The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books: A Meeting of Continents

An international gathering built in Britain

The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books began in London in 1982. New Beacon Books, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Race Today Publications founded it together, with John La Rose and Jessica Huntley as joint directors. Twelve London fairs took place between 1982 and 1995. Alongside the book stalls came a festival of discussion, poetry, theatre, music and film. Publishing became an occasion for people to meet across national borders. ¹

Its long title carried a historical argument. The organisers placed Black cultural production within a wider international field and made room for political writing alongside creative literature. A book fair could help a small publisher find readers; it could also give those readers an opportunity to question a writer, hear a poem aloud or compare experiences of organising. These different activities strengthened one another without becoming interchangeable. The printed book remained central, but the event asked what people could do together around it.

The independent publishers behind the idea

New Beacon brought a publishing philosophy shaped by La Rose’s experience in colonial Trinidad and his involvement in trade union and independence politics. Established in 1966, it combined publishing, bookselling and an international book service. Its account of La Rose’s work explains that he regarded access to information as a question of power. Publishing could enable people to interpret their own histories and sustain knowledge between generations. The fair extended this practical concern with how books reached people and whose experience those books recognised. ²

La Rose’s earlier involvement in the Caribbean Artists Movement also placed conversation between different art forms within the fair’s longer background. Poetry, painting, drama and music belonged to a connected cultural field. This did not mean that the later fair simply repeated the earlier movement. Its combination of public programming, bookselling and international participation gave the work a different form. New Beacon’s history helps explain why such a project could grow from a bookshop: distribution, education and cultural discussion were already closely related activities. ²

Bogle-L’Ouverture brought another independent tradition. Jessica and Eric Huntley established the publishing house in the late 1960s, building a platform for writers, political thinkers, educators and campaigners. The Friends of the Huntley Archives describes their home and west London bookshop as meeting places for artists, students and community members. Publishing depended on these relationships as well as on manuscripts and sales. The Huntleys’ contribution therefore involved much more than attaching a publisher’s name to an event. Their experience connected the work of producing books with the patient cultivation of an audience and a community. It also demonstrates why women’s organisational labour belongs near the centre of this history. Jessica Huntley’s position as a founding joint director was part of a much longer record of publishing and political activity. The fair drew on institutions that Black people had already built for themselves, each with its own relationships, priorities and ways of working. ³

Race Today and the connection with organising

Race Today contributed the experience of a journal and collective deeply involved in the political life of Black Britain. Black Cultural Archives’ exhibition on the publication describes its coverage of workers’ struggles, housing, policing, austerity and grassroots campaigning, alongside the cultural contributions of Black and Asian communities. Its international outlook connected events in Britain with developments elsewhere. That combination helps explain the presence of an activist publication among the fair’s founders. Discussion of literature could take place beside arguments about the conditions in which people lived and worked. ⁴

This was a coalition of organisations with overlapping interests, rather than a single publisher’s promotional festival. The journal’s record also cautions against imagining political writing as a separate category with no relationship to cultural life. Reporting, criticism and creative expression could appear within the same publishing world. Readers encountered arguments about collective action as well as accounts of experience. The fair provided a shared setting in which these different kinds of work could circulate beyond their usual audiences. ⁴

A festival moving through London

The first fairs moved between Islington Town Hall, Lambeth Town Hall and Acton Town Hall. From the fourth event, the London fair used the Camden Centre. Its programme reached beyond the main hall. ¹

A leaflet for the second fair, preserved by London Museum and dated March 1983, reveals how this worked in Brixton. The accompanying programme included documentary films at the Ritzy Cinema and a concert featuring young Black musicians. The Tate Library hosted an exhibition of work by Black painters and sculptors. Tickets could be obtained through several outlets, including Bogle-L’Ouverture. These details give the event a recognisable local geography: a bookshop helped people reach a programme spread across cultural venues in the surrounding area. ⁵

