The Windrush and the BUMIDOM: The memorialization of Caribbean migration

Caribbean migration to Europe: A comparative perspective

In order to fully grasp the connections between their history and memories of their history, it is crucial to understand the lives of these Caribbean migrants, and the historical context in which their migration to France and Britain took place. In other words, a historical comparative analysis of Caribbean migration is needed so that we can better understand how their past shapes their present and impacts upon our shared perceptions of this past. As Cubitt (2007) notes, ‘understanding how the flow of the past has produced each successive present moment and understanding how each such moment has construed the past that it deems to be significant cannot be separate undertakings: the task is always to connect them’ (p. 22).

In the twentieth century, movement from the Caribbean to Europe has mostly taken the form of labour migration which has been inextricably tied to European colonial histories. The communities settling in Britain throughout the twentieth century were predominantly from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, which were part of the British Empire until their independence in 1962 (Jamaica and Trinidad) and 1966 (Barbados), while Caribbean communities arriving in France came from Guadeloupe, Martinique and (to a lesser extent) French Guiana, territories which were French colonies until 1946 when their status was converted into that of French overseas departments. ³ The political structures of these territories are significant, in terms of their relative implications for political citizenship. Caribbean people migrated to Britain as colonial subjects until 1948, when they became ‘citizens of the UK and Colonies’ via the British Nationality Act. During the BUMIDOM era, Guadeloupeans and Martinicans migrated to metropolitan France as French citizens. In theory, citizenship guaranteed equality to all communities, irrespective of race, cultural heritage and ethnicity; yet Caribbean people were in both cases attributed a migrant, racialized identity by the state and by white metropolitan citizens, which did not take into account their British or French citizenship.

What sets twentieth-century migration from Caribbean islands to France and Britain apart is the time scale of these arrivals. Mass migration to Britain surged during the ‘Windrush years’ between 1947 and 1962. ⁴ It then slowed down in the 1960s and 1970s as legislation was passed to strengthen immigration controls; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, for instance, stipulated that only those who were born in Britain or who had one parent or grandparent born there had right of entry. In the French case, migration from the Caribbean began 16 years later and slowed down in 1982 when the BUMIDOM ceased operating, although migration did not completely stop. A new agency, the Agence nationale pour l’insertion et la promotion des travailleurs d’outre-mer (ANT) (National Agency for the Integration of Workers), was created which placed greater emphasis on mobility than emigration. Yet despite these differences, a shared migratory history can be observed at the turn of the twentieth century. World War I brought conscripted soldiers from the Caribbean colonies to fight for France, and many remained in the metropolitan centres afterwards. Soldiers from Guadeloupe and Martinique were mobilized alongside 500,000 colonial subjects from across the French empire (Orosz, 2008: 245). The figures are even more striking in the British context: 16,000 West Indians fought alongside 1.4 million Indians, 458,000 Canadians, 332,000 Australasians, 136,000 South Africans and 25,000 West Africans (Jackson and Kitchen, 2016: 6). ⁵ Migration flows continued to France during the inter-war years, which saw the arrival of middle-class students and intellectuals. The Black Caribbean community in Britain at this time was more heterogeneous and consisted of working-class seamen, nurses, bus conductors and clerks, as well as doctors, lawyers and students (Winston, 2006: 348).

Migration trends to Britain and France diverged following World War II, when both countries urgently needed workers to plug the labour gap and rebuild damaged infrastructure. Britain looked to its Commonwealth countries for this labour, including the Caribbean, and the first ships arrived in 1947: the SS Ormonde reached Liverpool in April 1947 and the Almanzora docked at Southampton in December 1947. Memories of these arrivals have long been overshadowed by the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. As Donnell (2019) explains, ‘significantly they were not subject to the same cultural and political responses that hailed the arrival of the Windrush’ (p. 196), and the following section explores why the Empire Windrush has attracted more attention in the public, cultural and political imagination than the other two vessels. Initially, the migration rate was slow – around 1000–2000 people per year in the early 1950s – but by 1966 more than 360,000 people of Caribbean or West African origin were living in Britain (Winston, 2006: 372–373).

