The GLC Story Oral History Project Interviewee: Ansel Wong Interviewer: Zahra Dalilah Date of interview: 16 February 2017 Location: Goldsmiths University, London Z: Could you describe your entrance into politics, when you became politicised when you were younger? What’s your background? A: I think my country of birth was Trinidad and Tobago and my political awareness grew out of the politics of the country, leading towards independence. So it was based and rooted within an anti-colonial dialectic. So that growing up as a young child, you were able to participate in a lot of discourses and discussions that were going around at the time, a drive/that derived from from independence from Britain. So that my political awareness grew out of that dialogue. Listening to politicians listening to analysts, a key mentor in that was Dr Eric Williams author of capitalism and slavery because he spoke very intelligently and movingly about aspects of history putting it in the context of freedom from enslavement, freedom from colonialism and as a young child you grew up in that environment running around listening to some of these things and some of the buzzwords that helped to sort of formulate in your mind a position. So for me, for example when Eric Williams spoke about ‘massa day done’ which is the dominance of the master, the dominance of the plantation owner is finished, something like that resonated in your mind as a child massa day done and that remained and resonated with me very clearly. And the other one was when we gain independence, he said, we are talking about mother Trinidad and Tobago not mother india not mother Africa. So immediately even though our heritage, our roots were from Africa and India, where we are now in that country, that’s our mother, that’s our roots, that’s our heritage. Z: Thank you and could you talk about the journey from Trinidad and Tobago to finding yourself in the UK and your background in terms of studying where you lived, where you grew up? A: Well most people primary and secondary education you undertook was in the colonies at the time or the independent nations. Our education system was geared toward tertiary education, either in the country, er, the mother country i.e. the United Kingdom or you would go abroad either to Canada or the States as a part of a scholarship program or a different kind of program. So natural progression, educational progression, was to a UK university, not a red brick university but it had to be a major university. And we had a system of examination leading us to what is called a scholarship exam so that that scholarship exam entitled you to Oxbridge. And everyone competed in the whole island, competed for that one or two places to Oxbridge and if you didn’t get that, you were considered a failure. So my progression was to try something, and I came fourth in the overall scholarship papers so I didn’t get into Oxbridge so I had no alternative but to look at an alternative red brick. Yeah, and I got into Hull to read English and American Studies because English was my particular subject which was a big disappointment to my family, a big disappointment to everybody, going leaving Trinidad all the way to go to a flipping red brick university called Hull in Yorkshire [laughing] nobody knew where it is or what it is about. Nevertheless, you’re moving away from your country to migrate there. At the same time my family had migrated as a result of the pull factors of economy and advancement. So there were push and pull factors moving people from one part of the Caribbean to the next or from West Africa to the next. I was pushed in terms of the educational input and progression. The rest of my family was pulled because they needed labour to oil the British economy. So both generations, both constituencies coalesce in London. So my sisters and so my brothers came over for those reasons and I came over for other reasons. So from that, within that kind of dialectic within those dimensions there were little tensions as well. There were also tensions who those who didn’t choose to go to the United Kingdom, but chose to go to the Canada and the USA. But the fact that what happened, the ones who went to Canada, the ones who went to the UK, in terms of successes, financial successes, and academic successes were very different from what happened in the UK. Within Trinidad and Tobago a degree from the UK automatically entitled you to certain benefits. A degree from USA or Canada even if it’s from Harvard or even if it’s from any of the Ivy League universities, still didn’t match a red brick university in the UK. So there was a value system in those sort of movement, so those were some of the factors that pushed me into there, and placed us in a particular position in United Kingdom society. So I arrived in Hull, in 1965, [to] go straight to Hull University in Yorkshire, studying English and American Studies. There I met other Caribbean people mostly people from Trinidad and Tobago and from other islands and from other colonies of Britain and other countries. And that in itself was an interesting experience because we came in as black students, within UK society, there were certain notions, certain expectations, certain stereotypes that they had of us. And I think that is best illustrated by the fact that the British Council, in this... UK were looking after the welfare of us as foreign students, students from the commonwealth, and their notion of what we need to do to integrate into British society was very much based on these kind of stereotypical, kind of racist perceptions of us. So for example, part of our induction at university, was to show us how to flush a toilet, part of the induction was to