Colin Smuts found himself airlifted from one political morass to another when he took a plane from Johannesburg to London in 1977. He was a youth organiser with the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), working with the Open School and interested in art as a form of self-development and awareness in the community. He had hoped to enhance his ideas on this in a multi-racial society but soon became preoccupied with – and alarmed by – the nature of racism in Britain; the ghettos in which black people lived, the ‘race riots’, the hostility between black people and the police and the rise of the National Front. It seemed to mirror the situation he had left. In fact, he characterised the British establishment and corridors of power as no different from the white political establishment in South Africa: ‘more concerned with gaining power than tackling the serious problems that exist’.

Colin was not impressed by the efforts of those who were attempting to deal with the issues. He attended a meeting of a Community Relations Council, at which most of the members were, like him, black, and this was where he made the observations above.

Denial about racism in Britain was something that was picked up by several grantees over the decades – and often denied by people with whom they tried to discuss it. Colin attended a seminar on racism in Britain at the Westhill College of Community and Youth Work, where he was astonished by the views expressed.