Meanwhile, immediately after World War II, France encouraged immigration by workers from Italy, Spain and Portugal before turning to its former Caribbean colonies. In total, approximately 160,000 people migrated through the BUMIDOM itself, and their transportation and housing were financed by the bureau. Significantly, the BUMIDOM was implemented in 1963, only a year after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was passed in Britain, which curtailed free movement for citizens of Commonwealth countries and British colonies by limiting migration to specific categories of workers or dependents. Remarkably, the United Kingdom was restricting immigration from the Caribbean (and beyond) at the same time as France was actively orchestrating it. The difference in constitutional situation is important here. France was encouraging migration from its overseas departments which, constitutionally, were and remain an integral part of the French Republic. In contrast, the United Kingdom was limiting immigration from the Caribbean at a time when these Caribbean islands were becoming independent nations, which meant that they could enact their own citizenship laws regarding Commonwealth citizenship. Yet Patel argues that there remained an imperial logic to British immigration policies. Decolonization and the end of empire did not mean stopping immigration from the Commonwealth completely, but stopping a particular kind of immigration: the arrival of non-white British and non-white Commonwealth citizens. As Patel (2021) explains, ‘immigration legislation in 1962, 1968, and 1971 introduced various technical legal distinctions in order to uphold political definitions of “connection” and “belonging” to Britain’, thereby retaining the constitutional structure of the Commonwealth but also preventing non-white citizens from entering Britain without control (p. 7). Policies of immigration and citizenship were inextricably tied to matters of race. As a corollary, and as will be argued, contemporary commemorative practices of migration organized by the state continue to be inflected by the legacies of colonialism and racism.

What is unique about migration to France is its institutional nature. In effect, the BUMIDOM acted as a labour recruitment agency, organizing the transportation, employment and housing of mostly young workers, and because the Caribbean islands were administered politically as part of France, this paradoxically intranational movement was technically a population transfer within France’s extended borders, rather than a migration. This population transfer was encouraged for several reasons; cheap labour from the Caribbean would help boost France’s economy while also lowering the unemployment rate on the islands and reducing political fervour for independence, thereby enshrining Caribbean dependency on the French state. While France actively facilitated mass Caribbean migration, Britain was not as keen to welcome what it considered an ‘influx’ of Black people arriving on its shores, despite its need for cheap labour. In fact, in a complication of the dominant narrative of post-war immigration to Britain, which suggests people of colour were welcome before 1962, it appears that the authorities were panicking about an increased Black and Asian presence even before the first ships set sail. By implementing the 1948 British Nationality Act which allowed people from the white Dominions to live and work in Britain as ‘citizens of the UK and Colonies’, the government also unwittingly granted the same rights to people in the New Commonwealth, including those in the Caribbean (Hansen, 1999). Indeed, the British government unsuccessfully tried to prevent the Empire Windrush from leaving the Caribbean. When these attempts failed, Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee suggested diverting the ship to East Africa and employing Jamaican labourers in a groundnut scheme (Rattansi, 2005: 49). Functionaries were also sent from the Colonial Office to the Caribbean to convince potential migrants that jobs were scarce in Britain (Rattansi, 2005: 49). Unlike in the French case, then, those who migrated to Britain did so on their own terms and of their own accord. This means, as Perry (2015) explains, that post-war migration from the Caribbean to Britain was ‘an unprecedented movement of choice by self-selected individuals’ (p. 59).

Despite these differences, migrants were treated in similar ways, particularly in their quest for housing. Many homeowners in France refused to let houses to Black Caribbean tenants, meaning that Caribbean people were forced to apply to housing agencies which dealt specifically with migrants. Similarly, in Britain, it was almost impossible for Black Caribbeans to find housing, because of the ‘colour bar’ policy which discriminated against people of colour. They were given little state assistance, apart from the temporary accommodation offered to those arriving on Empire Windrush in a reopened war-time shelter at Clapham South underground station. ⁶ They had to search for accommodation by themselves but they were almost always turned away. Work was also racialized for Caribbean migrants in Britain and in France; in both cases, they were offered low-skilled jobs at the bottom of the social hierarchy, regardless of the skills they had acquired in the Caribbean.

Considering these migratory flows within their specific cultural and historical contexts, then, clear differences emerge regarding the extent to which the state was involved. Yet parallels can also be observed, notably in the ways in which migration policy was influenced by colonial ideologies, which caused Caribbean people to be subjected to racial discrimination in France and Britain. How do these similarities and differences influence the place that Caribbean migration occupies in British and French cultural imaginaries?

