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On a flight from Sanaa to London I wassurprised when nine of my fellow passengers asked me to fill in theirlanding cards. The accent of their broken, but reasonably effective,English indicated long residence in Birmingham. I learnt that somehad been coming backwards and forwards from Yemen to Britain forthirty years, a few were married to British women, yet not one ofthem could read and write English.
Fred Halliday's study of the minuscule andforgotten Yemeni communities of Britain lucidly brings out thereasons for this failure to develop a skill so apparently basic tosurvival in metropolitan Britain. For the Yemenis, described byHalliday as the oldest-established of the many groups of Third Worldimmigrants to Britain, stand out. No other group of immigrants havebeen so self-effacing, so confined within self-imposed boundaries, sogenerally oblivious to political and social currents in the countryin which they have earned their meagre livelihoods, so firmlymentally rooted in the distant nation to which return is the focus ofall desires.
From the time the first Yemeni sea-farerswashed up in Cardiff and South Shields at the turn of the century theYemenis have been a hidden minority. The historical records arescanty, and enumerating the size of communities of Yemenis indifferent cities at different times is problematic. Halliday hasunearthed references to non-white sailors in local seaport newspapersof the time indicative of a tragi-comic confusion as to the originsof these strange "coloured" men. To most British the Yemenis weresimply "lascars", indistinguishable from the Indians, Malays andSomalis who similarly toiled below decks in the days when the Britishmerchant navy ruled the world. Yemeni and other under-paid lascarsbore the brunt of resentment from British sailors laid off at the endof the First World War. Officially the Yemenis were classified as"Adenis" despite the fact that the majority came from rural areasstraddling the former border between North and South Yemen. Hallidaynotes how Yemenis benefited from confusion about their places oforigin, that quiescence served the interests of men already skilledin keeping their affairs hidden from government officials andtax-collectors, solely preoccupied with sending as much as possiblefrom their meagre pay-packets back home.
Though Britain continued to employ non-whitesailors at a fifth of British sailors' wages until the 1970s, theproportion of "lascars", and in particular the number of Yemenis inthe merchant navy, had dramatically declined by the end of the 1930s.The Second World War temporarily renewed demand for cheap maritimelabour but after 1945 the Yemeni communities in Cardiff and SouthShields shrank as new opportunities arose in the industrial areas ofBirmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield.
Unlike the more permanent immigrants fromSouth Asia who now came to outnumber them greatly, few Yemenisacquired sufficient skills to do other than the most menial andrepetitive of industrial tasks. By the late 1980s as jobs becamescarce the Yemenis were again on the receiving end of whiteresentment, although by now they were being dubbed "Pakis".(Interestingly, the Yemenis have had such a low profile, keeping tothemselves in the Victorian terraced houses they had clubbed togetherto buy, even buying their meat from itinerant Yemeni butchers, thatHalliday relates how Pakistanis can mistake Yemenis for their owncompatriots). As the recession bit, Yemenis moved on. By the early1990s the scattered communities of Yemenis, which in the heyday ofYemeni immigration had reached 15,000, numbered no more than 8,000.
There are poignant moments in this book: oldseafarers left with little but their memories sipping tea in dingyboarding houses into which no English people have ever penetrated;destitute Yemenis knowing nothing of the welfare benefits they wereentitled to; men on permanent night-shift cut off not only from thesociety of the religious-ethnic majority of their country ofresidence but also from the mosques and Islamic welfare associationsfrequented by their non-Arab co-religionists; Yemenis sitting bythemselves in pubs.
Such vignettes serve to tantalise for thischronicle of Yemenis in Britain is frustratingly devoid of people.This is a one-dimensional account of immigration with no feel for thecommunities from which the migrants sprang. Even one case study of anindividual and his family could have greatly enriched the book.
Halliday's information about Yemeni societyis sketchy, based on a few visits to the former People's DemocraticRepublic of Yemen and a single visit to the Yemen Arab Republic. Herepeatedly assures us of the "recurrent" and "chain" nature of Yemenimigration, that they are "sojourners" maintaining links with villagesto which they will return. One senses that strategic choices arebeing made as to who will go and who will stay, yet we learn nothingof the sending communities. One is led to doubt whether Halliday hasvisited them, despite his intention to base the book on "historicalrecord, social and political analysis and personal observation". Howelse to account for being told that asid is "stewed lamb", hilba "akind of sweetish dough" or that "only elder sons inherit land" inYemen? We learn little of the "push" factors behind migration. Thosewho leave are not placed in any social context, simply referred to as"tribal commoners". Halliday seems surprised by the existence ofremittance agents in rural Yemen when such a mechanism oftransferring funds is to be found in many peasant societies lacking abanking system in which they can trust.
In lieu of detail on the lives of Yemenisojourners before, during and after their time in Britain, Hallidayprovides a potted description and analysis of global migration trendsand other labour movements in the Arab world. If this book istargeted to those already familiar with the Middle East or Yemen, itis not necessary to explain the meaning of halal, to define an Arab,to list the members of the Arab League, to inform the reader that notall Arabs are Moslems, to provide a brief history of migration fromLebanon and the Maghreb.
Women appear as shadows in this book. Withno regard to the social millieu of rural Yemeni women, Hallidaysimply assumes that those left behind in villages are gripped by"melancholy". He uncritically accepts the view of one of the raremigrants who not only brought his wife to Britain but had her do thehousehold shopping that she could not understand Roman numerals norunderstand the denominations of the currency she regularlyused.
The book is stronger when it comes tosketching the history of the various religio-political-trade unionorganisations established by the small fragment of the Yemenidiaspora temporarily resident in Britain. Such organisations were notmotivated by any hope of ameliorating the conditions under which theYemeni migrants worked and resided but reflected the turbulenthistory of their country, the struggle against the Imamate, debateswithin Islam and divided loyalties to the northern and southernregimes. The description of the career of Abdullah Ali al-Hakimi, anIslamic moderniser determined simultaneously to establish mosques,raise the educational level of women, and press Imam Ahmad towardpolitical pluralism is fascinating. In more recent timesmedia-generated furor over the sale and consumption of qat inBritain and the case of a Yemeni migrant who allegedly "sold" hisBritish-based daughters to a compatriot is alsowell-handled.
In short, despite gaps which will irritatethose familiar with Yemen, Halliday has written an interestingaccount of the forgotten Yemeni communities of Britain.