The knock-on effects of those 500 people’s arrival transformed Britain, leading to the multiracial society we live in today
Africans say to know how well you are doing in life you should compare your achievements with those of age-mates, or contemporaries. To assess the impact of the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948, that would mean comparing its impact with other events that unfolded around the same time. Almost a year before, a blood-soaked India slipped out of the orbit of the British empire, gaining its independence. A year after Windrush, in October 1949, the Chinese Communist party won the long civil war, establishing primacy over Chinese affairs. Three-quarters of a century later, these two countries are producing seismic transformations that are slowly, suddenly unravelling the dominant 500-year transatlantic global order.
Sandwiched between these two event colossi, Windrush would seem on the surface to measure poorly against its age-mates. But the celebrations beginning on Thursday, Windrush Day, will highlight two aspects of its impact. First, the arrival of a group of 500 people from the Caribbean, which signalled the beginning of mass migration to the UK from the colonies. And second, that migration’s knock-on effect of unleashing a multiracial society that, 75 years later, has so transformed these islands that we now have a prime minister of Indian descent by way of Africa, and Scotland’s first minister and Labour leader both of Pakistani heritage.