Cultural memories of the ‘Windrush’ and the BUMIDOM

Cultural memory is a form of collective memory, shared by a particular community. As Halbwachs (1925) reminds us in Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, notions of memory and community are intertwined, as memory is created by the social interactions that individuals have with others. Cultural memory not only provides an understanding of the past but also creates a form of shared identity and a means for communicating this identity to new members of the group. Jan Assmann (2008) distinguishes between cultural memory – an institutionalized form of memory which is ‘exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sound of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent’ (pp. 110–111) – and communicative memory, which is based on the recent past and emerges in everyday interaction. Phenomena such as images, texts, symbols and rituals do not have a memory of their own but trigger our memory of a particular event because of the memory we have already inscribed in them (Assmann, 2008: 111). Erll and Rigny (2006) advance this argument further, positing that literature is not only a medium and object of remembrance, but also produces knowledge about how memory works for particular communities in a process they term ‘mimesis of memory’: ‘by imaginatively representing acts of recollection, literature makes remembrance observable’ (p. 113). In this vein, an examination of literature and culture, produced by and about the migratory phenomena of the BUMIDOM and the ‘Windrush’, reveals how memory works for the Caribbean communities implicated in these practices, as well as how memory can be instrumentalized on local and national levels for political purposes.

A temporal gap is observed in the existence of literary and cultural works about migration from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean; representations of migration from the French Caribbean islands to metropolitan France appeared later than their Anglophone counterparts. This is in part explained by the different time frames of mass migration, but this is not the sole explanation. The cultural memory of the ‘Windrush’ became more prominent during the 1980s and 1990s, as the collection of individual stories about Caribbean people arriving in Britain became crystallized into a coherent narrative. A metonym for both Caribbean migration and the Black British experience, the ‘Windrush’ became a myth which was celebrated by Caribbean communities and politicians as a ‘success story’ of integration. As Mead (2009) explains, ‘the iteration of the Windrush as a cultural symbol, and in particular of the figure “492”, marks a transformation of the event from a collection of individual histories into a composite, symbolic, imagined and monadic moment of arrival’ (p. 140). The cultural memory of the BUMIDOM, however, has not emerged as a canon of works but as a series of individual, personal responses to migration. This lack of a literary canon about Caribbean migration is illustrative of France’s ambiguous relationship with issues of race.

Four distinct, chronological stages in representations of the ‘Windrush’ can be identified. The first cultural responses appeared in the 1950s, only a few years after the first ships had docked. These creations have now become canonical works about the Caribbean emigrant experience, and well-known writers, artists and musicians, such as the Jamaicans Errol Lloyd and James Berry, the Barbadians George Lamming and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and the Trinidadians Sam Selvon and Lord Kitchener, are now described as ‘Windrush artists’ who came to the metropole in search of a more established cultural landscape. Their work was supported by the BBC, and the weekly radio programme Caribbean Voices introduced Caribbean flavours to new British audiences. These predominantly male-authored, autobiographically inspired writings – such as Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) and Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) – feature male protagonists and focus on the transatlantic journey and the first arrival in urban metropolitan centres. However, as Lowe (2018) remarks, most of these texts do not refer to the arrival of the Empire Windrush itself: they describe later ships, reminding us that many journeys were made across the Atlantic in subsequent years, but they are framed by the ‘Windrush’ story by contemporary critics and readers in an illustration that ‘their own (fictional and factual) specificities [have been] obscured by the magnitude of the Windrush symbol’ (p. 546).

The next generation of literature and culture about the ‘Windrush’ was not produced until the early 1980s and peaked in the 1990s. This was when the myth of the ‘Windrush’ was overtly created by publishers and critics, as well as by the writers and artists themselves, as a response to the institutionalized racism of previous decades, as Donnell (2019) explains:

The changing political landscape, antiimmigration rhetoric, and the racism of Enoch Powell and the National Front in the 1970s, followed by Thatcherism with its politics of exclusion and institutional racism in the 1980s, brought into sharp focus the task of representing and claiming a place for black subjects in Britain. (p. 201)

This demonstrates clearly Assmann’s argument that cultural memory is shaped by external agents for specific political purposes; in this case, to create a narrative of a multicultural, multiracial Britain in which people are united by a shared British identity. Creative work produced during this time did not necessarily focus its attention on the arrival of the Empire Windrush either but offered broader reflections on the difficulties faced by Black people in Britain. The Jamaican dub poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry collection Inglan is a Bitch (1980) is a scathing critique of poverty, police brutality and institutional racism and a powerful example of literary activism from this period.

