1920 British race riots and the struggles of somali seamen

[LobsterUnit]

Blacks and Arabs were set upon in all Britain’s major ports and suffered savage beatings, fire bombings and murders. In February the violence erupted in South Shields, in April in the London docks; in May it hit Liverpool and Cardiff in June. The intensity of the violence seems to have increased at each stage. In Cardiff the rioting lasted several days, and resulted in three deaths. A Cardiff Somali, Ibrahim Ismaa’il, later remembered in his memoirs that


;A Warsangeli [from a Northern Somali kabil or clan], Abdi Langara, had a boarding house right in the European part of town… As soon as the fight started all the Warsangeli went to defend Abdi’s house… Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived—one of them was left for dead.26A local newspaper report described how:A black man was spotted—he was first insulted and then attacked by three whites, one of whom blew a whistle. This seemed to be the expected signal, because hundreds of persons rushed up from the neighbouring street, including many women and girls—who had sticks and stones, and flung them at the unfortunate coloured man as they chased him along the street.27Black and Arab seamen never took these attacks lying down, even when they were outnumbered.


One account from the 1919 riots tells how a Somali imam, Hadji Mohammed, ‘was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him, so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof and watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton’.28


A white racist was killed on the first night of the race riot in Cardiff. One historian writes that ‘the police protected the main black settlement around Loudoun Square (Because they feared the blacks would kill more whites if they didn’t) but left unguarded a secondary area of largely Arab settlement nearer the city centre. This population moved into Butetown for self-protection’.29

The subsequent police report, openly betraying its sympathies, concluded that ‘if the crowd had overpowered the police and got through, the result would have been disastrous, as the black population would probably have fought with desperation and inflicted great loss of life’.30In South Shields fighting broke out after an Arab seaman punched a racist trade union official outside the dockside union offices. A large crowd then attacked the Arabs who, outnumbered, ‘armed themselves with knives, sticks and revolvers’ and drove back their attackers’,31 while in Liverpool black seamen had defended their boarding houses against a police raid, one ‘armed with a poker, others with revolvers, knives and razors. One policeman was shot in the mouth, another in the neck, a third was slashed on face and neck, and a fourth had his wrist broken’.32 Soon afterwards a West Indian, Charles Wotten, escaping police clutches after one raid, was cornered by a crowd of 200 to 300 racists who threw him into the docks and pelted him with stones until he drowned.33

There were some reported spontaneous acts of solidarity from individual English people, and socialist newspapers such as Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought would excoriate ‘negro-hunting’ and ask the rhetorical question, ‘Do you wish to exclude all blacks from England? If so, do you not think blacks might justly ask that the British should at the same time keep out of black peoples’ countries?’34 But in the main the blacks and Arabs were left to put up resistance by themselves against the mobs and their organised collaborators in the forces of ‘law and order’.35

Part 2: 1919-1950—The seamen and the inter-war years

The reaction of the authorities to the 1919 mob violence was to further crack down on the Muslim seamen. Arab and Somali sailors were reclassified from their previous status as British passport holding workers to unwelcome and problematic ‘aliens’, their rights as British subjects deliberately and callously stripped away.In 1921 the Cardiff Town Clerk recommended that destitute seamen ‘be repatriated forthwith, or accommodated in a concentration camp’,36 and in 1922 hundreds of Adenese were repatriated out of the city. Seamen, including numbers of Somalis and Yemenis in South Shields who had lived in Britain for a long time, many with white wives and British-born children, were told that they had to prove their citizenship rights from scratch, and many had their British status removed for lack of documentation or financial resources to register it.The National Union of Seamen seized the opportunity to do a ‘British First’ deal with the shipping owner. The government and Home Office issued new restrictions in 1920 and then 1925 under the Aliens Act which had been targeted in the first place against poor Jewish immigrants:All coloured alien seamen were henceforth to be registered with the police and to carry an identity card marked ‘SEAMAN’ in red ink bearing a photograph and a thumb-print. It was argued that the last was necessary because it was more difficult to tell coloured men apart and some more positive means of identification was needed! The holder was not a person but an invisible man, a black; only the criminal associations of a thumb-print could give him an identity.37The NUS was granted the sanction in 1930 that Arab and Somali sailors specifically should be picked last (if at all) and go on a forced rota that meant they had to take any job offered them if they were not to lose all rights not only to a job but the right to stay in Britain.

