Part of British History is Black

In the UK, October marks the beginning of Black History Month. This national celebration aims to promote and celebrate the contributions of those with African and Caribbean heritage to British society and to foster an understanding of Black history in general.

The origins of UK Black History Month

To better understand the importance and complexities of UK Black History Month, it’s important to first understand its origins.

Before US Black History Month, there was National Negro History Week, which started in 1926 to advocate for the inclusion of American Black History in the US national public education system. Over time, and with the momentum and support of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, this week gradually evolved into the month it is today. In 1976, US Black History Month was officially recognized by President Gerald Ford.

Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, a Ghanaian activist and Special Projects Coordinator for the Greater London Council, was instrumental in bringing Black History Month to Britain. In an interview, he expresses, “I was stirred up in the mid-1980s by the identity crisis that Black children faced as some brazenly would not identify with Africa and shrank when called an African.” Akyaaba and other local community activists joined together and successfully organized the UK’s first Black History Month celebration in 1987 in London. This celebration quickly spread to other parts of the UK, with many boroughs beginning to formally recognize October as Black History Month. Black History Month has since expanded to “include the history of African, Asian, and Caribbean peoples and their contribution to Britain’s ‘island story.’”

Jason Johnson, a UK-based Product Support Specialist at Culture Amp, explains,

"Black History Month in the UK has been too US-centric, even though we’re very different culturally. Those of us living in Britain today have our own national cultures that are somewhat accepted within British society, and it’s distinct from Black culture in the US." — Jason Johnson

The black community in the UK has been a center point to it’s development. With-in different levels of the realm, the community has played a greater role, from slave, to industrialism to education amongst other disciplines of societal structure.

Celebrating African Writers In The UK.

The increasing popularity of “Postcolonial,” “Transatlantic,” and “Diasporic” studies, black British literature, once marginalized if not entirely ignored, is today a burgeoning field that is beginning to receive serious critical attention from scholars on all sides of the universe. In light of the past Windrush celebrations in England (celebrations that embraced the cultural, social, and political contributions that blacks made to British life and culture, both before and after the 1940s–1950s SS Empire Windrush era), British readers and critics are also beginning to examine black British literature.

How has the migrant experience transformed the British cultural landscape after the end of an empire? What does it mean to be British and Black? How have migrant writers created new aesthetic forms to respond to the meaning of postcolonial Britishness? How does writing function as a mode of imagining alternative spaces of belonging? Readings will range from the novels of migrant arrival in the 1950s and the works of Zadie Smith to "post-racial" novels by Helen Oyeyemi and Aminatta Forna, Nadifa Mohamed, Kadija Sesay among others.

The contemporary black British fiction attempts to inscribe into the narrative of Britain the experience of the African diaspora: not only the life of immigrants from the former colonies after World War II, but also the less visible earlier settlement of Africans in the United Kingdom. This is a presence that official history has usually erased or underplayed in the construction of British identity, and these stories complicate the traditional concept of an ethnically homogeneous British past. David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (2000) recreates the life of enslaved and free Africans in Britain in the late eighteenth century; Bernardine Evaristo’s comic novel-in-verse The Emperor’s Babe (2001) imagines the presence of an African family in Roman Britannia.

In Black and British (A Forgotten History) by David Olusoga- a Nigerian British writer. Olusoga Draws on a new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination and Shakespeare's Othello. It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain's global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the 19th century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of World War I.

Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. Unflinching, confronting taboos and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, this book describes how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries. Ignatius Sancho, Margaret Busby ‘Nana Akua’, Hannah Pool, Kadija Sesay, Ottobah Cugoana, Ben Okri, the list is quite long and solid. These literal scholars have changed the imagination of the diasporic communities in the UK through their intensive work.

Marc Matera’s ‘Black London’ gives a similar account of Blacks contributions to the empire through a different racial paradigm. The book describes a vibrant history of London in the twentieth century and reveals the city as a key site in the development of black internationalism and anticolonialism. Marc Matera shows the significant contributions of people of African descent to London’s rich social and cultural history, masterfully weaving together the stories of many famous historical figures and presenting their quests for personal, professional, and political recognition against the backdrop of a declining British Empire. A groundbreaking work of intellectual history, Black London will appeal to scholars and students in a variety of areas, including postcolonial history, the history of the African diaspora, urban studies, cultural studies, British studies, world history, black studies, and feminist studies.