The 50th anniversary of the arrival of Empire Windrush in 1998 also saw cultural memory being appropriated by politicians and institutions. This date spurred collective, institutionalized commemorations and celebrations of the Black British experience, as the ‘Windrush’ became a crucial reference point in Black British history. The political context played a fundamental role in these celebrations, as Britain sought to redefine itself as a diverse and inclusive nation following the election of New Labour in 1997. Yet this hope and optimism was tempered by the Stephen Lawrence inquiry of 1998, which concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist (Donnell, 2019: 203). This period saw a proliferation of non-fiction and oral history collections as people began reflecting on contributions made by Black British people to arts, culture and society: examples include Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998), edited by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips; and With Hope in their Eyes (1998), edited by Vivienne Francis. The ‘Windrush’ was also inserted into the cultural memory of Black Britain through a series of creative works commissioned by the BBC for the 50th anniversary celebrations, as further evidence of memory being appropriated by state institutions for specific political purposes. These commissions include the poem ‘Remember the Ship’ by John Agard (2000), the story ‘Out of Hand’ by Jackie Kay (1998) and the poem ‘The Men from Jamaica are Settling Down’ by Benjamin Zephaniah (2002). Interestingly, Kay’s contribution is the only one to explicitly feature the Empire Windrush. While the commissions do diversify the ‘Windrush’ narrative by acknowledging the existence of women and child migrants, these works also confirm the dominant strands of the ‘Windrush’ narrative – namely, that the ship was the first to arrive in Britain – and thus ‘merg[e] with the objectives and agendas that flavoured the 1998 moment and after’ (Lowe, 2018: 547).

The fourth wave of cultural representations emerged in the last decade, as descendants of the ‘Windrush generation’, galvanized by ‘the Windrush Scandal’, have been spurred on to tell their story about life as Black Britons today. This surge in creative response takes place against a backdrop of racial reckoning, as anti-racist movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, have sought to unite people globally in combatting acts of violence against Black people and provide a safe space for their self-expression. In the last decade, cultural responses have taken a variety of creative, fictional and non-fictional forms. These include works of oral history (Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, ed. by Colin Grant (2019)), poetry (Hannah Lowe (2014), Ormonde), novels (Louise Hare (2020), This Lovely City), television dramas (Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle, dir. by Kwame Kwei-Armah (2019)) and books for children (K N Chimbiri (2020), The Story of the Windrush). These works are mostly produced by people of Caribbean origin now living in Britain, who seek to remember the journeys their ancestors made to Britain. Unlike earlier work, many of these outputs do focus on journeys made on the Empire Windrush, perhaps as a response to the political scandal of 2018, to emphasize the sacrifices made by these migrants who have given so much to Britain and who have received appalling treatment in return.

To a certain extent, a similar pattern is observed in representations of the BUMIDOM, despite the difference in time frame. The first texts about twentieth-century migration appeared during the 1920s and 1930s. These were written by highly influential writers, such as Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, who had emigrated to France during the pre-BUMIDOM years. As McIntosh notes, the difference between Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean writers is generational. The important Anglophone writers arrived during the era of mass migration to Britain, while French Caribbean writers arrived earlier, during the inter-war years, alongside elite intellectuals (McIntosh, 2015: 105). This means that a body of French Caribbean literature about individual migratory experiences had already been formed when the BUMIDOM was established, meaning that it was not as urgent to create a form of shared identity through culture as it was in Britain at this time. The first creative works to focus explicitly on BUMIDOM operations started to appear in the 1970s and 1980s. These were mostly written by people with personal experience of the BUMIDOM; therefore, inevitably, they contained an autobiographical element. These texts often appeared at the beginning of an author’s literary career and acted as a springboard for further success; Mon examen de blanc (1975) was the first novel written by feminist activist and midwife Jacqueline Manicom, while Xavier: le drame d’un émigré antillais (1981) was the second novel of Tony Delsham, a Martinican journalist and writer who has since developed a large œuvre of writing.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a shift in representations as well-known figures of Caribbean literature and culture, who did not necessarily have personal connections to the BUMIDOM, began to incorporate it into their work. It was only then that the bureau became a significant reference point in the Caribbean imaginary. Some writers focused explicitly on the BUMIDOM – Maryse Condé’s (1997) Desirada, in which the narrator’s mother Reynalda leaves for France via the BUMIDOM to gain professional opportunities and personal emancipation, is a case in point. In fact, Desirada offers insightful reflections about the unreliability of memory because the narrator Nina receives conflicting information about whether her mother’s migration actually occurred through the BUMIDOM or not, and the instability of personal memory in the novel reveals Condé’s concern that a collective Caribbean memory can never truly exist. Other authors used the bureau as a contextual marker to explore broader issues of migration and racial identity. This awareness occurred at a time of heightened racial tension in France. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then leader of the far-right party Le Front national, reached the second round of the French presidential elections, and in February 2005 the French law on colonialism was passed, a law which sought to value the positive aspects of French colonialism. Furthermore, November 2005 saw a 3-week period of riots which began in Clichy-sous-Bois and spread to other urban centres, following the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré who were electrocuted while hiding from the police. Through their creative work, then, Caribbean artists and intellectuals played a part in the reckoning with France’s colonial history and its postcolonial immigration and associated racial violence. Their protagonists reflect on what it means to be French but simultaneously to be denied a French identity because they are of colour, their families originating from France’s former colonies.