show us how to use a knife and fork; because there was a perception that we didn’t know how to do these things. As Trinidadians we found that really laughable and we did it and we laughed at it among ourselves and talked among ourselves about how stupid it is; but we still went through the process. Laughing to ourselves and afterwards, how ignorant these people are. That was the kind of environment at university level that you had to deal with in terms of those perceptions. Obviously there were other perceptions, that we were very good at cricket or that we were very good at playing music. And that in a sense also was true to a certain extent. So for example, in terms of cricket, we all played cricket we all knew how to play cricket, but we never joined the university teams, this was the SU, because we just didn’t have that, I don’t know, discipline or whatever it was, to buy whites, to by nets, things and so on. But when the university asked us to play we had a team, a British Council team, and we played the university’s second team and beat them badly, because we had fast bowlers, and people bowling in their normal shoes, all sorts of things, and wearing all sorts of colours but for us it was a fun game. But the university took it very seriously and they were defeated and they felt we were not being loyal because we had these skills and yet we weren’t willing to participate and represent the university. But for us cricket was a fun game, you do it in your own time, and we enjoyed that. So that put us in conflict in a sense with the university, that reinforced our separateness from the university itself that was also codified by the fact that we were black or the fact that we were from different countries. Out of that I got involved in radical politics we had the radical student alliance the rsa was the left wing of student politics, the nutters as they said in terms of radicalism and Marxism I naturally progressed towards that, my friends were also involved in that. It was around May 65-67 or thereabouts were there were a lot of things happening in Paris and the Vietnam war and so on. So we were very heavily involved in activism and political action within the university and within Hull as a city. As black student we became part and parcel of us. We had our own organisations, we had the Caribbean society, that was a basis that gives us an opportunity just to feel at home with our culture and so on. And it was open to everybody so the opportunity for people to enjoy theirselves in a Caribbean milieu, the chance to experience something from that aspect. It was good in hull because we had a professor who was an expert in Caribbean literature so there was always a predisposition towards welcoming anything that was Caribbean, so that would enable us to happen. But the activism continued, we did a lot of work, we twinned with Hai Phong in Vietnam we raised money to buy ambulances and send them to Vietnam for the Vietcong. Like Paris when Paris erupted we too erupted, took over the university, expelled all the senate and everybody and elected a new senate of five students who became the senators of the university, I was one of the five, elected as senator. Then we negotiated to have a parallel structure in terms of the management of the university, the students become represented on the senate, and the five of us together with the university senate become the governing body for the university. So that radicalism, that approach toward revolution and what we thought was left wing manifested itself around that whole period when the Vietnam War was kind of generating a lot of support among students. And then coming down from university to London during the break time whether it was a summer break or mid-term break, it was very easy for us to drive down to London and join the urban elite in London, all the other London students, who had a much more we looked up to actually because … London was a kind of centre. We did our thing in Hull, we did our thing in Leeds, we linked up in the north but when you get down to London it was a different thing altogether because for the first time you’re engaging with the community not as university students, it was a community of people, of ordinary people and that was quite an eye opener. That meant to say that we didn’t see ourself as a kind of elite as academics, university graduates and so on. We were engaging very much with that second and third generation young black community. The best example of that was around the West Indian students centre in Earl’s Court. That was the central communal space for all Caribbean students, paid for by the Caribbean government. So each government contributed to maintain this building, it was a very big in earl’s court. And there you would go there was a library there was a dinner, a three course dinner in 16p, there was a bar. This was in 1965-68 and 69, 70 and so on. But it was an opportunity to do that, it was a place you could go and sit down, you can read books, newspapers from the Caribbean was there, you have a library where you could go and study, a quiet study, you had a billiards room, you had showers and everything. It was a nice little student centre. Next door to it was the West African student centre where the West African students were involved, so there was this kind of student orientated politics. At the same time, bubbling over that was what was happening in the black communities across London. And those people were agitating to get involved in what they see as this prestigious place, middle class students from the Caribbean enjoying themselves and all of the facilities and they, not getting the opportunity to do so. Our politics, which was of a populist