Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general.
The Making of a Minister, written (apparently) in the late 1960s, is a period piece, which alludes to ‘coloured men’ and unfolds round London’s Caribbean quarter — its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. The author, Roy Kerridge, claims to have written a ‘novella’, though it reads more like reportage.
When the President of a recently independent Caribbean republic (perhaps Barbados) arrives in London, he is sucked into a world of Black Power activists who are calling for a recuperation of ‘African consciousness’ in the mind of the modern immigrant (a strategy that has evolved into its unsophisticated form in today’s obsession with ‘respect’).
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