Reviewing what they saw as the increasing politicization of young black people in Britain in the early 1980s, the educational theorists Frank Reeves and Mel Chevannes identified five ‘traditions’ that provided ideological and practical resources for the articulation of political activity. These were: Black Power; Pan-African Socialism; Rastafarianism; Garveyism; and ‘Race Today-style Marxism’. The relative popularity of each of these traditions and the extent to which they coherently can be separated from one another are open to debate, but it is instructive to note that each of the first four listed relies on forms of political discourse that originate outside of Britain. Further, at least three of them rely on an emphasis on African ancestry, and, specifically, on the physical invocation of the African continent. Crucial to both Garveyism and Rastafarianism is the idea of ‘return’ to Africa, and, while this ‘return’ is not strictly required within a philosophy of Pan-Africanism, the necessary focus on the figure of the continent as the defining heart around which black unity must be expressed foregrounds the material importance of the landmass. We find the following in the manifesto of a black British political organization in the mid-1980s: