Risk and Resilience in the African-Caribbean Community in the UK

• Author: Hilary Robertson-Hickling and Frederick W. Hickling
• Pages: 77-98

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RISK AND RESILIENCE IN THE AFRICAN-CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY IN THE UK

Risk and resilience in the African-

Caribbean community in the UK

HILARY ROBERTSON-HICKLING

AND FREDERICK W. HICKLING

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IntroductionIntroduction

IntroductionIntroduction

Introduction

The year 2008 marks the 60th year of the arrival of the SS Empire

Windrush in the United Kingdom with 492 Jamaicans on board, and

thus the beginning of the mass migration of West Indians to Britain as

part of the rebuilding effort in the aftermath of the devastation of World

War II. Their arrival and integration into British society in the face of

racism and numerous other challenges, illustrate some of the risks involved

in the process of migration, as well as the remarkable resilience which the

Caribbean migrants displayed. This paper examines the dialectic nature of

the risk and resilience factors encountered by this group of migrants from

case studies drawn from public and private clinical settings in Birmingham

and London, England; explores the causes and the consequences of these

factors in the issues of mental health and African-Caribbean migration to

the UK and concludes that risk and resilience are dialect antipodes for

survival in a hostile, racist environment.

The risks to which the Caribbean migrants were exposed included

possible criminalization and the development or onset of mental illness.

Resilience results in survival, wellness, academic and personal success and

the development and maintenance of healthy, wholesome relationships.

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FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT IN CARIBBEAN MIGRATION AND DIASPORA

Garvey’s (1967) ‘A people without knowledge of its history is like a tree

without roots’ acknowledges that a complete understanding of the risk

experienced by African-Caribbean people and their resilience to these

experiences must begin with an insightful perception of the history of the

forced and free migrations of African-Caribbean people in the latter part of

the previous millennium. Hickling and Gibson (2005), and Hickling (2007)

have suggested that the European invasion and genocidal colonization of

the New World, the enslavement of the African people and the concept of

the Euro-American psychosis, set the stage for the present day dilemma of

Caribbean people. He suggests that the initial European colonizers

experienced a delusion ‘…all that I see is mine, and all therein belongs to

me…’ that underpinned the conquest of the New World and continues to

underscore the desire to expropriate all of the wealth and resources of the

world for their use. A delusion is defined as a fixed false belief, impervious to

rational argument, out of keeping with the cultural beliefs. The European

delusion is the basis of the domination of the rest of the world by Europeans

and Americans for the last five hundred years. Their thinking has had a

negative impact on the migrants and subsequent generations who are forced

into the role of the inferior and subservient other.

The rigours of the Middle Passage and the horrors of African slavery

have been well documented (Williams 1970, Sherlock and Bennett 2000)

and the seminal relationship of the development of contemporary capitalism

and African slavery (Williams 1970) set the stage for the colonial ‘devouring’

of Africa by Europe in the late 1900’s (Pakenham 1991). Embedded in

the legacy of 350 years of African slavery was the forced migration of African

people to the Caribbean and the Americas. The mass movement of people

from Africa and Asia continued after the abolition of slavery in the form of

indenture driven by the demand for cheap labour to fuel the voracious

capitalist maw worldwide. The construction of the Panama Railway and

Canal (1850-1914) provided a major source of employment for migratory

Caribbean labour in the late nineteenth century, where the creation of a

discriminatory glass ceiling between white workers - gold men - and black

workers — silver men — (Newton 1984) was a common feature of

European colonial social engineering.