I came from Nevis in the Caribbean to England towards the end of winter 1962. It was the same year that the British Parliament brought in the Commonwealth and Immigration Act. This Act ended the right of free entry into the UK for people who had been colonised by the British Empire. It wanted to exclude the descendants of those who had for hundreds of years been enslaved on the plantations that helped to enrich Britain’s economic development. It is probably not a coincidence that the ship that looms large in the lexicon of British consciousness, is called The Empire Windrush. Black people were not the only passengers on this ship.

I had travelled to meet my mother who had left me as a baby so that she might be able to work and create a better life than she’d been experiencing in St Kitts and Nevis. I’m sure that she also wanted her children to have a better existence, better education, and careers. In other words, the seeking of opportunities for self-development. It was not only Britain that my parents and others decided to migrate to. Voluntary migration to other islands and countries was already part of living in the Caribbean since the ending of slavery.

Britain and some other countries who took part in the transatlantic slave trade and institutionalised the system of chattel slavery, decided in March 2026, not to be signatories of a resolution of the UN General Assembly, to recognise that the trafficking of enslaved Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The simple question is why didn’t they? The simple answer might lie in looking at what slavery was about and its continuing consequences as well as the monetary implications. This denial also overlooks their roles in helping to create the social and psychological damage of this history. Of course, there’s still much to be researched and said. In the meantime, people like me have always lived, and are still living, with the consequences.

Through my attempt to do some family history, I have calculated that I most likely had my sixth birthday on the boat coming over. Only scraps of memory of that journey remain. I doubt if there was an organisation remotely like Migrant Help back then. By the time I had arrived, my mother’s generation had done the work themselves to navigate the new environment, its peoples, its geography, its language, and customs as well as developing relationships with local white people especially. In my Roman Catholic school in Leeds, there were children of Italian and Polish descent too. I can only surmise that their parents had been children from war torn countries.

I have now lived in the UK for over sixty years, married a white Englishman, raised two children who are now raising their own children. The struggles continue, made worse by racist acts and racist rhetoric. I mention this partly to say that words, actions, and labels matter. For example, one of the reasons I like spending time in Nevis and St Kitts is because I don’t have to think about being cast as “other” most of the time.

Another troublesome issue is, who is called an immigrant? What are the thought processes and actions that establish meanings to such categories? It seems to me that it’s partly a matter of convenience so as to easily identify and manage people who come from elsewhere. Yet in St Kitts and Nevis, as far as I am aware, white people who have migrated there are called “ex-pats.” I have never heard them being referred to as immigrants or migrants.

“Race” and “immigration” are words and actions, as far as I have experienced them throughout my life. They have been deliberately conflated in the British context, as witnessed in and by the Parliamentary Act mentioned above. It seems therefore, that one seemingly cannot be seen or used without the other to define particular groups of people. In the British imagination this was, and still is, applied to black people like me and whoever are the newest and seen as unwanted arrivals.


Fenella Jeffers