In the last 20 years, there has been a surge of cultural production about the BUMIDOM, as members of an increasingly large Caribbean diaspora in the metropole reflect on their family history. These items encompass a huge array of genre and media. The BUMIDOM has been memorialized in documentaries – L’Avenir est ailleurs (2006), directed by Antoine Léonard-Maestrati, and BUMIDOM: des Français venus d’outre-mer (2009), directed by Jackie Bastide, are key examples – and also in fictional films, such as Jean-Claude Barny’s Le Gang des Antillais (2016). In addition, theatre productions, children’s fiction and graphic novels have been created, many of these to critical acclaim – for example, Péyi an nou (2017), Jessica Oublié and Marie-Ange Rousseau’s bande dessinée, was awarded the Prix Étudiant de la BD Politique France Culture in 2018. Unlike texts written in previous decades, these works are produced by descendants of BUMIDOM participants and so they do not transmit the personal memories of their creators. Rather, they operate via a form of transgenerational memory transfer, in a process Hirsch (2012) terms ‘postmemory’. The ‘generation after’, who did not live through the particular events, remembers the BUMIDOM through the stories and images passed down to them. The subsequent generations become emotionally invested in these stories and take on these transferred memories as if they were their own.

Thus, while a canon of creative work has been produced by ‘Windrush artists’, whether they came to Britain on the Empire Windrush or not, the same cannot be said in the French context. As I have outlined, a rich corpus of cultural work has been created about the BUMIDOM, but this has not been promoted by French cultural establishments in the same way as British institutions have supported the ‘Windrush’ canon. Rather, the corpus emerges spontaneously, indicative of France’s attitude towards racial difference and its Caribbean communities. France’s Republican model of inclusion means that the universal notion of ‘Frenchness’ operates above all racial categories, although ultimately being French is synonymous with being white in contemporary French discourse. The state, therefore, cannot be seen to be overtly supporting a literature and culture which proudly asserts its Blackness. Moreover, in political and social terms, Guadeloupeans and Martinicans are French, with the same rights and responsibilities as French citizens living in mainland France. In state discourse at least, BUMIDOM participants and their descendants are not Caribbean migrants but French citizens and therefore supporting their work would contradict this Republican ideology.

Strikingly, most of the works produced about the ‘Windrush’ are created by people of Caribbean origin now living in Britain, whereas work on the BUMIDOM is produced both in mainland France and in the Caribbean islands, indicative of the departmentalization structure which enables people to divide their time between the two locations. Much recent work is published either by local publishing houses in Guadeloupe or Martinique, or is self-published, which suggests a lack of state support for accounts of the BUMIDOM. This current lack of institutional support contrasts sharply with what is happening in the United Kingdom. Cultural events about the ‘Windrush’ have been organized by publishers and creative arts organizations across the country. For instance, in 2018, Penguin Books organized the festival ‘Arrival’, supported by the Mayor of London, and this event included writing workshops, talks and activities for children. In 2020, the Windrush Caribbean Film Festival was inaugurated, an event which aims to educate audiences about the contributions of the ‘Windrush generation’ and their descendants through film. In comparison, to date, there has been no national memorialization of the BUMIDOM, either in France or in Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Remembering and forgetting the ‘Windrush’ and the BUMIDOM

According to Aleida Assmann (2006), political memory, like cultural memory, is mediated and is transmitted across generations through institutional sites such as monuments and museums in a top-down approach, for specific political purposes (p. 215). Assmann (2006) gives national memory as the example par excellence of political memory, arguing that in the memory construction of hegemonic nation states, ‘only those historical referents were selected which strengthened a positive self-image and supported specific goals for the future’, while minority nations do commemorate defeat, provided that it adheres to the national narrative of the tragic hero (p. 217). The expression ‘devoir de mémoire’ is ‘omnipresent in political discourse’ when dealing with these issues of collective memory and particularly memories of traumatic history (Ledoux, 2013: 240). Ledoux (2013) explains how the term emerged in France during the 1990s to commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and from the late 1990s it was applied to postcolonial memory practices more generally, specifically around slavery and the Algerian War of Independence (p. 240). ‘Devoir de mémoire’ implies a state-endorsed memory practice that recognizes victimhood and the state’s role as perpetrator.

