Jab Jab

At Notting Hill Carnival, people came out before dawn covered in black paint and oil, some wearing horns, some carrying or dragging chains. This was J’Ouvert and, within it, Jab Jab: the Grenadian masquerade in which the body is deliberately blackened, the devil performed and the symbols of slavery picked up and carried through the street.

Six days later, hundreds of men arrived in Dover dressed almost entirely in black. Black clothes. Black balaclavas. Faces covered. They blocked roads leading to the port and marched through the town chanting:

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets.”

And:

“Stop the boats.”

They did, in fact, manage to stop some boats. Ferries.

Put the pictures beside one another and they become strangely symmetrical. Two crowds. Two costumes. Two occupations of public space. Two performances of identity.

TikTok’s magnificent historical washing machine can make them look like rival tribes.

Jab Jab comes from diable: devil. It grew out of the Caribbean plantation world. Black bodies were covered in oil, grease, soot or molasses; horns and chains became part of the masquerade. The imagery of enslavement and colonial Christianity was seized and turned back upon itself.

You called us devils?

Fine.

Here come the devils.

You made blackness frightening? We will make ourselves blacker.

You put us in chains? We’ll bring the chains.

You wanted us invisible? We’ll fill the street.

It is wonderfully impolite.

Blackness exaggerated until it can no longer function as shame. Something imposed from outside is seized, enlarged and performed deliberately.

You think this is what I am?

Watch me.

That matters because Notting Hill did not begin with Hugh Grant. The genuinely revisionist version of the neighbourhood is the floppy-haired Englishman with the bookshop.

In 1958, white gangs attacked Caribbean residents in and around Notting Hill. Black people were excluded from rooms, jobs, pubs and clubs. Fascist organisations were active locally. Homes were attacked.

A year later, Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones organised an indoor Caribbean carnival. The street carnival that developed during the 1960s grew from that same history of migration, racism, resistance and community.

It was not parachuted into an innocent white neighbourhood by a diversity officer in 2004.

It came from the neighbourhood.

And behind that lies another inconvenient piece of British history.

Britain needed these people.

Caribbean migrants did not simply turn up one morning because somebody had forgotten to close a border. Postwar Britain had labour shortages. Caribbean workers were recruited into the NHS, London Transport and other public services. They became nurses, porters, cleaners, conductors, railway workers.

Britain went looking for labour.

Come and help rebuild the Motherland.

Certainly.

Could we rent a room?

Steady on.

That contradiction runs through postwar Britain.

Then came Smethwick in 1964, with the infamous racist slogan about having a Black neighbour. Four years later came Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.

Then the National Front.

I remember the later version of that world. Notting Hill in the 1980s did not feel like a Richard Curtis film waiting to happen. Carnival meant enormous police deployments, reggae, food, crowds, apprehension, confrontation, pleasure.

And mostly enormous amounts of fun.

White people joined in.

Black people joined in.

People whose grandparents came from Grenada danced beside people whose grandparents came from Galway, Gujarat or Godalming.

Notting Hill Carnival is rooted in Black Caribbean culture, but that does not make it racially closed.

Quite the opposite.

Its achievement is that it became London.

London has always been full of people whose claim to the city did not rest on property deeds or ancestral possession. People who arrived with little, people pushed from somewhere else, people priced out, moved on, rehoused, excluded, tolerated, recruited, needed and then told they did not belong.

Black and white.

We owned very little except ourselves.

And, sometimes, the street.

Which is why I have little patience with clips of Jab Jab sent to me as evidence that Britain has somehow been stolen.

And please don’t accompany them with the rhetorical question:

Is this what your grandfather fought and died for?

Yes.

It is.

Or at least it is much closer to what he fought for than the ethnic-nationalist fantasy implied by the question.

My family history does not begin at Dover in 2026. Nor does the history of the streets. Britain and the Caribbean had a shared history centuries before. That history involved slavery, sugar, empire, trade, violence, migration and, eventually, citizenship.

None of that makes me personally guilty.

I did not own a plantation in Grenada. The young Black man covered in oil at Carnival did not grow up cutting sugar cane under a whip.

I find inherited guilt politically rather boring.

But inherited history is another matter.

History not as confession but as information.

And that brings us back to Dover.

The men there were performing something too.

They dressed alike, covered their faces and created a collective body.

But at J’Ouvert, blackness makes the body more visible.

At Dover, blackness makes the individual disappear.

And perhaps that is why the chant bothers me.

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets.”

I know those streets.

That tiny patch of earth.

And the answer has never been that simple.

The streets belong, if they belong to anyone, to the people who live in them, work in them, get pushed around them, dance in them, fight in them, raise children in them, remember them and change them.

Nobody gets them uncontested.

That is the city.

It is not somebody else’s culture occupying ‘My London.’

It is my London.

The Black man covered in oil is not trespassing on somebody else’s history.

He is carrying part of its history on his skin.

If you don’t like Notting Hill Carnival, don’t go.

But learn where the oil came from.