Browse Sections

• Education 
• Business
• Blog
• Special reports

Roots book for schools

24/11/2006

ASIAN, black and Chinese schoolchildren have produced a race awareness booklet and DVD for use in Manchester schools.

The 13 and 14-year-olds went out and recorded conversations with older people in their communities on how they arrived in the UK, race relations, education and cultural awareness.

The booklet, sponsored by Manchester University's Ahmed Iqbal Ullah trust, named after a Manchester schoolboy who was murdered by a racist teenager in the school playground, will be used to spread greater understanding of ethnic minorities among youngsters in the city.

Asian couple Gurdas and Dharanbir Landa re-call how they were forced out of their home country.

"We used to live in Lahore in the Punjab. In 1947 the country became Pakistan. We had to flee from our home. We were really refugees, fleeing our home a war, bringing only what we could carry."

From the same family, Kuldeep Landau describes the culture shock of arriving in Manchester: "In India we had a house, shops, people to clean and cook for us. Over here, we didn't have any servants, we didn't have anyone to wash our pots and pans and clothes for us. I don't know whether it was a good or bad thing."

There were positive and negative experience of white British society.

Community leader Abdus Salaam recounts: "I was one of the early Asian settlers in Manchester. We lived in Logsight. Our next door neighbours were non-Asian. One of them was Mrs Johnson, a very nice woman. And when she cleaned her house, she cleaned mine! She cleaned my windowsill and my step...those people, what a lot of community spirit they had."

But poet and playwright Anjum Malik did not experience such a warm welcome. She says: "I think we had racism the moment we arrived, the way we were treated at immigration and I experienced tremendous racism at school....My headteacher's favourite saying to Asian kids was, 'Go back to where you have come from and stop wasting my time'."

Many Asian incommers where highly educated but had to take up relatively menial jobs.

Fadima Zubairu recounts: "Fancy me having to go and wash up dishes in the Empire Grill in Manchester...I said, 'What, was this why I gave up teaching in the classroom..I tried to get back into teaching, I was told I wasn't trained to teach British children."

But the booklet ends on a happy noted revealing that, in the main, those interviewed have settled and lived a useful life here, like Dr Harkirtan Singh Raud who revealed: "I'm a member of the Manchester United fan club...so I'm British, a Sikh Mancunian who supports Manchester United. There's no harm in being all of those."