With this in mind, I posit that, on one hand, the French state has intentionally avoided memorializing the BUMIDOM because it is not an episode of its national history which promotes ‘a positive self-image’, in Aleida Assmann’s terms. Memorializing the BUMIDOM would mean recognizing the racialized and gendered treatment of France’s Caribbean citizens and acknowledging the stigmatization and trauma that this bureau has caused. On the other hand, it seems that the BUMIDOM has been obscured by, but is also implicit in, debates around the memorialization of transatlantic slavery, given that the abolition of slavery in 1848 locked the Caribbean islands into a colonial relationship of dependency and oppression, which is associated with the perpetuation of forms of unfree labour that arguably continue into the BUMIDOM. State-led initiatives have been implemented to commemorate the abolition of slavery, in an illustration of this official, political discourse of the ‘devoir de mémoire’. For instance, in 2001, the loi Taubira was passed, in which France was the first nation globally to declare the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades as crimes against humanity, and 10 May was announced as a national day of commemoration. These state-led commemorations are controversial because they promote a hexagonal, Eurocentric version of the past. Black and Caribbean activists and scholars are committed to ensuring that Caribbean people are active agents in these memorial practices and that their memories are not obscured by a white metropolitan lens. An example here is the Comité Marche du 23 mai 1998 (CM98), an association which emerged to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery and seeks to recognize the role of the enslaved people in their own emancipation. ⁷ The specificities of the BUMIDOM are thus subsumed by these broader memorial debates. Meanwhile, the British government has commemorated ‘Windrush’ migration through a variety of national monuments and museum spaces, alongside more local, grassroots memorialization practices. Aleida Assmann (2006) states that any memories which do not fit the heroic narrative of nation-state construction are suppressed (p. 217). Thus, the official memorialization of Caribbean migration to Britain tends to omit the more problematic aspects of this history, and local groups and communities must fill this commemorative gap.

At present, there is no national, official museum space in metropolitan France or the Caribbean which commemorates the BUMIDOM. In 2007, the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration was opened in Paris, although it was not officially inaugurated until December 2014 by President François Hollande, following a name change to Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration. ⁸ The museum is housed in the exhibition space of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, a building constructed for the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931. Many scholars have commented on this surprising location for a museum of immigration; Aldrich (2010), for instance, describes this decision as ‘incongruous, ironic, or even shocking [. . .], especially given the sensitive issue of immigration from France’s former colonies’ (p. 21). The museum houses a permanent exhibition entitled ‘Repères’, which examines immigration to France from the nineteenth century to the present day, alongside temporary exhibitions about migration in a wide range of time periods, cultures and contexts. However, there are stark omissions in this narrative. The BUMIDOM does not appear in the exhibition, and nor do other (post)colonial migrations, such as the journeys of the Pieds-Noirs (the European settlers who lived in Algeria during French rule). This silencing of France’s (post)colonial histories is illustrative of Connerton’s ‘repressive erasure’, the most extreme form of the seven types of forgetting outlined by Connerton (2008) and the strategy employed by states to shape the memory of a nation by openly or covertly erasing memories of troubling events (pp. 60–61). A new permanent exhibition is in the process of being curated, under the direction of Patrick Boucheron, historian and professor at the Collège de France who has worked alongside, among others, the former director of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, historian of race Pap Ndiaye (replaced by Madame Mariane Saïe in 2022 when Ndiaye was appointed to the government as Education Minister). The exhibition is planned to open in Spring 2023. In a published report, ⁹ the scientific committee explain their proposals for the new exhibition – it will be both thematic and chronological, and the BUMIDOM will feature as a key event in the 1960s which explains the Black presence in France (Bertrand and Boucheron, 2019). In a period where interrogating the colonial past is at the forefront of global public discourse, it is crucial that the BUMIDOM is incorporated into this new narrative of twentieth-century migration to France.

