Blacks Britannica: ‘storm chasing’ in search of Black Britishness

Blacks Britannica was supposed to air on WGBH-Boston in July 1978. It didn’t. The film, an examination of life in the UK told from the perspective of Black Britons, was deemed too incendiary. When its director, David Koff, played the original cut to the American public service broadcaster’s director, the latter was so disturbed by the film it was pulled, and another version was recut without the consent of Koff or his co-producer, and wife, Musindo Mwinyipembe. In Britain, the reaction was even stronger: Blacks Britannica was seen as so dangerous that diplomats scrambled to ban it outright. 

What caused such a draconian response? A film, shot in 1978 – three years before the widespread racial unrest of 1981 – which argued that Black Britons were being treated like second-class citizens, and often had to go toe to toe with the state.

Blacks Britannica is an incredibly rare thing: a film that captures the perspectives of Black people across the entire UK. The filmmaking team, who were supported by the academic Colin Prescod, toured the country, going from town to town. As Prescod told me, they were “storm chasing” wherever the dark clouds descended. In the late 1970s that meant everywhere. Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and London all feature, as does my home town of Bradford, where they captured the campaign to free a local textile worker, George Lindo, who had been wrongfully convicted over a robbery at a bookie’s. 

My new book We Were There is all about these hidden histories. It’s a cultural and social history of the Thatcher era, and film and TV are a crucial part of it. I tell the story of Blacks Britannica and Lindo, but also look in detail at Bea Freeman’s Liverpool documentary They Haven’t Done Nothing, which aired on Channel 4 in 1985 and looked at the aftermath of the 1981 unrest in the L8 postcode, otherwise known as Toxteth.

In the Birmingham chapter I look at the sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s appearance on Open Door, a BBC programme in which the broadcaster ceded control for 30 minutes to outside groups. Hall and the Campaign Against Racist Media turned the lens around to show how the broadcaster was complicit in the racism that Black Britain was subjected to by the media.

Empire Road (1978-79), Michael Abbensetts’s landmark two-series sitcom, which starred Norman Beaton and Corinne Skinner-Carter, also features. Horace Ové, who had directed Pressure, the first Black British feature film, in 1977, came in to direct part of the second series, while Dennis Bovell, who had produced Linton Kwesi Johnson’s albums, provided the theme tune and the incidental music. There had never been such a project on television – one powered almost exclusively by Black British talent. 

Maureen Blackwood’s 1992 documentary A Family Called Abrew traces the story of a family – full of sportsmen and entertainers – who had been based in Scotland since the end of the 19th century. The matriarch Lottie, a dancer, was born in Edinburgh and worked all over the UK during the inter-war period. Her brother Charlie, whose accent is pure Leith – rich and dense, almost leaving a trace of itself in the air after he finishes a sentence – would have liked to have been a ship’s engineer. But as a young Black man, he couldn’t get a job in the industry and instead, like his older brother Manuel, ended up boxing. Blackwood’s story takes place in the shadows and margins of Britain, in Soho nightclubs and smoky boxing rings, as well as the stage and screen, where the family worked as extras alongside Paul Robeson.

Too many of these projects are absent from the listicles that rank the ‘best Black British films’. Instead there is a focus on a brilliant but almost exclusively London-based set of features. This absence might be partly explained by the treatment films like Blacks Britannica received. The response to the documentary – which has never been aired in the UK – became one in a series of examples of repressive British state intervention in films made about Black Britons. Ové’s landmark Pressure had its release delayed by three years because Ové refused to recut a scene depicting police brutality.

Three years later Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980), about the exploits of a young reggae sound system in south London, was given an X certificate in the UK, meaning no one under the age of 18 could watch it, while it was banned outright in the US because of its depiction of the sound system crew fighting back against the police and racists. One scene in particular, which depicted the lead character stabbing a far-right street thug, was seen as too controversial.

Even though Blacks Britannica’s British premiere had been pulled after political pressure, the team had arranged successful press screenings at London’s Scala cinema. Time Out’s Mike Phillips – whose brother Ron was in the film – called it “a bold, thoughtful and penetrating [film]”. Variety described it as “an unsettling portrait of an England in transition”, while the Village Voice critic Alexander Cockburn claimed it was a film “that not only reveals, analyses and explores, but mobilised”. There were dissenting voices, too. The Observer’s Philip French dismissed it as “a slick, simple-minded agitprop picture of the sort that unfairly brings serious Marxist thought into disrepute”. BBC executives also hosted a screening, but decided against airing it because it wasn’t ‘balanced’.

The film critic and Hollywood historian Peter Biskind said that the recut version of the documentary, which aired in America on 10 August 1978, was “an object lesson in the anatomy of censorship”, while adding that the decision was “a serious setback not only for Britain’s Blacks, who rarely get a chance to make themselves heard, but also for American independent filmmakers”.

“The mere thought that this upstanding and well-thought-of country could be somehow described as being something other than that was really, really hard for people to take,” Mwinyipembe told me. “It’s a bit like [someone saying] ‘Racism, moi?’ No, that happens over there in America. We don’t do that.”

Koff, Mwinyipembe, Prescod and the film’s researcher Margaret Henry fought, and ultimately won, a four-year legal battle to be able to show their version of the film in the US. That meant the film was able to have the second life they craved for it, although mostly outside the UK. Henry and Koff showed it to enthusiastic audiences at festivals around the world, including Melbourne, Leipzig, Florence and even Baghdad. Their victory came with a high price: they were labelled ‘difficult’.

The banning of Blacks Britannica was a wasted opportunity to listen to the complaints that were coming from frontlines up and down the UK, including Bradford. Despite the film’s arguments being dismissed by some quarters of the liberal media, they stood up to scrutiny: young people were being framed, unemployment among Black people was eye-wateringly high. ‘Sus’ laws (allowing the police to stop and search people at will) were being disproportionately used against young Black men. Communities were being denied access to good-quality housing, while immigration law was being tweaked to make it harder for more Black people to become British.

These weren’t paranoid delusions or a Marxist fantasy. They were problems that continued to be denied until the summer of 1981, when thousands of Black Britons made their anger known during months of unrest. In 1978, Blacks Britannica offered the establishment an opportunity to look at the treatment of Black Britons and change direction. It also gives us an all too rare glimpse at life for Black Britons beyond the confines of the capital.

► We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Vintage.