‘The Making of a Minister’, by Roy Kerridge

Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general.

The Making of a Minister, written (apparently) in the late 1960s, is a period piece, which alludes to ‘coloured men’ and unfolds round London’s Caribbean quarter — its boundaries roughly at Marble Arch, Bayswater, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. The author, Roy Kerridge, claims to have written a ‘novella’, though it reads more like reportage.

When the President of a recently independent Caribbean republic (perhaps Barbados) arrives in London, he is sucked into a world of Black Power activists who are calling for a recuperation of ‘African consciousness’ in the mind of the modern immigrant (a strategy that has evolved into its unsophisticated form in today’s obsession with ‘respect’). The West Indian president, no stranger to political temptation and folly, is subsequently lured into a black, anti-colonialist pressure group based in north London known as LAPFIT (the League of African Peoples for Fighting Imperialist Tyranny).

Did LAPFIT exist? (The internet throws up a LapFit.com travel food tray company for children — ‘Turn the drive-thru mess into easy, clean fun!’) In a few deft strokes, Kerridge conjures a time in 1960s London when Black Power sought to rehabilitate the notion of Mother Africa. Emmanuel Davis, the LAPFIT Secretary, is a card-carrying communist from Sierra Leone with a fondness for gin and cider (mixed). His vain hope is that Africa and African culture might provide an antidote to the ‘defilemement’ of British colonialism and redeem the black masses.