The leaflet also helps recover the fair as something encountered before it became an established historical subject. It was an invitation to attend particular events, with practical information that connected people to places. A surviving piece of publicity can therefore tell us about more than famous participants. It shows how literature, visual art, music and film were presented as parts of one public occasion. The invitation was to participate in cultural life through several different doors, including venues that audiences might already know. ⁵

Poetry, theatre and arguments about freedom

The American writer Amiri Baraka left a contemporary account of the 1984 festival in Unity newspaper. His report described a poetry programme bringing together himself, Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson, with Mutabaruka also participating. It recorded a discussion of radical Black and Third World theatre involving Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Akua Rugg. Baraka wrote as an enthusiastic participant with strong political commitments. His account captures the intensity of an encounter between writers and audiences, while remaining one person’s interpretation of it. ⁶

The same report documented a forum on women’s struggles with Leila Hassan, Barbara Smith and Julia Lynn Walker. Women’s political thinking was therefore present within the programme’s explicit subjects, alongside theatre, independent publishing and Caribbean politics. This matters because a history told only through celebrated male writers would misrepresent the range of discussion. The programme placed questions about who could speak, organise and publish within a broader debate about freedom. It also allowed different traditions of political and cultural work to confront one another in a shared setting. ⁶

The practical work of an international event

The Huntley collection’s book fair records include correspondence, minutes, programmes, accommodation lists and staffing rotas. Such documents bring the work behind the public platform into view. An international gathering required beds for visitors, people to cover responsibilities and decisions to be recorded. The archive also contains photographs of formal and informal occasions, preserving a different aspect of the event from its printed publicity. Programmes tell us what organisers planned; working papers can show how much effort was required to make those plans possible. ⁷

The surviving chronology also makes the regional dimension clear. In 1985 there were associated events in Manchester and Bradford. By 1995, the programme included Manchester’s Nia Centre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, as well as London and Glasgow. These were specific encounters in particular cities, rather than an international event that existed only in the capital. Dates and venues help establish the fair’s reach without assuming that every local programme was identical. Regional organisation was part of the history in its own right. ⁷

Hospitality, households and shared labour

Researcher Leonard Butingan’s work with the George Padmore Institute’s archives and oral histories draws attention to another part of the fair: hospitality. Visiting writers and campaigners stayed in local homes, and discussions continued around kitchen tables. These domestic arrangements helped an ambitious international programme operate with limited resources. They also created forms of contact that were different from a formal panel. Sharing accommodation could extend a conversation well beyond its advertised finishing time and bring visiting participants into the everyday lives of their hosts. ⁸

Butingan’s account emphasises that the people involved included teachers, youth workers and sound system operators alongside prominent writers. This wider circle helps explain the fair’s durability. A cultural event depends on people who introduce visitors, organise rooms, maintain correspondence and keep returning to the work. Remembering those contributions changes the scale of the story. The fair was made internationally significant through tasks that were often local and ordinary. Its history belongs to the people who sustained those relationships as well as to those whose names appeared most prominently in a programme. ⁸

Black European connections

Historian Tiffany Florvil’s research shows how the fair became important to Black activists from Germany. Participants included Nii Addy, Obi Addy and May Ayim, whose work was connected with the development of Black German organising. Florvil traces Nii Addy’s first attendance to 1986 and describes the relationships that followed. The London gathering offered opportunities to meet people whose experiences challenged the assumption that Black European life could be understood through one country alone. It brought different national histories into direct conversation. ⁹

Ayim’s contact with poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Merle Collins and Sonia Sanchez gives this exchange a literary dimension. The significance lay in encounters between people already developing their own work, not in a simple story of ideas travelling in only one direction. Participants brought experiences of racism, language and belonging from different societies. Those differences could become grounds for discussion and solidarity. Florvil’s research makes the fair visible as one setting within a larger network of Black European cultural and political relationships. ⁹