nature wanted us to bring these young people in and bring the community in so that the community would engage with students. I was involved with the union of west indian students which is the west indian students union. The union of west indian students was a national, international thing body across the whole world and west Indians students union was the UK branch. Both branches myself and Tony Martin became Professor Tony Martin who is one of the foremost scholars on Marcus Garvey, we both managed and ran those two organisations. So we developed quite a lot of work within that centre to politicise the young people and begin to address the issues of black people in the United Kingdom, black people in London. Which before, as students we weren’t particularly au fait with because we were looking at global issues across the world not true what was happening locally. And that is where activism came out, a lot of things happened in that centre, the centre became a focal of political activity. To such an extent that the government threatened to cut off funding if we don’t stop and introduce measures to stop the community coming in. And that battle went on until in the end the government, all of the Caribbean governments because they all were contributing, British Caribbean governments, at different levels, like the United Nations, they all have a percentage they will contribute and they all decided that when Pms came, when ministers came on tours and visits, or whatever it is they would come to address the students but while they came to address the students there would be very discordant elements within there, that one carrying on. It was a place where radicals came. So after Tommy lee and all of those people who did a black power salute at the Olympics, when they passed through London they came there and addressed the students. We invited them to come and address the students. That was seen as not the remit of this centre, we shouldn’t be engaging those sort of politics and so on. Michael X would come and visit the centre, all the radical movements would be there, the Caribbean artists movements, would have meetings there regularly. And these are Caribbean writers, Andrew Sorkey, Eddie Braithwait, John la Rose everybody coming to London and meeting as Caribbean writers in exile, as writers. So all this was ahub of political activity and I was chairman of the house committee, I ran that centre, and also the vice chair of the union of west indian students unions across the world. So I became very much meshed into that. And then we started to do things also of a radical nature. Two examples, one was the creation of a black supplementary school and we called it the CLR James supplementary school. CLR James agreed, he wrote to me, I asked him and he said yes, call it by my name. And we set up that school to teach English basic skills, black politics and culture and so on for the young people. And the second one was an arts group called the black arts workshop. And the idea was to look at black art, black performance, black theatre. At that time, in America, people like Amir Baraka, Leroy Jones and Essence magazine all of those radical the black aesthetic was being promoted by Ed Bullins and … others like him. We embraced all of that, the black is beautiful movement. That workshop was an opportunity for people who were creative, poets, writers, dancers, everybody coming together as young first gen and second generation black people, and opportunity to perform their art and their craft. Linked to that also a lot of groups at the same time, the black united and freedom party in London, new cross, around here. The facembas which was another theatre performing group black theatre group, and we were the two main proponents of black art. Black arts workshop and the facembas sometimes we’d join together and put on shows, all within this idea of revolution and taking the art and looking at art in a different perspective, and creating something we then called a black aesthetic. So yes, black is beautiful, and therefore the beauty is determined not by European characteristics, European norms or metaphors or anything like that. We are creating our own idea of what it is that we can call beautiful, what it is that we can call excellent, that appeals and relates to our culture. Sorry I’m going on … [microphone changes position] Z: What was your career progression after university? A: Left university in 1968, I then came down to London. I decided that because again my family had been settled in, the ones who went to Canada, ones that went to the USA and ones who remained in the UK. There was no real wish then to return, which would have been the original idea: come to university, do your degree and teach at whatever it was. But I decided then to stay on, do a postgraduate certificate in education, which at the time was called education in tropical areas. It was just a pseudonym for teaching English as a second language which, that was the words used later on! But in those days, in the 1960s, 69-70, they decided on this notion of ‘education in tropical areas’. And it’s the same thing like second language teaching. I did that and I got my post graduate certificate in education, did a teaching practice at Sydenham Girls School in Forest Hill and decided well, look, this is it. I was offered a post at Sydenham and decided to take it. So therefore in one fell swoop, my life, then really said, this is it, I’m grounded here in the United Kingdom, I’m grounded here in London. And my career was within that decision. So I then started to get involved in other things and other activities, developing the black arts workshop as I referred to earlier and also involving