 Welcome to the British Library and to UNFINISHED BUSINESS, the new exhibition. It's here, it's happening. It's here at last. My name's Biro Lats. I work in the cultural events team. We're really excited to be kicking off with this next event, which is an exploration of how Africa is represented in education, art and literature. It's an association with the Black Curriculum and Myriad Editions. A little bit of what we like to call housekeeping now. If you look below this box, you can see that there's a section for questions. You can send those in at any time. Above me here is a feedback section. We'd love to hear what you think. Also you can buy books and you can donate to the British Library, which would be very nice. The chair for today's panel is Lavinia Stenet, a writer, historian and the founder of the Black Curriculum, a social enterprise set up to address the lack of black history in the UK curriculum. So I'm going to hand over to you now, Lavinia. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to New Justice of Africa. Tonight we're joined by contributors Annie, Ade, Goretti and Zekiswa. So let's just dive right into it. I'm going to introduce everyone on the panel. Good evening. How is everyone doing? Good evening. Good evening. Good, good. So this is the, I guess, the penultimate day before the light changes. So we want to be able to kind of bring the light into this conversation and share also the education around New Justice of Africa. So today Margaret Busby's landmark anthology is the epitome of intergenerational sisterhood and has provided us with foundations for a remarkable conversation surrounded race, gender and resistance. With Busby's legacy, it is immortalised by continuing to push the conversation forward and assess readers to continue to celebrate her work and the generous gift to the world. So first I'm going to introduce Annie. Annie is an actress, director and writer. Annie, can you give everyone a wave? Hi. And she has worked in radio, TV and films and theatre. She appeared earlier this year in Inua LLM's Three Sisters at the National Theatre. She is currently lecturing at St Mary's University in Twickenham and is directing students at Radder. Annie's poems and short stories are published in various anthologies and her plays produced in the UK. She has just finished her novel, Congratulations, Breaking the Malfur Chain, which is to be published in 2021 and it was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Competition. So quite a lot and an extract from her novel is also championed by Mirad Editions in the first novel competition of 2018 and she is also working on her second novel, Ominarah. So welcome Annie. I will now go on to Goretty. Hi Goretty, how are you? Hi. Hiya, so Goretty is one of Uganda's leading novelists. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Kwazulu Natal, South Africa. Her first novel, The First Daughter, was published in 1996, followed by Secrets No More in 1999, which won the Uganda National Literary Award for Best Novel in the same year. In 2002, she published a novella, Whispers from Vera. Her third novel, Waiting, was published by the Feminist Press in New York in 2007. In 2014, she published her essential handbook for African creative writers. She has also published several short stories in children's books and was recently also appointed a member of the Commonwealth Foundation Civil Society as part of their governing board. Welcome Goretty. Thank you. So our next contributor is Zekiswa. Zekiswa, hello, how are you? I'm very well, thank you, how are you doing? Great, great, awesome. So Zekiswa is a South African writer, editor and publisher of Born in Zambia, raised in Zimbabwe and currently based in Kenya, but who considers the whole African continent her home. Her debut novel, The Madams, was shortlisted for the 2007 K-Sellows. Now you've got to correct me now. Duka Award in 2007, her third novel, Men of the South, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Booked 2011 and Herman Charles Bosman Award. In 2014, she was named Africa on the Africa 39 list, which categorises 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. In 2015, she won the K-Sello-Duka Memorial Literary Award in London Cape Town, Joburg, and she has written three children's books, and she's also the founder and curator of artistic encounters, the virtual literary events, and also the founder and editor of the Afro-Young Adult Anthology. She is the co-founder also of the publishing house, Piwapo. And yes, thank you so much. So, we are clearly in the presence of greatness. And last but not least, we have Addy. Addy Solanki is an award-winning British Nigerian playwright, screenwriter and academic. She has an MFA in film from the University of Southern California where she was a Fulbright scholar, and she has a BA honours in English literature from Sheffield University. Her award-winning plays include acclaimed Pandora's Box, which won the best new play nomination of the West End, and she was shortlisted for the $100,000 Nigerian prize for literature, which is Africa's biggest literary award. She's also conducted the most recent play, The Court Must Have Had a Queen, which premiered at the Hampton Court Palace in 2018, and she's also written for The Guardian, The New Statement, Art Monthly, The Times, The Voice, and BBC Radio 4. Wow. So, I'm ready to get into these questions. Thank you, everyone. We'll start with Annie. And Annie, could you tell us more