1.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan
OK, so I’m going to be cribbing from the Guardian obituary of Ambalavaner Sivanandan a lot here, which brought him to my attention, but I was really impressed by this man’s legacy. I’m ashamed to admit that I’d never heard of him until he died. This is their summation of him:
Director of the Institute of Race Relations who helped change the way Britain thought about race
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/ambalavaner-sivanandan?CMP=share_btn_fb
His story is extraordinary, and has a particular resonance with me because his cultural background is so similar to my father’s. Sivanandan was a Tamil from Sri Lanka, who came to Britain in the 1950s. Hindu Tamils are in the minority amongst the majority of predominantly Buddhist, Sinhalese in Sri Lanka and, according to the article, Sivanandan dressed as a policeman and waved an unloaded gun around to protect himself and his family from a Sinhalese mob. After coming to England and witnessing the anti-black race riots in Notting Hill, he is quoted as saying:
“I knew then I was black, I could no longer stand on the sidelines: race was a problem that affected me directly. I had no excuse to go into banking or anything else that I was fitted up to do … I had to find a way of making some sort of contribution to the improvement of society.”
This quote had heavy resonance with me. No just because he strove to stick his head above the parapet and try and effect a change but because he also used the phrase 'I knew then I was black'. I have long been aware of ‘black’ as a political, rather than a factual or descriptive concept, but it was very interesting to me to hear this man describe himself as such when many of my Sri Lankan relatives are so resistant to the term to define themselves.
The statement - ‘I knew then I was black’ also struck me because it expressed something of my own childhood feelings of ‘we’re all in this together’. To put it another way, I was always shocked that one ethnic minority group would discriminate against another when surely they knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of discrimination. I felt the same about homophobia - how could someone from any minority background, who knew what it was like to be attacked, verbally or physically, be homophobic? Yes I was naive but it was all well meant and I look back on this period of naive idealism with a certain amount of fondness. (I was a genuine bleeding heart liberal from a very young age.)
But enough about me (I told you this was going to be very subjective!). Ambalavaner Sivanandan was responsible for the investigation into procedure which dubbed the police force at the time of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, as institutionally racist. Or, to quote the Guardian article:
His writing was key to ideas that later entered the mainstream with the publication of the
Macpherson report in 1999, which concluded that the flawed handling of the death of Stephen Lawrence was because of institutional racism – defined by Siva as “that which, covertly or overtly, resides in the policies, procedures, operations and culture of public or private institutions – reinforcing individual prejudices and being reinforced by them in turn”.
He was also responsible for many memorable aphorisms, such as “We are here because you were there” (relating to post-colonial migration) and “The personal is not political, the political is personal”
I gave the obituary to my dad to read and asked him if he’d heard of or knew Sivanandan (not as dodgy as it sounds - ‘Oh, this man’s from Sri Lanka as well, do you know him??’) Because my dad was part of a fairly large community of expats when he first arrived. Sadly, he (my dad) didn’t know him but he did tell me how to pronounce his name properly, so it was useful to broach the subject.
Siva's legacy lives on.
2.
James Barry - (Margaret Ann Bulkley)
https://www.facebook.com/StylistMagazine/videos/10157863207694572/
I was lying in bed one morning, trying to put off the inevitable hour of waking, looking through Facebook on my phone, when this video from Stylist Magazine popped up. The video is about a woman born in 1795, who, because of her gender, was barred from going to University, let alone studying medicine, and decided to pass herself off as a man so she could go to medical school. She joined the British army, became a well-respected doctor, travelled the world, was instrumental in effecting many reforms, and was the first surgeon to perform a cesarean in South Africa. The truth was only discovered after her death and the army were so ashamed that they suppressed the records for a hundred years (bloody men, eh, can’t stand to be shown up by a woman!).
The video is highly entertaining if you'd care to have a watch.
So, I think that will have to do for now - this is the first of a multi-part series of forgotten trailblazers (possibly, if I can't think of anything else to write.)
Many thanks for reading!