in a political organisation called the black liberation front which was one of few black organisations like the Panthers, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Front and the Black United and Freedom party and we all were developing approaches that were trying to introduce programs of resistance, programs of rebellion, that kind of thing. And campaigning against certain things, campaigning against the SUSS laws, campaigning against police brutality, campaigning against inability to enter into nightclubs and so on. Wherever there were opportunities we would certainly coalesce a community and join that particular campaign. Whether it’s the mangrove restaurant, whether it’s over 4 people arrested and beaten up by the police at Oval station or whether it’s around direct activism of certain individuals, say for example around the siege, the Spaghetti House siege. Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge is a Spaghetti House and some of our young people went in there to rob it. And it went wrong and they took hostages and they belonged to our organisation, the Black Liberation Front, at least two of them belong to the organisation, one was a criminal and that again placed us into direct limelight. Because in some instances we’d been very romantic about revolution very romantic about what we wanted to achieve and not realising what is the real implications of what we were saying and what would happen in terms of bringing the radical approach towards religion. So for me I was at university, I struggled with liberation theology in terms of my faith as a catholic, coming to this country as a Jesuit priest, therefore having difficulties accepting the dogma of Catholicism. But then being attracted by the liberation theologists of latin America who saw religion in a different matter. Or Pablo Friere in terms of his ideas about education.So that education is not necessarily a bad thing in concept, it’s a different concept of how you acquire knowledge and acquire experiences. So all of these things begin to influence my thing, my thoughts and because you dabbled with it as well as the personal struggles you went through, because my parents would be very upset that I suddenly lost my faith and [was] no longer going to the church, but that was the reality. I came here and I struggled, I went in to live in the chaiplancy to try and redeem my faith to try and see what else I could do. I couldn’t, there’s no way, my mother had to eventually accept that that’s the way I am. So this change continued, all the kind of influences coming onto you as you moving and getting involved, then there’s the political aspect of it, all the political struggles going around, campaigns around things that were happening in the community in London. Then there were the issues around trying to organise yourself into an organisation replicated along the lines of the American black power movement as well and developing self help initiatives which led to development and creation of Ujamaa/Eugima housing association which we developed which was the largest black housing association in the UK. And we started very simply. Around squatting and capturing, what we called capturing properties. So you would see, look around your communities and if you see an empty property, nobody’s there, you break in, you tidy it up, you paint, you fixed it, you bring the young people who were getting more and more, there was more and more homelessness and they would stay there for a month, two month, three, a year and then you move them on. So there’s lots of properties in London that were free. So we have a van and we drive around and we have people who are plumbers people who are painters people who could do different things so we’d break into those buildings and wait until they take us to court or until the police come and turf us out. So it was very much like a squatting movement at the time. So what we concentrated on was black young people, because increasingly we were having homelessness and as they were growing up, they were in conflict with their parents. Their parents felt ‘right, you can’t behave like you were doing: out’. They chucked them out. [hits his microphone] Sorry. And then there was the question about our girls getting pregnant and increasingly becoming pregnant and becoming having single parenthood, nowhere to go. We had to find solutions to … these because this was our community. You can’t take a moral attitude towards it: ‘don’t get pregnant’. Yes you can say something, yes, don’t protect yourself, sex protection, sex protection. … But if you get pregnant we’re gonna find a way of dealing with it. So we established hostels for our girls, young girls who were either getting pregnant or were chucked out, who weren’t getting pregnant but we had to do that. So I was a warden at one of those hostels in Ladbroke Grove. And we had about 50 rooms and each girl would be in one room. My wife had that responsibility to look after them, to nurture them, to show tham basically, don’t get pregnant. [laughing] that was our … message. ANd they had a subsidised rent in there. And the idea was to then move them from there into permanent accommodation. So programs like that were part of our educational strategy to deal with the black presence in this country. So we established operation headstart which is a program to build on that so we had a book shop, headstart books and crafts in West Green Road in Tottenham, Seven Sisters. And that provided some of the entrepreneurial resources that we needed to carry out our projects. So we did all of that yeah, and I played a pivotal role in developing with others some of these things. So, teaching at the same time, I stayed