The unveiling in 2014 of the African and Caribbean War Memorial at Brixton's Windrush Square in London conveyed a solemn message engraved on the stone: 'Remembering the Forgotten'. Most existing scholarly studies focus on the war commemoration in Anglophone settler societies and rarely pay attention to such the remembrance events held by Commonwealth immigrants in Britain. This paper attempts to address this oversight by investigating the intersection between war and imperial memories in Afro-Caribbean war commemoration in Brixton, a suburb that has come to be widely regarded as the centre of black London. Deploying a spatial lens, I intend to read Brixton's central square as what historian Geoffrey Martin suggests 'a palimpsest', where collective memories of slavery, colonisation, and migration overlap. This distinct arena of collective remembrance comprises the Tate Gardens, Windrush Square and the Black Cultural Archives, which has been home to the black civil rights movement and symbol of transnational black solidarity in the UK since 1980.
I argue that the recent addition of the African and Caribbean War Memorial further unsettles British war commemoration on both local and global scales. On the one hand, it shows the decentralisation of war commemoration away from the prime sites of national remembrance in central London and a concomitant strengthening of localised community links. On the other hand, it provides a variety of transnational mnemonic contexts in which counter-narratives seek a point of anchorage against waves of negation and oversimplification in contemporary political and cultural discourses. Drawing on both written and oral materials, this case study demonstrates how the shared memories of the British Empire have been constantly associated with worldwide struggles against racial injustices prompted by community commemorations such as that in Windrush Square. As my own interviews with the key members of the Afro-Caribbean community reveal, to remember the forgotten is to visualise the invisible by amplifying the accounts of the ethnic minorities left behind in mainstream national narratives.
