successful distribution system, so profitable that he bought two mini vans and employed his own drivers who were also well paid.
From there Baynes ventured into publishing. His first effort was Magnet, a tabloid followed by Daylight International, a fortnightly in magazine format. Both folded within months and Baynes went into a calculating hibernation. In 1975, he made a famous reappearance with The West Indian World, Britain’s first professionally produced news-paper edited by him with a small group of black journalists including myself in offices in Harlesden. It was hard going. Baynes was frequently running up debts – although he honourably paid his journalists, he was frequently behind with his rent and printing bills.
Baynes himself barely kept his head above water, and with the help of well wishers and a liberal white girlfriend, he was able to meet the rent for his flat. He drank alcohol sparingly, ate very little and his only luxury was two packets of Rothmans cigarettes a day. He didn’t want to make money. He had a magnificent obsession – the black freedom struggle. He felt deeply about the plight of his people, about apartheid in South Africa and the continuing poverty of the Caribbean islands and he genuinely sought to change their wretched world.
His well written newspaper, which was keenly read by the “race relations specialists” of Fleet Street, Scotland Yard and even 10 Downing Street, had a large and influential readership in the black community.
Aspiring black politicians, community leaders, intellectuals, writers and concert promoters were regular visitors to the West Indian World office, useful news sources, sometimes providing advertising support and all proud that at last they had a powerful media voice. There was very little advertising but the paper kept going from sales and the small but helpful advertising from West Indian small businesses particularly the hard working and dynamic women’s hairdressing sector. The World needed their money and they needed the editorial and advertising support of the paper.
It was idealism at its most noble and also commercially enlightened. But even this and the sacrifice of its team of professionals who often went without pay could not keep the paper afloat. One of Baynes’ closet friends was the irreverent Hyde Park orator Roy Sawh. When Sawh learnt of the dire straits of the West Indian World he arranged for a meeting which was to ensure the continuity of the paper for another decade at least.
Roy Sawh introduced Baynes to the Guyanese Arif Ali. Arif at that time was successfully publishing a small magazine The West Indian Digest and had his eye on expansion. Arif quickly saw the potential of the World and took it over. Ali and Baynes were like minded. They felt strongly about racial justice, were radical in outlook and wanted to bring down the walls of oppressive British racism.
Unlike Baynes, Arif with only an elementary education could not write but he had an instinctive feel for publishing realising that while editorial was important the commercial side was equally so. A first rate wheeler-dealer Arif introduced a welcome era of stability and even prosperity to the World.
The paper paid its printing bills and rents without much difficulty. Arif also took on more editorial, advertising and administrative staff and paid them reasonably and unfailingly.
Many reporters were trainees with the aptitude for the job. In addition to their pay, journalists on the World could also claim expenses, unprecedented in black or for that matter ethnic publishing.
Arif came out fighting. The new and stronger West Indian World continued the tradition of exposing racist mischief in high places. The authorities, including a seriously embarrassed Scotland Yard, took notice and made efforts to address black grievances. The new developments were also strengthened by the emergence of a new and less romantic breed of black politicians who with the help and encouragement of the World began to realise that the futility of spitting in the wind if they did not immerse their feel in real, practical politics and thus we saw black councillors in hitherto all white town halls and eventually the Mother of Parliament itself opened its doors to the representatives of black and ethnic peoples.
The World produced some outstanding journalistic talent, people like Tony Douglas whose biting and amusing satire in his weekly column in the World won for him a huge and grateful following. Pierre Russell, a versatile writer and a master political and sports analyst, Leo Pennant a stylish lay-out man, Stephen Bulgin, the mastermind behind many human rights campaigns and Caudley George, a news photographer of distinction.
This was the halcyon age of Black journalism. It was bliss to be alive then for we had some very decent human beings and bright and decolonised writers without the mercenary ambitions that were later to sour and demean black journalism and publishing. These pioneers were sickened by racist injustice and devoted their lives to raising awareness of the problems that faced a bewildered, confused and defenceless people and empowered them by devising strategies to see off white racist chicanery and supremacy. Racism is still with us, blighting many lives black and white, but only the most cynical will deny that its diseased wings have not been significantly clipped. This is, in large measure, due to the unalloyed age of journalistic reason, idealism and altruism that dominated black journalism until mercenary developments in the late 1990s.
Briefly what happened was that most of the new breed of publishers and journalists were single-mindedly career and profit minded. We even had the obscene spectacle of the formation of black trade unions whose sole objective was to catapult some “moderate”, opportunistic and mercenary writers into profitable areas of the white-run, controlled and manipulated media.
These are large issues, impossible to deal with adequately in a few thousand words. I hope, with the Editor’s permission, to enlarge on the descent from idealism to materialist opportunism in a later article on The Colorful Times.
