Over the last few years, I have been writing an oral history of my village, Uitvlugt. One of its notables is Roy Sawh, who was recently praised by the Guardian as one of Britain’s “civil rights heroes” from the 1960s, with his “exhilarating Speakers’ Corner presence”. Several podcasts and a Zoom webinar about Roy during the COVID lockdown revealed he was in Australia, and last week I learnt from his brother in New York that he had passed on April 23 this year.
Few Guyanese may remember Roy, but in the sixties and seventies, he had earned a certain notoriety across the British Empire for his anti-racist activities in England. Roy was born, in 1934, of an indentured labourer father and first-generation Guyanese mother. The father eventually ended up at Plantation Uitvlugt, where he worked in the cane fields and had six children, of whom Roy was the third. Finishing primary school, and refusing to become a teacher because that necessitated conversion to Christianity, he worked briefly at Plantation Uitvlugt’s office, before sailing to England in 1958 to study accounting. Politically aware, he had joined the PPP.
Arriving in London, he was soon disabused of much of what he had taken for granted in British Guiana about what being “white” meant. As he recounts in his book “From Where I stand”, he was astounded at the sight of white railway porters when he arrived at Victoria Station and asked a policeman whether he was really in London.
In Guyana in general, and Uitvlugt in particular, Whites were overlords on the Plantation, and lived in exclusive gated “compounds” to be served by butlers, cooks, gardeners and mule boys. As in all their colonies, the British cultivated a lifestyle to emphasise their superiority over the hoi polloi, who accepted their pretentions because they ran the economy and colony.
He could secure a job as a toilet cleaner at a hotel near Hyde Park, earning £6 weekly, out of which he paid £3 for a one-room bedsit with a weekly bath. Wandering over to Hyde Park, he encountered Speakers’ Corner where, since the 19th century, individuals expressed their sentiments on every subject under the sun.
He experienced daily racist putdowns even by Whites engaged in menial occupations, which discomfited him since, unlike at Plantation Uitvlugt, they were not economically superior.
He tried his hand at Speakers Corner, but discovered there was not much he could say, and turned to educating himself from newspapers. As a member of the PPP in British Guiana, he had been exposed to politics, since Dr Cheddi Jagan had held several meetings at Uitvlugt during the leadup to the 1953 elections. Roy voted for the first time in the 1957 elections. When PPP leaders visited London, Roy was one of those who attended the meetings, and in 1962 was given a scholarship by the PPP to Moscow University to study philosophy.
By his account, he encountered racism against African students, which the Russian authorities denied, and he promptly quit the course and was deported to England. Dr Jagan and the PPP did not take kindly to his actions, and relations with the PPP soured.
Because of his Moscow foray, Roy found it more difficult to secure employment, and plunged further into educating himself – this time in libraries, where he could be warm. He earned a large following from his Hyde Park speeches, where he skewered white racism and educated non-white listeners by wittily demonstrating that “all skin teeth nah laugh”.
His position on race progressively radicalized, especially after the passage of the Race Relations Act in 1965, ostensibly to protect minorities, but was used against them. Roy evolved and lived by the philosophy of “political blackness”, which posited that if one were not White, politically one was Black, its antithesis.
Malcolm X visited Britain that year, and the parallels with the American situation were made explicit. A Trinidadian, Michael De Freitas, also militantly opposed to racism, became involved in Malcolm’s visit, and soon changed his name to Michael X. He and Roy Sawh launched an organization, “Racial Action Adjustment Society” (RAAS), to counter racism in Britain.
In 1967, Roy, as deputy of another grassroots organization, Universal Coloured People’s Association (UCPA), was charged and jailed for a speech at Speakers’ Corner concerning South African apartheid.
In September 1969, he started his most significant project – the “Free University for Black Studies” – teaching Asian, African and West Indian Studies that challenged European hegemonic discourses.
