Introduction

In 1952, Lord Beginner, the Trinidadian calypsonian, claimed that interracial marriages in Britain constituted a growing social movement. His song, ‘Mix up matrimony’, contends that:

This commonsense paean to interracial love – which celebrates a British society and a global scenario in which ‘mixed marriage’ is normal, rather than especially forward-looking or transgressive – suggests that problematic social and political issues are simply not at stake. The logical conclusion of such a position is the idea that mixed-race people (referenced by the phrase ‘coloured Britons’) are representative of this new national template – and even of a new world order.

In his critique of the same song, Ashley Dawson interprets the text in gendered and colonialist terms, since the proponents of this ‘mix up matrimony’ are African and Caribbean men marrying white women, a point made unmistakably through Lord Beginner's reference elsewhere in the same song to Seretse Kharma, ‘chief of the Bamangwato people in Bechuanaland, who was driven into exile for marrying a white woman’. Dawson reads ‘coloured Britons’ as black British immigrants, rather than their mixed-race children, and he sees the song as proposing a kind of naïvely felt tribute to Britain as the ‘mother country’ through its eager desire for assimilation through interracial matrimony. Indeed, the official sanctioning of such marriage, by national, even divine, authority, is implied through the phrase, ‘this is freedom from above’.