A Cardiff Somali, Ibrahim Ismaa’il, later remembered in his memoirs that;
1. "A Warsangeli [from a Northern Somali kabil or clan], Abdi Langara, had a boarding house right in the European part of town… As soon as the fight started all the Warsangeli went to defend Abdi’s house… Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived—one of them was left for dead...."
2. One account from the 1919 riots tells how a Somali imam, Hadji Mohammed, ‘was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him, so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof and watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton...’
Police harassment and a local authorities’ ban on them moving out of the depressed port areas effectively segregated these ‘aliens’ and their families, treating them as a ‘social menace’. Very top of the list of moral crusaders was Cardiff chief constable James A Wilson, who clearly had a pathological hatred of ‘race mixing’:
3. The coloured seamen who live in our midst…are not imbued with our moral code, and have not assimilated our conventions. They come into contact with the female sex of the white race, and their progeny are half-caste, with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents...
4. The Arab and Somali seamen responded to the attack on their already precarious existence by launching a militant and vigorous campaign to smash the rota, picketing shipping offices and lobbying to get the union’s position changed. The violent confrontations that took place in Cardiff and South Shields as a result ended with Arab and Somali sailors being prosecuted and receiving ‘exemplary’ sentences tagged with judicial recommendations of deportation.
5. In Cardiff the British Somali Society (BSS) and the Somali Youth League (connected to organisations in Somalia) were formed in the mid-1930s, and the BSS leadership collaborated with the Communist Party.
http://isj.org.uk/muslim-working-class-struggles/
1. "A Warsangeli [from a Northern Somali kabil or clan], Abdi Langara, had a boarding house right in the European part of town… As soon as the fight started all the Warsangeli went to defend Abdi’s house… Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived—one of them was left for dead...."
2. One account from the 1919 riots tells how a Somali imam, Hadji Mohammed, ‘was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him, so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof and watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton...’
Police harassment and a local authorities’ ban on them moving out of the depressed port areas effectively segregated these ‘aliens’ and their families, treating them as a ‘social menace’. Very top of the list of moral crusaders was Cardiff chief constable James A Wilson, who clearly had a pathological hatred of ‘race mixing’:
3. The coloured seamen who live in our midst…are not imbued with our moral code, and have not assimilated our conventions. They come into contact with the female sex of the white race, and their progeny are half-caste, with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents...
4. The Arab and Somali seamen responded to the attack on their already precarious existence by launching a militant and vigorous campaign to smash the rota, picketing shipping offices and lobbying to get the union’s position changed. The violent confrontations that took place in Cardiff and South Shields as a result ended with Arab and Somali sailors being prosecuted and receiving ‘exemplary’ sentences tagged with judicial recommendations of deportation.
5. In Cardiff the British Somali Society (BSS) and the Somali Youth League (connected to organisations in Somalia) were formed in the mid-1930s, and the BSS leadership collaborated with the Communist Party.
http://isj.org.uk/muslim-working-class-struggles/
