![]() ![]() ![]() He also pointed out that a book about black history is also for white readers since it involved them too. Fryer himself had remarked on the dilemma in the book’s preface, before quoting the West African proverb, “knowledge is like the baobab tree one person’s arms cannot encompass it”. ![]() Although fulsomely praised by the likes of CLR James and Salman Rushdie as a breakthrough work of scholarship, others openly questioned whether Fryer, a white Englishman, should, or could, write about black history. Staying Power was not without its controversy either. It was this and a follow-up piece about how the new migrants were settling in that would ultimately inspire his 1984 book Staying Power, a history of black Britain that opens with the immortal line: “There were black people in Britain before the English came here.”Īt the time, Fryer was best known for his eye-witness account of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, which caused his expulsion from the Communist party for its denunciation of the Soviet Union. ![]() Angela Cobbinah’s photograph of members of the Tooting Project in south London meeting in 1979, a time when two out of five black people were born in the UKĪS a cub journalist on the Daily Worker Peter Fryer reported on the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Dock in 1948 carrying “five hundred pairs of willing hands” from the Caribbean. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |