'Drinking from one pot': Yemeni unity,at home and overseas

Abstract

Outside of expatriate Yemeni communities, very little is known in Europe or north America about Yemen and its people.

The unification in May 1990 of the two separate Yemeni states, the Yemen Arab Republic in the north and the People's Democratic Republic of the Yemen in the south, created little interest in the establishment press of the West. And yet, this unity was achieved in an era of intense fragmentation of nations and secessionism in many parts of the world, including countries very close to the Yemen. It was also managed voluntarily, without war or rancour, and with each separate state willingly offering up its individual sovereignty.

In this interview, given in July 1990, Abdulgalil Shaif gives a perspective from the heart of the emigrant community on Yemen's anti-imperialist history and its new unity.

Sheffield has a population of 2, 000 Yemenis, most of whom are the families of now redundant steelworkers, who arrived in the city during the 1950s and 1960s, and who are organised through two separate community associations that reflected their origins in the two formerly separated Yemens. The unification has been greeted with great joy by Yemenis abroad, and is seen as a powerful stimulus for their own community development in Britain and elsewhere.

Shaif's story is one of a small black community in the gut of a large British ex-industrial city, struggling for social justice in its new setting, as well as striving to l1laintain and revitalise its lirtks witlt the hOl1leland: the story of a people vt~ho ltaae iit>v homes artd two strllggles. and a story of two generations keeping faith with each otlter in the old/new land of post-imperial power.