Black Teacher

"I wanted to have a couple of books that were more like primary sources; things that help us to understand about Empire like or colonialism from, from a different perspective. This has recently been republished by Faber and Faber with an introduction by Bernadine Evaristo. As per the title of her memoir, Gilroy was a black teacher. She was born in Guyana, and came to Britain in 1952. She had trained as a teacher in Guyana and did more training at the Institute of Education in London. And then she couldn’t get a job as a teacher because she was black. There’s this lovely passage in the book where she describes how her employment prospects became ‘the matter’: she would send letters to people and ask to be considered for one of the hundreds of teaching vacancies in London. And she would get letters back saying, you know, “we have discussed ‘the matter’” or “we’re thinking about ‘the matter’”. They’re quite short chapters and it moves really quickly. She does lots of bad office jobs, and then she gets a job as a teacher. She experiences lots of racism from other teachers and from students, but eventually becomes head teacher in a school in Camden, at the time the only black head teacher in London. That’s the end of the book. She becomes incredibly successful in her career, has two children (one of whom is the cultural theorist and historian Paul Gilroy) and continues working whilst raising them. It’s a wonderful memoir of her experience of migration. In her introduction, Evaristo says Gilroy is one of the unsung heroines of black British literature. It’s extremely interesting as a historical source, but actually, it deserves to be more widely read because it is a wonderful piece of life-writing. Gilroy was born in Guyana when Guyana was British Guiana, a colony. She thinks of herself as British, does British teacher training and learns how to teach primary school children about British history and British literature. And then she comes to Britain and discovers that she’s just not welcome. It really demonstrates the power of the narrative in the colonies that Britain is the motherland, and you’re part of this imperial family. She comes to Britain in 1952 when it’s suffering from a labour shortage – especially in teaching – and post war devastation and immense poverty. Yet the defining experience for her is one of continuous racism. It stops her from getting a job that she’s very, very well qualified for, for years and years and years. Even when she gets into teaching, she constantly experiences this racism. It shows you the difference between the image of colonialism from the people who are living in the colonies, what they were taught to expect, and the realities in the metropole, where people have no sense that all this is actually part of a quid pro quo. The British Nationality Act was passed in 1948, and when she comes to the country, Gilroy has the absolute right to live and work in Britain – but there’s no sense among the people she’s working with of that fact. They don’t understand how she’s there. They don’t know anything about Guyana where she comes from. It really shows you the fundamental inequality, not just economically or racially but also inequality of interest and understanding."