Anton Rønholt

13/04 - 16

Lonely Londoners

Throughout the ages, the white man has not been known for his kindness and compassion toward the
other races. The Native American was massacred, the Asian has been ostracized, and the Arabian has been
feared and hated. But no one has more famously been oppressed than the black man. And even though
they later on gained their hard won freedom, it would be a good while longer before one could truly say
that they were treated as equals. Such was the case for many caribbeans who uprooted from their homes
after the Second World War and sailed for what they had been told was greener pastures, in the promised
land of Britain. We will take a glance at the life of such Immigrants from the West Indies in the novel The
Lonely Londoners written and published in 1956 by Sam Selvon, who himself came to London from Trinidad.

In The Lonely Londoners we make the acquaintance of two distinct characters, both immigrants
from the West Indies. First we meet Moses Aloetta, a Trinidadian worker who moved to London in search
of a better life. What he found was a hard life, with only menial labor for a foreigner, cold weather and sub-
par living standards. London is not a particularly kind place for newcomers, and Moses who may once have
been a hopeful and optimistic youth would over time become as depressed and grimy as the city he now
lived in. London is portrayed as a dismal place compared to Trinidad, and a Caribbean man’s views on the
city are portrayed in the language of the novel, written in the accent of the islands. Both Moses and the
Narrator speak in a way riddled with grammatical errors, slang and odd word choices. This serves to let the
reader get much closer to the mindset of the people portrayed in the novel, the poor Caribbean working
class. They are a people who cannot rely on the system in their new home. All they can rely on is each
other. This is seen in the case of Moses, who against his will and better judgement has become something
of a foreman and guide for the new arrivals from the West Indies. He is shown as a somewhat bitter and
disillusioned man, but nonetheless fulfills the duties he has been saddled with, simply because someone
has to make sure that the newcomers are given a helping hand in London. In this way he aids the Caribbean
Henry Oliver, a man briefly introduced in the first chapter, but who from the start shows an odd mindset,
coupled with a decidedly laid back attitude.

It can be said that The Lonely Londoners gives any person, black or white, Trinidadian or British, a
close up on the deplorable situation that dominated the lives of Caribbean immigrants in the 1950’es. The
novel use of dialect throughout the text makes the experience much more real.