There is no museum dedicated to the BUMIDOM on the Caribbean islands either. Departmental history museums on the islands focus either on the early ethnographic development on the islands or on Creole traditions and important cultural figures. Moreover, the museum landscape of Guadeloupe is dominated by the Mémorial ACTe, a museum commemorating the history of slavery. Built on the site of the sugar factory Darboussier, the Mémorial ACTe opened to the public in July 2015, and the museum offers a specifically Caribbean narrative of the history of slavery. The heavy psychological burden of slavery continues to weigh on the collective Caribbean imaginary, and so, understandably, Guadeloupeans and Martinicans have prioritized the commemoration of slavery in all its brutality over the inscription in public space of more recent migratory phenomena. ¹⁰

Commemorating the BUMIDOM thus seems to be a task for local grassroots movements, both in the metropole and in Martinique and Guadeloupe. These community groups organize debates and exchanges around issues related to Caribbean migration. Many operate in the virtual realm and seek not only to inform and educate younger generations who are perhaps unfamiliar with the BUMIDOM but also to unite people whose shared history is formed around it. For instance, ‘Enfants du BUMIDOM’ is a Facebook community which encourages dialogue between descendants of BUMIDOM participants, although some are reluctant to discuss their difficult experiences, and for others, remembering the BUMIDOM means admitting that they had to resort to financial help to migrate to France. Recently, groups have organized their own exhibitions to share testimonies and display photographs and artistic creation about the BUMIDOM. The collective travelling exhibition ‘Partir pour la metropole, une odysée Populaire 1960-1980’ is one such example, organized by L’Association Hexîle, 60 AdaDa and Sonjé and first held at 60 AdaDa art gallery in Saint-Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris from 31 October to 22 November 2020 before being displayed in suburbs across Ile-de-France.

There is currently no monument, statue or memorial through which remembrance of the BUMIDOM can occur for Caribbean communities. Interestingly, however, a memorial statue is located at Saint-Denis airport in Réunion which is connected to a specifically local history in which the BUMIDOM was implicated. Inaugurated in November 2013, the statue is a bronze sculpture of a young child clutching a suitcase, and clinging onto the child is an adult, visibly upset at the child’s departure. This is a statue to commemorate the so-called ‘Enfants de la Creuse’. Approximately 2000 children were forcibly removed from their homes in Réunion because the island was overpopulated and children were deemed a drain on resources. Some of these children were orphans but many were not. The BUMIDOM financed the transportation of these children who were placed in rural areas across France. However, the department of La Creuse received the largest number of children since it was underpopulated and underdeveloped, hence the name ‘Enfants de la Creuse’. This trauma was only officially recognized recently, after a lawsuit was filed against the government in 2005 by a group of 19 former Réunionese ‘children’ for violating French laws concerning children’s rights. In 2014, the government acknowledged their moral responsibility towards those who had been deported, and in February 2016 a commission headed by Philippe Vitale was created to investigate the matter, of which the findings were finally published in April 2018 (Vitale et al., 2018). ¹¹ The statue was moved to a peripheral space in the car-hire area shortly after its inauguration, following complaints that it disrupted the image of Réunion as an idyllic tourist destination (Vergès, 2017: 164–165). To a certain extent, then, this episode still remains hidden from view, despite recent proposals to create a ‘lieu de mémoire’, to borrow Nora’s term, in Guéret (la Creuse) ¹² and to install a commemorative plaque at Paris Orly Airport, which was indeed erected on 17 February 2022. ¹³

In the French context, commemorative work has been crystallized around this traumatic case, though only after constant lobbying by the Réunionese community. Conversely, the institutional attempts to remember post-war Caribbean migration to the United Kingdom focus on the positive contributions made by people of Caribbean origin to the national life of the country, and local organizations, charities and community groups must carry out the more difficult commemorative work to remember the darker episodes of the Black British experience. The principle organization which undertakes this complex task is The Windrush Foundation. Created in 1996 by Sam King MBE and Arthur Torrington, this London-based charity is run by the directors Verona Feurtado, Dione McDonald and Arthur Torrington. The organization has a wide remit and seeks to ‘promote good race and community relations, build cohesion, eliminate discrimination and encourage equality of opportunity for all’, according to its website. ¹⁴ In addition to organizing events to celebrate artists and intellectuals who arrived on the Empire Windrush, the organization has also created educational resources for teachers, parents and students.

