Burt Caesar: 'A Hostile Environment'

When the Home Office, under a Conservative government, declared in 2012 that it was creating the ‘hostile environment’ which led to the life-altering injustice that has violated the lives of some 20,000 British citizens of Caribbean heritage, it was not the first occasion when bureaucratic policy wreaked havoc in their history. From the years of the Atlantic Slave Trade to the present day it has been part of a random and undulating landscape of terror.

Since at least the seventeenth century, a dozen or so generations have been caught in such dragnets of Africans and their descendants. The forms and methods may change and vary somewhat - guns, whips and chains are now rare - but the crimes against human beings are no less brutal and coercive: the arbitrary arrests and confinement, the forced transportation. The fact of survival attests in no small part to continued fierce resistance to this state-sanctioned violence.

Drawing on reports and documents of their time (including authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Claude McKay) Burt Caesar looks at three diasporic locations which precede the current so-called ‘Windrush Scandal’, a twenty-first century iteration of a ‘hostile environment’.

Watch the recording below:

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Biography: Burt Caesar

Burt Caesar is an actor and director in film and theatre. He is a former Associate Director at the Royal Court Theatre. In 2007 he was one of the advisers in establishing the permanent gallery, London Sugar & Slavery, at Museum of London Docklands.

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