Beyond the Secret Garden: Powerful Politics: The Right to Speak Up


in British Children’s Books In the latest in their Beyond the Secret Garden series, Karen Sands-O’Connor and Darren Chetty examine children’s books dealing with protest and politics.


In 1979, Des Wilson wrote a book for young people on politics entitled So You Want to Be Prime Minister: An Introduction to British Politics Today (Peacock). In it, he argued ‘we should all become politically aware and knowledgeable, and should at least use our democratic rights’ (210). In the chapter ‘We the Voters’, Wilson comments ‘Another, and particularly sad, influence on British elections in recent years has been the question of race’ (48). Wilson goes on to discuss the Smethwick campaign of 1964 (though he did not mention the infamous campaign slogan of this election); Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech; and Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 Panorama appearance before concluding, ‘It is a sad fact that in a country that prides itself on tolerance, prejudice on race cannot be ruled out as a factor that can swing votes in some parts of the country. It is also a sad fact that there are politicians who will take advantage of this’ (50). Racism is depicted negatively, but without describing the effects of racism on actual Black and Asian people in the country. Wilson argues that everyone should become involved in politics, but his rhetoric suggests that it is white British people that have the real political power.


In fact, many of the earliest writers to discuss Black and Asian voices in politics were themselves members of radical political parties, including the British Communist Party and the British Black Panthers (which, unlike the American Black Panthers, included many members from Asian backgrounds). Most of these writers were reacting to a racist British society. Roxy Harris published extracts from George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, books dealing with Black Power and the Black Panther movement, in a book called Being Black (New Beacon 1981). Harris included discussion questions for each extract to ‘help black people, young and not so young, to sort out for themselves where they stand on many of the crucial political, social, economic and cultural issues that they face’ (5). Similarly, A. Sivanandan, the director of the Institute of Race Relations, published a series of four illustrated books on British racism that directed readers to consider the institutional and state causes of racism. The last of these, The Fight Against Racism (IRR 1986) included a list of Black deaths in police custody and prison, noting that ‘No death in police custody has been allowed to go unchallenged’ (28) and reproducing photos of protests against the


police. Former Black Panther Farrukh Dhondy published fiction that exposed the limitations of white British commitment to anti-racism in the short stories ‘KBW’ (East End at Your Feet Macmillan 1976), ‘Come to Mecca’ (Come to Mecca and Other Stories Macmillan 1978), and in the novel The Siege of Babylon (Macmillan 1978). Dhondy’s novel, based on the Spaghetti House Siege of 1975, also explored what would push Black Britons into radical politics; at one point in the novel ‘Three hundred police with horses, vans and batons, have stopped a crowd of about a hundred young black people marching’ in protest (80-1). Poverty, racism, unemployment, lack of access to education and police oppression pushed young Black and Asian people to become political in the 1970s and 1980s.


More recently, the six books in the Black History series by Dan Lyndon (Franklin Watts 2010) offer an excellent introduction to the topic for teachers and Key Stage 2-aged children in particular. Two of the books in the series, Resistance and Abolition and Civil Rights and Equality explore protests in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and the UK. In the first of these two books alone, there are sections on The Amistad, Nat Turner, Nanny of the Maroons, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Katherine Auker, Olaudah Equiano, and Elizabeth Heyrick.


14 Books for Keeps No.248 May 2021


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