West Indian World was a weekly newspaper founded in 1971 in London, England, by Vincentian journalist Aubrey Baynes. [1] Under its masthead was the strapline: "Britain's First National West Indian Weekly". [2] The newspaper continued publication until 1985. [3]
Launched at a party on 16 June 1971, with claims to be the first West Indian weekly in London, the newspaper cost 5p, had 20 pages and a print run of 30,000 copies. [4] [5] Baynes has been described as "the true father of the Caribbean/African press in the UK", having previously started the lifestyle magazine Daylight International and edited the short-lived weekly Magnet News. [6] [7] West Indian World struggled financially because of lack of advertising. [8] In 1973, the newspaper was acquired from Baynes by publisher Arif Ali. [9] [10]
Notable staff and contributors to West Indian World over the years included Lionel Morrison, [11] Barbara Blake Hannah, [12] Lindsay Barrett, [13] Neil Kenlock, [14] Flip Fraser, [15] and others.
Events from the year 1884 in Canada.
The Voice, founded in 1982, is a British national African-Caribbean newspaper operating in the United Kingdom. The paper is based in London and was published every Thursday until 2019 when it became monthly. It is available in a paper version by subscription and also online.
British African-Caribbean people are an ethnic group in the United Kingdom. They are British citizens whose ancestry originates from the Caribbean or they are nationals of the Caribbean who reside in the UK. There are some self-identified Afro-Caribbean people who are multi-racial. The most common and traditional use of the term African-Caribbean community is in reference to groups of residents continuing aspects of Caribbean culture, customs and traditions in the UK.
Val Irvine McCalla was a Jamaican accountant and media entrepreneur who settled in Britain in 1959. He is best known as the founder of The Voice, a British weekly newspaper aimed at the Britain's black community, which he established in 1982 as a voice for the British African-Caribbean community. He was honoured as a pioneering publisher for the community, but also faced critics who deemed him sensationalistic.
The Caribbean Times was a British weekly newspaper that was first published in 1981 by Hansib Publications, a publishing house for Caribbean, African and Asian writers and their communities, founded in London by Guyanese-born businessman Arif Ali in 1970. The newspaper covered news, sport and social developments in the Caribbean, targeting the UK's West Indian and African-Caribbean population. It was "an important anti-racist campaigning organ" and the UK's oldest Black weekly newspaper. Hansib brought out other publications, including the weekly Asian Times in 1983 and the African Times in 1984, but in 1997 sold off the newspapers in order to concentrate on producing books.
Claudia Vera Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, in 1958, and played a central role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest annual carnival in the world.
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Carlton Lindsay Barrett, also known as Eseoghene, is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist and photographer, whose work has interacted with the Caribbean Artists Movement in the UK, the Black Arts Movement in the US, and pan-Africanism in general. Leaving Jamaica in the early 1960s, he moved to Britain, where he freelanced as a broadcaster and journalist, also travelling and living elsewhere in Europe, before deciding to relocate to West Africa. Since the latter 1960s he has been based mainly in Nigeria, of which country he became a citizen in the mid-1980s, while continuing his connection to cultural ventures in the UK and US.
Lionel Edmund Morrison OBE was a South African-born British journalist, and a former president of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). He was the first black journalist to hold that office.
Alex Pascall, OBE, is a British broadcaster, journalist, musician, composer, oral historian and educator. Based in Britain for more than 50 years, he was one of the developers of the Notting Hill Carnival, is a political campaigner and was part of the team behind the birth of Britain's first national black newspaper The Voice. Credited with having "established a black presence in the British media", Pascall is most notable as having been one of the first regular Black radio voices in the UK, presenting the programme Black Londoners on BBC Radio London for 14 years from 1974. Initially planned as a test series of six programmes, Black Londoners became, in 1978, the first black daily radio show in British history.
West Indian Gazette (WIG) was a newspaper founded in March 1958 in Brixton, London, England, by Trinidadian communist & black nationalist activist Claudia Jones (1915–1964). The title as displayed on its masthead was subsequently expanded to West Indian Gazette And Afro-Asian Caribbean News. WIG is widely considered to have been Britain's first major commercial black newspaper. Jones, who originally worked on its development with Amy Ashwood Garvey, was its editor. WIG lasted until 1965, but always struggled financially, closing eight months and four editions after Claudia Jones's death.
Arif Ali is a Guyanese-born publisher and newspaper proprietor who migrated to London in 1957. The company he founded in 1970, Hansib, was among pioneering publishers in the UK that disseminated publications of relevance to Britain's black community, others including New Beacon Books (1966) and Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications (1968). Hansib went on to become the largest black publisher in Europe.
Donald Hinds was a Jamaican-born writer, journalist, historian and teacher. He is best known for his work on the West Indian Gazette and his fiction and non-fiction books portraying the West Indian community in Britain, particularly his 1966 work Journey to an Illusion, which has been called a groundbreaking book that "captured the plight of Commonwealth immigrants and foresaw the multicultural London of today".
The African and Caribbean War Memorial in Brixton, London, is the United Kingdom's national memorial to African and Caribbean service personnel who fought in the First and Second World Wars. It originated with a project for a memorial to Caribbean Royal Air Force veterans of World War II who arrived in Britain in 1948 on the MV Empire Windrush; this was an extension of the commemorative plaque and sculpture scheme run by the Nubian Jak Community Trust to highlight the historic contributions of Black and minority ethnic people in Britain. The memorial was originally to have been placed at Tilbury Docks, as part of the commemoration for the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. However, as the project began to evolve into a larger tribute that included both World Wars and commemorated servicemen and women from both Africa and the Caribbean, it was agreed by the memorial recipient – the Port of Tilbury – and the project organisers that a new, more accessible location needed to found. The memorial was ultimately permanently installed and unveiled on 22 June 2017 in Windrush Square, Brixton.
Neil Emile Elias Kenlock is a Jamaican-born photographer and media professional who has lived in London since the 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s, Kenlock was the official photographer of the British Black Panthers, and he has been described as being "at the forefront of documenting the black experience in the UK". Kenlock was co-founder of Choice FM, the first successful radio station granted a licence to cater for the black community in Britain.
Barbara Makeda Blake-Hannah is a Jamaican author and journalist known for her promotion of Rastafari culture and history. She is also a politician, film maker, festival organiser and cultural consultant. She was one of the first black people to be an on-camera reporter and interviewer on British television when, in 1968, she was employed by Thames Television's evening news programme Today. Hannah was sacked because viewers complained about having a black woman on screen. She later returned to Jamaica and was an independent senator in the Parliament of Jamaica from 1984 to 1987.
Song for Mumu is the debut novel of Jamaican-born writer Lindsay Barrett. Written between April of 1962 and October of 1966 while the author lived in Frankfurt, Germany, Paris, and Accra, Ghana, it was published in 1967 in London, where Barrett participated in readings alongside writers associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement.
Peter Randolph Fraser, known as Flip Fraser, was a Jamaican-British journalist and playwright. Fraser was founding editor of The Voice. He also wrote and directed the stage musical Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame, the first all-black cast production to play in the West End of London.