In the winter of 1961, Mustapha Matura, fresh from a trans-Atlantic voyage from his native Trinidad and Tobago, a British colony at the time, arrived in London expecting a world of opportunities.

He was quickly disillusioned. In a period rife with anti-immigrant hate crimes in Britain, Mr. Matura, who was about 21 at the time, had felt the sting of racism even before coming ashore, taunted by a sailor during the ocean crossing.

“We went to London and found out the sophistication of our dreams was just a gloss,” he told The New York Times in 1977. “It was very harsh on the bottom of the ladder.”

It was an awakening that compelled him to begin writing, distilling his experiences into plays even while holding down jobs as a garment factory assistant and a hospital porter. Troubled by stereotypes of black Britons and a British society that, he found, hypocritically masked its intolerance, he explored themes of racial independence and cultural transition in writing about the lives of Caribbeans, both in London and in his homeland, against the backdrop of their colonial past.