When a discussion became an organisation

One meeting had a particularly traceable organisational outcome. A workshop on racism, fascism and racial attacks at the ninth fair, held on 23 March 1990, contributed to the formation of European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice. The George Padmore Institute’s collection records the involvement of campaigners from Britain and other European countries. John La Rose and the barrister Ian Macdonald became co-chairs. Here the connection between a cultural festival and political organising can be followed through the records of a subsequent organisation. ¹⁰

European Action was especially active between 1990 and 1993. Its work included demonstrations connected with the meeting of European heads of government at Maastricht in December 1991. This provides a concrete example of what continued after a book fair ended. A workshop could help establish relationships that were then used for further action. It would be misleading to reduce every conversation to such an outcome, but this case shows that the fair’s political role extended beyond the ideas expressed on its stages. ¹⁰

Connections across the Atlantic

The international story also reaches back to the Caribbean. The University of the West Indies holds a record of La Rose’s address at the opening of the first Caribbean People’s International Bookfair and Bookfair Festival, at Palm’s Club in San Fernando, Trinidad, on 27 June 1987. The document is catalogued within the Gaskynd Granger Papers at the Alma Jordan Library. This precise archival trace places La Rose within a Caribbean gathering during the years of the London fairs. It helps prevent Britain from becoming the assumed centre of every cultural relationship. Books, people and organisational experience travelled between connected places. Its survival also reminds us that evidence for Black British cultural history is held beyond Britain. Following these connections requires attention to Caribbean archives as well as collections in London. ¹¹

An ending, and a record for the future

Over time, the balance of responsibility changed as Bogle-L’Ouverture and Race Today withdrew. New Beacon carried much of the later work. The last London fair took place in 1995; in 1997 La Rose decided that it could not continue in its existing form. ¹

The record survived through archival preservation and the collection A Meeting of the Continents, edited by Sarah White, Roxy Harris and Sharmilla Beezmohun. The volume brings together memories, organisational history and the programmes of all twelve London fairs. These different kinds of evidence matter. A participant’s memory can convey atmosphere and significance; a programme can identify who was scheduled to appear; correspondence can reveal work that remained invisible to an audience. Reading them together creates a fuller history than a list of celebrated guests could provide. ¹²

The George Padmore Institute also makes the book fairs a subject of continuing public discussion, including a recorded conversation with Margaret Busby and Janice Durham. The existence of these accounts is part of the fair’s legacy: people involved in independent cultural institutions helped preserve the evidence through which later generations could understand them. That legacy invites attention to relationships and organisation as well as individual achievement. ¹²

The fair’s place in Black British history rests on this combination of ambitions. It created opportunities to encounter books, made cultural work public and brought people together across borders. Its history asks us to recognise the bookshop, the meeting room and the host’s kitchen as places where intellectual life is made. The printed programme ended; the questions about access, independence and collective responsibility remain open.

Sources

[1] George Padmore Institute. The International Book Fairs, 1970–2005: collection history.

[2] New Beacon Books. John La Rose.

[3] Friends of the Huntley Archives at LMA. The Revolutionary Publishers; 14 July 2026.

[4] Black Cultural Archives. Race Today: Black History is British History; Exhibition, 4 October 2024–2 February 2025.

[5] London Museum. Leaflet advertising the Second International Book Fair, object 2007.1/140; March 1983; collection record.

[6] Unity Archive Project; originally Unity newspaper, volume 7, number 10. Amiri Baraka, International Book Fair; 20 June 1984.

[7] The London Archives, catalogue hosted by AIM25. International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, LMA/4462/M; Records, 1982–2002.

[8] George Padmore Institute. Leonard Butingan, More Than an Archive; 15 September 2025.

[9] African American Intellectual History Society, Black Perspectives. Tiffany Florvil, On the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books; 26 June 2019.

[10] George Padmore Institute. European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice archive collection; 9 June 2021.

[11] The Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies. Address by John La Rose at the opening of the first Caribbean People’s International Bookfair, Gaskynd Granger Papers, SC158, Box 2, Folder 2; 27 June 1987; catalogue record.

[12] George Padmore Institute. 40 years since the first International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books; 21 November 2022.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.