Meanwhile, the national commemoration of the ‘Windrush’ occurs primarily through statues and memorials, in a stark contrast to memorialization practices of the BUMIDOM. A national monument, erected at Waterloo station, was unveiled on Windrush Day 2022, and the Windrush Commemoration Committee, chaired by Baroness Floella Benjamin, has chosen Basil Watson to design this monument. Furthermore, Hackney Council commissioned Thomas J. Price and Veronica Ryan to create two new sculptures to honour Hackney’s ‘Windrush generation’. The artworks are marble and bronze sculptures of Caribbean fruits, in recognition of the artists’ own memories of visiting local markets as a child, and were unveiled in October 2021. In addition, local authorities are involved in the changing of place names and street names, in a further example of state-sponsored memorialization. For instance, the area in front of Brixton Tate Library was renamed as Windrush Square in 1998 for the 50th anniversary celebrations. However, there is some resistance among the Caribbean communities about these government-led initiatives. Torrington has spoken out about his anger over the lack of consultation between the government and Caribbean communities. ¹⁵ He is also frustrated at the choice of Waterloo station for the national memorial; passengers arrived at Tilbury Docks and spent their first nights in Brixton, and therefore in his view, the Caribbean community has closer connections with Brixton than with Waterloo and Lambeth. Vernon has proposed an alternative monument which is arguably more appropriate because of its close connections to the ‘Windrush generation’. He is working with the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust to raise £2 million to recover the anchors of the Empire Windrush, currently at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Algeria, in order to create a new national monument to Caribbean migration, which would be inaugurated in June 2023 for the 75th anniversary of the arrival of Empire Windrush. ¹⁶ Other examples of community-led commemoration include The Bronze Woman, a 10 foot-high statue acknowledging African-Caribbean motherhood, inaugurated on 8 October 2008. ¹⁷ Local Caribbean communities are thus reacting against ‘the intentionally selected and organized, mostly institutionalized concept of a memory community’ (Ißler, 2019: 811), by determining their own narrative of migration and selecting how to commemorate it themselves.

While in the United Kingdom, then, there has been some institutional attempt to incorporate Caribbean migration into the fabric of British history – even if the political and cultural memory of Caribbean migration principally rehearses the dominant ‘Windrush’ narrative – this is lacking in France, primarily because of France’s political model of Republican universalism which refuses to recognize the identity category of race. Activists, academics and public figures have long contested the ‘colour-blind’ policies of the French government which, while intending to avoid racial inequalities, in fact exacerbate the problem by refusing to acknowledge that racism exists. Mame-Fatou Niang, Rokhaya Diallo, Assa Traoré and others have become public targets on social media for speaking out about racial injustice. A gendered element is visible here too, as it is most often Black women who are criticized for voicing their opinions about race. While the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protests of Summer 2020 galvanized support for people of colour who have faced discrimination for generations in France and elsewhere, the French government has repeatedly refused to engage in discussions about race and racism. On 10 June 2020, President Emmanuel Macron was quoted in French newspaper Le Monde blaming academics in humanities and social sciences for an increase in public debates about race and identity, explaining that the ‘ethnicization’ of French society risks splitting the Republic in two (Stromboni, 2020). Activists are thus having to do the work that the French government refuses to do, that is, recognizing the value of France’s minority populations and acknowledging that their existence in France cannot be separated from France’s imperial history. This clash between French Republicanism and Caribbean activism is rendering French society more polarized; activists are becoming more outspoken in speaking out against the government’s inaction, but in turn the authorities are condemning these views all the more strongly.

As I have argued, then, the French state is reluctant to memorialize in cultural and political terms the BUMIDOM because, in their eyes, it would contradict French Republican values. It would mean admitting that the bureau operated on racial lines and shining a spotlight on Caribbean communities who, despite their French citizenship, continue to be treated as racialized migrants, even today. Of course, racial discrimination is widespread in the United Kingdom too; the ‘Windrush scandal’, the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017 and the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on people of colour are all evidence of these structural racial inequalities, despite the government’s insistence that the United Kingdom is not institutionally racist in a report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, published on 31 March 2021. State commemoration of the ‘Windrush’ therefore seems disingenuous when considered against the backdrop of racial injustice, particularly as the Windrush Day was promoted particularly by Theresa May, also architect of the ‘Hostile Environment’ policy which sought to make life so difficult for undocumented migrants, including those who had arrived legally from the Caribbean, that they would be forced to leave. Activists and campaigners have been calling out this hypocrisy; the government claims to celebrate Britain’s diversity while deporting these very same people. In both France and the United Kingdom, then, activists and grassroots movements have sought to create a different narrative of Caribbean migration, and one which emphasizes agency, inclusion and diversity.