teaching at mostly girls schools because that was my main concern because what I was seeing among our young girls was very troubling and ver worrying and we wanted to tackle that, so took that choice. Plus I found it easier to teach girls and to get that kind of respect and be able to drive them and create the kind of motivation that they needed for education, for their educational success. And that was very powerful. Z: So the work you did on the side was the Black Liberation Front and other than that you were working as a teacher. A: As a teacher, yes. Z: Okay and how did you come from being an English teacher to working with the GLC A: Right, from an English teacher working at Sydenham I soon realised that I wasn’t able to directly engage the girls because I was one of the few teachers that had a degree in English and therefore they were putting me to teach at the highers, there was streaming, at the higher streams, O level, A level and so on. And all the other girls that I wanted to teach were the lower streams and I wasn’t accessing them. I decided then to get involved by providing them opportunities for them to meet so lunchtime, I will collect their money, 18p whatever it is, we collect their money, send two of them down to Brixton market to buy food, they bring it back, they cook and we eat, we have lunch. So instead of having a school lunch so we had that kind of opportunity, it’s a Caribbean club. But then they felt it had to be widened, it should be all girls.So we call it the fourth world club, women as a fourth world, an opportunity to create that kind of things. So I decided I can move out of that and when I was offered the opportunity to develop a community education project in Brixton, I decided to do that and there is where I set up the Affaway school which was the first black supplementary school that was funded by the Inner London Education Authority and that school again was a full time school for young people who were truanting in the head or truanting with the feet in the education system. I did outreach work with those local schools in Lambeth Norwood Girls, Dick Shepherd, Wilson Manor, I did some work with Tulse Hill Boys and so we worked very much around that and therefore the opportunity existed for a positive intervention in the lives of these young people because you were giving them some positive opportunity to deal with all this underachievement and poor self images. So from there I was rooted in social engineering, social work to make sure these things happen. So it was a natural progression from there into local authority work and social work. ‘Cause from there I went and found myself into the development in Elimu Community School, what we call a communiversity, linking up school and university and Elimu is swahili for knowledge or education and the idea is you provide community knowledge and community education for people who were there. Ken Livingstone became mayor of London and he decided to recruit a team around him for his own agenda and I was encouraged to become part of that team. He set up an ethnic minority’s unit within the Greater London Council, headed up Herman Oosely, who is now Lord Oosely and Herman asked me to come and be his deputy and that’s how I went into the Greater London Council because we had an agenda, we had to support Ken with his left-wing agenda and deliver it. Because the problem he had was to deal with all the bureaucrats and officers in the GLC who are careerists. We came in as political activists we came in on the basis that we were gonna change this organisation because we are subscribing to the agenda Ken has brought in. We were put in there for that purpose. So for the first time I had a status as a very senior officer at one of the top levels within Greater London and had had very little experience of senior management at that time but very clear in my head what my politics were in terms of community engagement, community empowerment and in terms of using the resources right across London. Z: Sorry, what year are we in? A: This was erm, oh God, I finished 68/72, it’s around the late 70s, yes. 80s, 1980s. Z: Okay so just to kind of get a sense of the political atmosphere at the time; so you had Margaret Thatcher elected in 79 and you had the GLC abolished a couple of years after that. So what was kind of your memory of those key events, when Thatcher got elected, when Ken came in … A: Well, once Ken came into power, as I said, we were brought in to fit in with his agenda. And we just started to make programs to make changes within local government. For example we tackled the fire brigade, as a uniform service, because we had responsibility for that, for the fire bridge. So that there weren’t any black firefighters so we decided that we had to tackle that agenda in terms … of ensuring that diversity and equality is incorporated. Part of that struggle was to tackle the issue around selection procedures and testing; what sort of testing they’d use, personality testing and so on which was very much skewed against black people and we looked at that, we got buy in for the other members to change all of that so when a black person applied there was this opportunity for that black person to be as successful as anybody because the test that you were asked to do didn’t discriminate against you. So there were things like that, there were things around economic development we wanted to look at, how we empower through venture funding and different aspects of economic development, access to buildings and so on. Z: What’s venture funding? A: Start up funds, yes,to enable a business to use start up funds to start their own business. Around the issues around race because there was a