Dina Iordanova offers her thoughts on Steve McQueen's 2020 film Mangrove, and how it - sadly - shows how the racial tension in the 1970s still exists today.
Mangrove (2020): Race, Media and History
l watched Steve McQueen’s Mangrove (2020) with a heavy heart. This film — about a painful trial that exposes the practice of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ stance and the extreme racial prejudice of the 1970s — moved me more deeply than his Twelve Years a Slave (2013).
It may now be 50 years since the events that are depicted, yet l feel this film is as topical today as it can be. Even if transformed and regulated, racism is built into the system, as events of this last summer -- 2020 -- have repeatedly revealed. Racism is alive and well. In Brexit Britain, it is being practiced, legitimately, through government-approved measures such as ‘hostile environment’, double standards in police brutality, and such likes.
Leaving the EU will result in revisions to human rights practices and in cancelling many of the current backstops available to vulnerable groups. The UK is on a downwards spiral back to what we see in the film.
The study of history
I see comments — in various reviews of Mangrove that have appeared in the media — that the trial of the ‘Mangrove nine’, as this episode of history is known, is being restored by McQueen to its proper place in accounting the history of racial injustice in Britain. Reviewers wonder if what happened would be taught more properly now…
Indeed, being a naturalised Briton, l had never heard of this trial during my 22+ years in this country. My son, who was schooled entirely in the U.K., was never taught anything related to race. In his education, the study of history was reduced to a few select ‘themes’ (e.g. Tudors, industrial revolution, Nazis), and l know that since he was in school the position of history on the curriculum has been reduced even further.
Turning to British friends, I asked if their own experiences with history were similar. They confirmed it.
“In the 1970s,” one said, “we were never taught about any of our own history that didn't fit into an extremely narrow worldview. Even where dissent was covered at school it was very much from the angle that it was all in the past and we don't need anything like that any more.
"The empire, of course, was only ever a good thing - civilising the natives and making them fit for the modern world. Everything useful I know about British history came from my own reading after I left school.”
Another friend said that she “never knew about the Mangrove nine case as a kid in the 70s.” But she clearly remembered hearing her uncle praising ‘the great Enoch Powell’.
I was not hugely surprised by their responses. It is typical for the educational system of most nation states when it comes down to history to be selective and to whitewash inconvenient episodes. I remember the shock l felt on learning about atrocities committed by my country-fellowmen that we had never heard anything about (in this instance about atrocities committed by Bulgarian occupying troops in Greece during WWII).
I have since made it a principle to ensure I include depictions of either side of a conflict (when teaching and writing, that is). It was particularly challenging when doing my book on the Balkans/ Bosnian war, as it was full of selective narratives and deletions. However, I always thought Britain should know better than this....
I find it reassuring that a new generation of ethnic minority historians is appearing in this country, like Olivette Otele, David Olusoga, and Kehinde Andrews, who are openly talking of the damage done by the British Empire. Yet I also know a number of senior history and cultural studies people in British academia who seem quite uncomfortable with their scholarship.
For me, the most revealing episode that revealed the degree of lack in the study of British history took place in 2001. While lecturing about Indian film at the University of Leicester l found myself standing in front of some twenty white British students -- and not a single one of them knew what the Partition of India was. Only two in the whole class were aware that India had been a British colony.
As a Bulgarian who had arrived in the UK just three years earlier, I surely felt strange — a recent immigrant myself, it had fallen on my shoulders to fill in the huge gaps in their knowledge of the 20th century’s history of their own country.
An Indian friend based in the UK shared a similar yet much more recent experience. Teaching the work of Ritwik Ghatak for a World Cinemas module in one of the UK’s most prestigious universities, she observed that the students did not know anything about the Partition.
“I was writing the dates and names on the whiteboard with the surreal feeling of delivering a Wikipedia-like summary of one of the most significant historical events,” she said. “It was quite upsetting. I felt -- especially as someone from India -- like I was failing to convey the sheer weight of this, but also disappointed and shocked that I even had to explain the bare basics of a historical event of this magnitude.”
References
25 April 1968. BBC Radio 4, 25 April 2008. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/1968/riversofblood.shtml
50 Years On: Rivers of Blood. BBC Radio 4. 14 April 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09z08w3?fbclid=IwAR0I0x2sJBy7cifCyeXpZVKRaubrG05B272Fjd0wpv_IflrxpTq5ArjGMHg
McQueen, Steve, ‘The UK film industry has to change. It's wrong, it's blatant racism.’ The Guardian, 20 June 2020. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/jun/20/to-see-race-and-class-at-work-in-britain-just-try-a-film-set-steve-mcqueen?
Ramon, Alex. ‘Mangrove relays Black British struggles of the past’, Sight and Sound, 19 November 2020. Available: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/mangrove-steve-mcqueen-small-axe-black-british-collective-struggle?