about the depictions of gender in your writing and plays and why it is important that a range of narratives are centred? I wrote about both genders, but I must admit that I tend to write more from the female point of view. I think that it's important that as women we tell our stories ourselves. Most of the time we hear from and about the men and their point of view. And I think that women have their stories too. And these are just as important. And more and more black women stories are coming, being shown, being produced, being published. And this is what has happened with the new daughters of Africa anthology, where Margaret Busby has been able to get over 200 black women to have their stories told either through poetry or short stories or extracts like mine. My novel, Breaking the Map of Chain, which is based on Sarah Forbes Bonetta, has two female narratives, sisters captured during this slave trade. And it was important for me for us to see their different take as women living first in Africa and then later on in Victoria and England, where they lived completely different lives. One as a maid and the other as a princess, the Goddaughter of Queen Victoria. It's important for me that we learn our history, that children know of our history and that we have it available for both the boys and for the girls to feel that they are represented. So my difference of gender is both but fewer towards the female gender. Thank you, that was perfect. So thinking about Breaking the Map of Chain and also understanding that our children need to know our histories, Garethian, want to go over to you and ask you about what ways Ugandan politics has influenced your writing and how do you think the two are synonymous? First of all, I really think that for us writers there's definitely a mix of politics and writing and that the act of writing itself is political because if you consider why we write or why do I write, it is to express our opinions and through a particular point of view. So that's already a political act because you are not just expressing your opinion but you are persuading the world to look at it from your point of view. Then the other reason is to question or interrogate the status quo. So for me that's already an act of political act and then there's freedom of expression which as writers we practice every day. It's a political act as a human right. It's ingrained in laws of our countries. So I also regard that as a political act and the themes. If you look at the themes which we write about, we write about race, about gender, war, inequality, identity, migration, love, sex. Even when I look at love and sex, I keep thinking that it's the way these two are regulated. So you are not free to love the person that you really want to. There is a regulation somewhere and you're not free sometimes to have sex with the person. There is some regulation somewhere on these acts. So for me, I regard that as a political act. For my own writing, I write about all my writing is based on the political realities of my country which is Uganda. I write about war particularly how devastating the devastating effects of war on women I write about patriarchy questioning men's privileged position in society. And sometimes I feel that I don't really have the luxury or the privilege not to write about these issues. Wonderful answers and it's really interesting to reflect on the inextricable nature of politics from our writing. We can't divorce the two. So thinking about themes, I want to move on to Zekiswa and understand more about your work and how your work is particularly informed by African concepts of time. So could you tell us more about that? Well, I just... There isn't really like anything major to tell about it. I think the work itself speaks for itself, but I'm genuinely... I think the second part of that question that you're asking was what are the lessons we can use? We can learn by using African ways of understanding the world and I think the major lesson that one can learn from is I think in all our communities, wherever we are from, there's a concept of humanity, humainness, ubuntu, as we'd say in South Africa, o unu, as we'd say in Shauna. And I think the major thing that we can... A lot of us know it, a lot of Africans know it, but perhaps our leaders need to know it. Our leaders in Nigeria, our leaders in South Africa, our leaders in Zimbabwe, our leaders in Diakongo and all over the continent. So perhaps maybe from our literatures what our leadership could learn. Well, maybe from our literatures, our leaders should just... Our leaders should just read more so that they learn humanity and they learn what we know. Absolutely. I think it couldn't be any more crucial in this society that we have today that our leaders are informed by African ways of seeing the world. And thank you for also bringing in some Shauna there as well. So, Addy, I'm going to move to you. And could you tell us more about some of the pivotal changes that you have seen with Africa on screen? There are lots of changes. The one I'm going to focus on is the increasing the number of protagonists, which is always of interest to me. I made a choice, as Annie has said in my work, I'll always centre African, mainly African female, but African and Black African heritage characters. So it's been remarkable that in the last two, three years there have been, I think, there was one weekend this year when out of all the films released one weekend, there were