ethnics minorities unit there was a women’s unit , there was a police unit and these were the three main areas. Obviously there was economic development, arts, so on. These were the three main political units who were there to try and force that agenda working in partnership. Working in partnership with economic development, working in partnership with the arts with responsibility for Southbank and the programming for the Southbank for example where black people and black arts weren’t given the opportunities to use this prestigious venues. So us as the ethnic minorities council had a remit right across the GLC to make sure that elements of their delivery, of their services, didn’t discriminate against black people or did not in fact fail to represent those cultures; and plus the fact that we develop our own programs. SO we would have concerts we would have events and we have commemorations so we introduce this anti-racist year which would be a celebration. We had the money to do that because we used local authority um, Section 137 I think it was, of local government act which enabled us to have a penny out of whatever it was to generate the funding for those kind of projects. And that led to us launching this anti-racist year for the whole of greater London, we’re talking about every borough, 32 boroughs, London boroughs all embracing and participating in that. So immediately, the agenda for race, race became high on the agenda because it was being taken at that level by Ken Livingstone and the GLC. Out of that came African Jubilee Year, the commemoration of the organisation of african unity, the celebration of emancipation and so on and out of that came black history month because it was part and parcel of that. So it was initiatives over the years that was building up be able to say to Londoners this has to be a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic society, and therefore as leaders at that level we are going to be creating programs that reflect that multiethnicity and multiculturalism. Z: And before Ken Livingstone, what was the agenda of the GLC? A: I think before then, I wasn’t involved as an employee, I was involved as an outsider. My involvement as an employee came when Ken got elected and he brought us in so I was new to the GLC as an officer, as an employee. Prior to that it was very much an echelon of white power at the top end of the scale because you had .Greater London Council and then you had the local authorities and then you had the Inner London Education Authority at each of these there were troubles going on with the community. So with the ILEA there were elements in terms of issues around achievement in terms of underachievement and identify . So they developed in their own way a kind of multiethnic inspectorate. Which included again people like myself, not me personally but people like myself at that level who were teachers who would be given the opportunity become inspectors and would drive the agenda for race, class in the Inner London Education Authority. So from the ILEA there was that things happening but within the GLC there was very little evidence of any change before Ken Livingston. There was an idea that you’re delivering services and the delivery of these services was efficient and we didn’t need to take into account any needs or special needs in terms of ethnicity or race. Perhaps in terms of class but not in terms of race for communities. So there was a kind of colourblind approach towards the delivery of services and it was when Ken came in and made a race, ethnicity, disability, gender and economic status key indicators that would influence policy development and programs, then all of that changed. Z: Where there any other major political events in the leadup to Ken Livingstone’s takeover that marked the political atmosphere at the time? A: Well there was the ongoing issues around SUSS, SUSS laws, vagrancy law. The police arresting people on suspicion of being a footpad or things. Z: What’s a footpad? A: Someone who steals, what the phrase called, immigrant footpad, that was muggers. [surprise, laughter]. A footpad in the old english parlance is someone who steals from you and run away. SO there was this idea that a lot the mugging and the street crime was generated by black young people. There was that issue and there for any black person is susceptible to being stopped and searched by the police because of that basic suspicion and that meant it brought young people directly into contact with the police and there were high levels of arrests and so on. Issues around what was happening in our schools where issues around poor self image, issues around educational , labelled educationally sub-normal, ESN, and then placed into special schools. There were issues around, for us as black parents, for my generation and the generation before me who saw special education as special not negative because from the Caribbean from Africa, west africa, if you’re given something special , it’s special and it’s different, better but within the English context special education meant that you were separate because you were not within the norm. So educationally sub normal and special schools became the dumping ground for black students. That was a battle that had been waged. Organisations had been formed [coughs] black teachers, black teachers were coming together as one body. There was a growth in the development of black studies particularly in primary schools. There was a Teachers Against Racism (TAR) which was an asian body fighting for that multiculturalism . And it was another organisation, national NAME … … National Association for Multiethnic Education. Again radical teachers, black teachers coming