Raising A White Binny

“Raising a White Binny”, a novel by Stanley Scott The novel is set in London in the sixties, a period of changing moral and sexual attitudes and before the advent of anti-discrimination laws and policies. It tells the story of five young West Indian friends living and working in the Earl’s Court area :- George, a single-minded and serious young man who fulfils his ambition to marry his childhood sweet-heart and get to university to study for a Degree, and who is fascinated by the various lifestyles of his friends, Vishnu, from British Guiana, a non-practicing Hindu, who supports a ‘proper’ system of arranged marriages and who, in his search for moral values, attempts to find them with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Malcolm, from a well-to-do Jamaican family, who passes his Bar finals, but stays on to get experience and Richard and Michael, who spend their spare time picking up white women, i.e. ‘raising white binnies’, with varying results. The term “binny” was popularly used by young men in British Guiana to describe an attractive young woman.