The order specified that;A white card shall be issued…to any Somali or Arab who satisfies the Port Consultants that he is a bona fide seaman and lawful in this country. The white card shall only be issued after being stamped by the National Union of Seamen and the Shipping Federation… Officers engaging Somalis or Arab crews shall be informed that it is very undesirable to mix Somalis and Arabs of other races, and asked to specify which one they prefer.38Soon Somalis, Arabs and their families were pushed into starvation and destitution.Police harassment and a local authorities’ ban on them moving out of the depressed port areas effectively segregated these ‘aliens’ and their families, treating them as a ‘social menace’. Very top of the list of moral crusaders was Cardiff chief constable James A Wilson, who clearly had a pathological hatred of ‘race mixing’:
The coloured seamen who live in our midst…are not imbued with our moral code, and have not assimilated our conventions. They come into contact with the female sex of the white race, and their progeny are half-caste, with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents.39Wilson was delighted to hear of the South African Immorality Act of 1927 that forbade sexual relationships across racial boundaries.The Arab and Somali seamen responded to the attack on their already precarious existence by launching a militant and vigorous campaign to smash the rota, picketing shipping offices and lobbying to get the union’s position changed. The violent confrontations that took place in Cardiff and South Shields as a result ended with Arab and Somali sailors being prosecuted and receiving ‘exemplary’ sentences tagged with judicial recommendations of deportation.The seamen looked to radical forces to help them. In Cardiff they were drawn via activists in the Seaman’s Minority Movement and the International Transport Workers’ Federation into a working alliance with the Communist Party and the Colonial Defence Association it influenced. One historian tells how ‘the International Transport Workers Federation sprung to the defence of coloured men in one of the perennial conflicts over national insurance. The following year black men were involved in a movement to increase wages within the NUS.’ As Neil Evans has written in his meticulous study of the period, ‘Butetown was viewed by the Communist Party at the time as one of the most productive areas to hold corner street meetings and sell literature. In the late 1930s the Colonial Defence Association led protest marches and deputations about relief scales to the City Hall in Cardiff’.40An article in the Negro Worker (edited by Trinidadian communist and Pan-Africanist George Padmore) in 1933 under the byline of Minority Movement port organiser Harry O’Connell was headlined ‘Race Prejudice in England’. It reported a debate at a Cardiff City Council meeting over the issue of relief for blacks and concluded, ‘Coloured and white workers in Cardiff must unite to fight for equal employment rates for all workers irrespective of colour and race. As long as the British Slavemasters are able to play out one section of the working class against another, they will be able to rob and exploit both alike’.41 In 1934 the anti-socialist LCP leader Dr Harold Moody was forced to complain (with some exaggeration) that ‘the coloured people of Cardiff are mainly Communists, simply because no one else has seen fit to give them a helping hand’.42

These Muslim communities organised among themselves for their political, social and religious needs as well as forging links with radical anti-racist organisations. In Cardiff the British Somali Society (BSS) and the Somali Youth League (connected to organisations in Somalia) were formed in the mid-1930s, and the BSS leadership collaborated with the Communist Party.43 The United Committee of Coloured and Colonial Peoples Organisations, set up to unite the migrant seamen of Cardiff across national, ethnic and religion divides, sent an Arab delegate, Mohamed Hassan, to the landmark 1945 Pan-African Congress organised by George Padmore in Manchester, along with two delegates from a Somali Society.44 There were also welfare organisations and a religious grouping, the Islamia Allawia Friendly Society, in Cardiff45 and similar formations in South Shields. As Ansari has written, ‘Muslims in Britain found themselves forming part of a broader multicultural identity, which coexisted with and sometimes transcended religion’.46After the Second World War renewed migration from the colonies boosted the Yemeni populations. As Richard Lawless has written:In the 1950s and 1960s a new influx of Yemenis into Britain found employment not in shipping but in heavy industry, especially in the steel and metal-working plants in Sheffield and Birmingham… Some Arab seafarers moved to the Midlands where new employment opportunities were opening up in industry and in this way forged a link between the two phases of Yemeni migration to Britain.47


Meanwhile, harassment of Muslim sailors by the police and local authorities in Cardiff and South Shields continued. A sharp reminder came in 1952 when a Somali seaman, Hussein Mattan, was fitted up by the police for the murder of a local woman and hanged after a sham trial. It was not until 1998, 46 years later, that his widow Laura and sons Omar and Mervyn managed to get this gross miscarriage of justice recognised as such and Mattan’s name cleared.48

[LobsterUnit]

http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=288

[Jeffo]

Cliffs.

