Why London is Labour: A History of Metropolitan Politics, 1900–2020

Abstract

space for solidarity with other black immigrants. Abrahams’s relationship and subsequent rift with George Padmore, for instance, is traced through the response to his book Return to Goli, which emphasises the liberal humanism he formed in progressive and ‘tolerant’ 1950s London. In Matshikiza’s accounts of early 1960s London, Thorpe locates ‘a meaningful engagement with the interplay between London, South Africa and a wider global black imaginary’ (97). Thorpe draws on work by scholars including Leslie James; this book might also usefully be read in conversation with Marc Matera, Kennetta Hammond Perry, and Rob Waters to expand the historical frame of Black diasporic politics, geographies, and reading cultures in London. The chapters deal with the writing and experiences of male writers in the metropolis as their case studies, distinguished by intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Thorpe details the reasons of structure and genre as to why this is the case, including the masculinity of South African urban writing. The book also includes two ‘detours’, where Thorpe explores the work of Noni Jabavu, including her time as the first black woman editor of the New Strand magazine, and Lauretta Ngcobo, a ‘forger of alliances between Black British writers’ (184), including the edited collection Let It Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain (1987). The detours are named as such because they represent ‘intriguing diversions into the cartography of the South African writer in London’ (12). This is perhaps most evident in Thorpe’s location of Ncgobo within wider London networks of black British activism and feminism, where she challenged the limits placed on black South African women writers and shaped the direction of intersectional, anti-racist politics. But Jabavu’s earlier experiences of gendered expectations and sexism and the negotiation of racism through her proximity to the upper middle class in Britain and the longevity of her time in London are also drawn out with finesse to offer a different story than the ‘well-worn tropes of masculine apartheid-era exile’ (91). These detours are fascinating but frustratingly brief, offering a tantalising glimpse into the alternative maps of South African London that might be further pursued. Nevertheless, there is much in Thorpe’s work for scholars of South African history and writing, London and urban histories, exile, modernity, and transnational movements.