The Viraj Mendis Memorial Meeting and Archive Launch

By Kerry Pimblott

April 9, 2025

Authors note: This article is part of a series of blogs documenting activities emerging from the multi-year project, Grassroots Struggles, Global Visions: British Black Power 1964-1985, led by Drs Kerry Pimblott (Manchester) and Kennetta Hammond Perry (Northwestern) as part of an effort to better  document, preserve, and (re)present the history of Black Power and its legacies for local traditions of anti-racist resistance in the North West and East Midlands.

Former Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign chairman, Chris Procter, addressing the Viraj Mendis Memorial Meeting at Ascension Church Hulme, March 1, 2025. Photo courtesy of Rachel Bywater Photography.

On March 1, 2025, the Ascension Church Hulme hosted a special memorial meeting to honour the life and legacy of Sri Lankan radical and human rights activist, Viraj Mendis. Mendis, who took sanctuary in the Church for over two years in the late 1980s and went on to dedicate his life to the Tamil cause and wider movements against racism and imperialism, passed away in Bremen on August 16, 2024. The historic gathering - attended by over a hundred people including Mendis’s family and former comrades - exemplified the global dimensions of his activism from Manchester to Mullivaikkal.

The idea for the memorial meeting originated in our ongoing collaboration with the Manchester-based Radical Reading Room, an autonomous collective that is building a radical library and resource space in the Ascension Church. Over the past two years, we have worked together to better understand and document local histories of antiracist resistance with a particular focus on Viraj Mendis’s Defence Campaign (VMDC). As I have written elsewhere, despite the VMDC’s significance in leading the longest sanctuary campaign in modern British history until recently few signs of that legacy could be found in the Church building or wider public or scholarly accounts.

To redress this neglect, we have been working closely with former VMDC member and Radical Reading Room co-founder, Janet Batsleer, to initiate a community-based oral history and archiving project. At the time of writing, we have conducted interviews with nearly twenty former campaign and church members, including Viraj and his wife Karen Mendis. Interviewees have also donated campaign materials from their own private collections for inclusion in a new archive to be housed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre. It was through the connections we forged in the oral history process that planning for the memorial took place with Viraj’s former comrades playing key organisational roles. 

Multi-faith shrine in memory of Viraj Mendis at Ascension Church Hulme. March 1, 2025. Photo courtesy of Rachel Bywater Photography.

In preparation for the memorial meeting we worked with Lynda Sterling and a team of artists from the OT Creative Space to design a series of new heritage and art installations to enable visitors to learn more about the VMDC and broader anti-racist movements in the community. This included a ‘760 Days of Sanctuary’ timeline tracing Mendis’s campaign from its beginnings to his forcible removal and deportation to Sri Lanka in January 1989. The timeline includes campaign posters and original photographs donated by photographer Charlie Baker as well as original artistic creations by Iqra Tariq and Lynda Sterling.

'760 Days of Sanctuary' timeline installation at Ascension Church Hulme featuring photography by Charlie Baker. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Bywater Photography.

The meeting kicked off with Sanctuary, a dramatic monologue performed by Eve Steele and written by playwright and former VMDC member, Ed Jones. This was followed by a community meal and an opportunity for attendees to explore the new art installations, archival materials presented by the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and the Working Class Movement Library, and visit with local activists’ groups in our Campaigner’s Corner. Musical accompaniment was provided by the Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST) choir and drummers from the Rhythms of Resistance and Manchester Drummers for Palestine drum corps.

Manchester Drummers for Palestine at the Ascension Church Hulme, March 1, 2025. Photograph Courtesy of the Rachel Bywater Photography.

In the second half of the afternoon, we welcomed some of Mendis’s closest comrades to deliver prepared remarks including his wife Karen Mendis, Professor Jude Lal Fernando, Professor Paul Weller, and former VMDC chairman Chris Procter. The event closed with a panel of speakers from local campaigning and activist groups working in the interlocking movements - against racism and imperialism, for migrants rights and the Tamil cause – that Mendis life and struggle represented.