[Basra-]

What happened to the Good men specie--REAL MEN of Somalia? They killed each other in the civil war. And the rest of sissies are walking around in the west in their tight jeans and drinking their lattes. They cant even accomplish a basic thing like marrying our xalimos-- our sisters need to go Chinese Gu.s zero, and candaan Gu.s jileec. and Jamaicans Gu.s I cant take it.

[xiimaaya]

Basra that's the royal noble warsangeli ppl. The sultans of sultans in somaliland. I am so proud of my ancestors wallahi.

[Basra-]

Xiim

Do u know--Reer Shiire??? Amina Shiire ? have u heard of her? She is my aunt. Married to my uncle who is Habar Yonis. He looks like a white man, and she looks like the queen of Sudaan! looooo l She is the darkest woman I ever met. And all her relations are the same. Whenever they visited us--we used stare at them with amazement. Very sweet people though, humble. Black beauty. They have jiiini gravitating faces, and luscious figure with emphasis oh the waist and booty. Mashalaah. But their madowness scared us. Their children are light skin too--thanks to my uncles genes, but they are others who are caramel beautiful skins. Very pretty children.

[thehappyone]

[Basra-]

thehappyone

How the hell do u that imaging? Can u private me and tell me?

[thehappyone]

Thanks huuno. That looks like a alotttttttttttttttttttttt of work. I'll pass, but thank u sooooooooooooooo much for willing to share. So sweet.

[Lancer]

What happened to the Good men specie--REAL MEN of Somalia? They killed each other in the civil war. And the rest of sissies are walking around in the west in their tight jeans and drinking their lattes. They cant even accomplish a basic thing like marrying our xalimos-- our sisters need to go Chinese Gu.s zero, and candaan Gu.s jileec. and Jamaicans Gu.s I cant take it.

[Rambie]

That Gu.s obsessed slut. You can't help but to think it was the only thing she ever used 2 play with in her childhood. Imagine that, Girls playing with a dummy in a room while Basra is sucking an artificial Gu.s on the corner. That bitch is so fucked up.

[Basra-]

Basra aways speaks the truth, even when fat, single mothers with wecel kids like rambie call her 'sluts'!

[zidane88]

What happened to the Good men specie--REAL MEN of Somalia? They killed each other in the civil war. And the rest of sissies are walking around in the west in their tight jeans and drinking their lattes. They cant even accomplish a basic thing like marrying our xalimos-- our sisters need to go Chinese Gu.s zero, and candaan Gu.s jileec. and Jamaicans Gu.s I cant take it.

[Basra-]

What happened to the Good men specie--REAL MEN of Somalia? They killed each other in the civil war. And the rest of sissies are walking around in the west in their tight jeans and drinking their lattes. They cant even accomplish a basic thing like marrying our xalimos-- our sisters need to go Chinese Gu.s zero, and candaan Gu.s jileec. and Jamaicans Gu.s I cant take it.

zidanee

Go read about this guy---in my reading of aristocrats I came across him. He lived among the ottomans. I think he looks like u in old age.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wortley_Montagu

[Rambie]

Basra aways speaks the truth, even when fat, single mothers with wecel kids like rambie call her 'sluts

And I spouse this is your true form you garac product of a one night stand in Egypt?

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=359601

You horny harlot, I bet you even wash your mouth with a Gu.s I won't be surprised if you already have a one sticked up in your ass all day so you can feel something when walking (like always ) You half breed Madam pimped by her own father, don't project your reality on me.





Go and find your father's ceeb (if he is alive that is) Hoe, you can dig him out if you ever run out of Gu.s and add it to you stock/collection in the refrigerator

Vanish Whoore