ABSTRACT
While it must have been a relief to Williams to return to London's somewhat less racist conditions than those of Cape Town and South Africa, the Empire's capital city was by no means free of racist philosophies or actions. For example, Bandele Omoniyi, a Nigerian from Lagos studying in Edinburgh, stated that ‘the treatment accorded to Africans in the Nativeland [ie, the UK] and abroad by the ignorant classes of white men and those who ought to know better generally make one's blood boil.' 1 There is also much evidence of the racist behaviour a Black man would encounter at all levels of British society in A. B. C. Merriman-Labour's Britons Through Negro Spectacles, published in London in 1910. Even a White author, H. Snell, in an Independent Labour Party leafiet issued in about 1904, which was grossly anti-Semitic, noted that there was ‘widespread prejudice against the foreigner in England'. 2 According to historian George Garrard, people of the ‘new left, particularly those influenced by Social Darwinism, had not entirely formulated their attitudes towards all the various forms of racial hostility'. Bruce Glazier, a stalwart of the Independent Labour Party was one of these, believing that ‘race aversion [was] accentuated by numerous strangenesses and impediments of language, religion, tradition and economic conflict'. 3
