Southall Black Sisters (SBS) is one of the UK’s leading organisations for black and minority women. We have been in existence since 1979. In 1982/3, we set up a not-for-profit advocacy and campaigning centre for black and minority women, with a particular focus on the needs of South Asian women. The bulk of our work is directed at assisting women and children - the overwhelming victims of domestic and other forms of gender-related violence – obtain effective protection and assert their fundamental human rights. Although based in West London, an area with a large South Asian population, we have a national reach. Our work addresses issues of multiple or intersectional discrimination, involving the simultaneous experience of race, gender and other forms of inequality.
Kiranjit had set her husband alight after 10 brutal years with him, had been sentenced for murder and after a three year campaign, SBS managed to get her released on 1991 on the lesser charge of manslaughter.
We have marked our 40th year with a number of events. We began with a film festival in collaboration with the UK Asian Film Festival at Rich Mix cinema, showing four films over two Saturdays in March and April, ending with a panel discussion to draw out the themes that have been central to our work. We opened the festival with our signature film, Provoked, which was based on the life of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a landmark case that turned SBS virtually into a household name. Kiranjit had set her husband alight after 10 brutal years with him, had been sentenced for murder and after a three year campaign, SBS managed to get her released on 1991 on the lesser charge of manslaughter. Kiranjit’s journey from victim to perpetrator neatly encapsulates the spectrum of domestic violence that SBS has covered. Pragna Patel, Director of SBS, will be in discussion with Kiranjit, Sally Challen and Harriet Wistrich on 8 November to reflect on how the legal landscape has changed for women in the intervening years. Along with Provoked we screened Burning an Illusion by Menelik Shabazz, a sensitive exploration of the race/gender intersection in the Caribbean community when a young black woman, treated contemptuously by her work-shy boyfriend, overturns the power balance in their relationship after he is falsely arrested and beaten by the police.
The other two films, My Beautiful Laundrette and Brick Lane, screened on the second day touched on the fault lines within communities and questioned explicitly the notion of community homogeneity thereby revealing the fallacy of multiculturalism, issues that cropped up time and again in SBS’s work. The rise of religious fundamentalism in the 1980s, partly as the result of the failure of anti-racist politics in the UK, represented a serious setback to the nascent growth of women’s freedoms in the Asian community.
In May, we shared the platform with Clean Break Theatre Company which was set up by two women in prison, 40 years ago, and uses theatre to keep the subject of women in the criminal justice system on the cultural radar, at Globe Theatre for their Women, Power and Activism session. Whilst our trajectories were quite different, our commonalities presented a fascinating picture of feminist activism in the last 40 years.
We followed this up with two Feminist History Walking Tours in Southall on the two hottest Saturdays of the year in June. It was billed as a ‘Walk in the footsteps of campaigning women’ which started at Southall Town Hall where it all exploded in 1979 when the community protested against a National Front meeting. It ended up, two hours later, at the SBS offices with a wander around the office to look at posters and photos of the key moments in our history and a delicious Indian meal. That was great fun for everybody who took part, organisers and participants alike.
We have really taken over and owned the streets of Southall this year in the way we did in 1984 when we organised the very first women’s march against violence in support of Krishna Sharma, a local woman who was driven to suicide by abuse from her husband and in-laws.
We organised a pop-up cinema event on the pavement outside Aldi in Southall in July where Provoked was screened again with Kiranjit in attendance. We have really taken over and owned the streets of Southall this year in the way we did in 1984 when we organised the very first women’s march against violence in support of Krishna Sharma, a local woman who was driven to suicide by abuse from her husband and in-laws.
Ending the year with a sizzle, we will hold our final event on 30 November at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End, where we will launch our anthology of short stories written by the women of the SBS survivors group, Turning the Page. This will be a very special evening, a 'literary' conversation between two groups of women - published writers and the SBS survivors' group, divided by privilege but possibly united by the experience of violence.
We sent their stories out to writers like Jackie Kay, Moniza Alvi, Meena Kandasamy and Miss Yankey and invited them to respond creatively to the work with new writing of their own. These too are included in the book. They will be reading from this and their other work on the evening where we will be joined by Imtiaz Dharker - (so we will have 'almost' two Poet Laureates in the room. 'Almost' because Imitiaz turned her invitation down and Jackie Kay is, of course, the Makar of Scotland). A real privilege! Book your tickets here.
We will present a taster from this book on 8 November at the joint Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize and Centre for Women’s Justice Awards ceremony. See you there!
Rahila Gupta is a freelance journalist, writer and activist. She joined Southall Black Sisters in 1989 and has been a judge on the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize since 2003.