maybe 10 new releases and three of them were Black films, African films with Black protagonists. I think it's extremely important that we focus on not just having lots of the talents of Annie's people, the actors on screen, but the roles they're playing. That, for me, is the paramount issue. In recent times, in the last month, I think, we've had the first, well, it's not the first, but a screenplay written, a film with the screenplay written by a British Nigerian very young woman, Rocks, which came out maybe two, three weeks ago. And that was a coming-of-age type story, a group of young teenagers in the area where I'm speaking to you from, Hackney. I live 10 minutes from Dolfston where a lot of the filmmaking was done. And it was really moving to watch a story about young women, the sort of women who we walk past on the streets. I see them on their way to school, to see their lives put on screen. It shouldn't be remarkable, but it actually is a sad measure of our society that there is really still almost headline making. A year ago, another film that I found very moving for a similar reason is we've often seen the trope of the white saviour in our African storytelling. And I really enjoyed The Boy Who Harnished the Wind, the story that, I think it was Chewetel, Egyaforth Direct. And that for me is the exact type of story I want to see and write, which is about a black saviour story, a young Malawian child who's struggling in his community and uses his wits, his smarts, his ingenuity to solve a problem. So I'm really excited to see that trend, more and more black protagonists, and we can't have this conversation without talking about the impact. Whatever we think of the whole Wakanda notion of Black Panther, which was, first of all, a really big budget, Disney blockbuster superhero. In terms of genre, it's not the first superhero film, but I think it's an important addition to the repertoire of African storytelling, that the amount of energy and time and passion and love, and it was a really brilliant work of fiction. To see that level of investment in African storytelling is remarkable, and it obviously pays off because the audiences came in droves. It was a huge box office success on the list of the top 10, I think, most highest gross in films in the world. So I think having black protagonists in all sorts of stories, low-budget independent affair, but also blockbuster affair is a really welcome trend that I applaud and want to contribute to. I think it matters for several reasons. I think as pure entertainment, I've always been very keen on storytelling, which is about entertaining people. But as some of the other panellists have said, we also do obviously want to educate. When I think about the horror of George Floyd's murder in America earlier this year, there is a link between the level and the scale of black protagonists in fiction and the way in which our lives are treated in real life. If we are low value in the fiction chain, if we're never the centre, if we're only ever supporting characters or subsidiary characters, that does, I'm not arguing it makes all the difference, but it feeds into the way we're, if you like, evaluated and treated in real life. So I think African protagonists are really important and the lack of them in the past has devalued our lives and the increase of them is helping to not just tell our stories, entertain and make money for film companies and studios, but it's also contributing to a better society. I genuinely believe that. And by the way, obviously we all know what the protagonist, but just we do, but for the audience, it's the person who is the beating heart of the story. It's the person and it's often the white male who is 25 tall, James Bond on the screen and this is the person who holds our attention for two hours or three hours, whatever it is, or 13 episodes if it's a TV series or 20 episodes. So you can see the importance of us valuing ourselves and putting ourselves as we do as writers into the heart of our own storytelling and sharing our important in that role with the rest of the audience. In fact, you know, so often when we talk about the white savior trope, they're always, I always think, descendants of Tarzan. You know, the idea of the king of the jungle is a white guy. So thank God we're seeing Africa, not just as a backdrop for these kinds of, you know, different white stories, but Nollywood has been a massive contributor to countering that. We mustn't forget because I live in the West, I may always focus on Euro and American stories, but Nollywood has done an amazing job in obviously centering black stories. I contributed to Nollywood. Nobody blinks at the idea of a black protagonist. Wonderful reflections. I think it's really important that we have a range of narratives and we're at the heart of that in terms of storytelling, as you say, particularly with black protagonists inside the continent also outside of that as well. So thank you, Ellie, for your contributions. It's a perfect segue back to Annie. So Annie, could you tell us more on how you direct your work to navigate past linear narratives of loss when showcasing the complexity of African cultures and histories? The linear narratives present stories in a logical manner, you know, by telling what happened from one point to the next in time. It goes in the straight line, but most of the time our stories ourselves go backwards and forward. So African culture and histories are complex and they're embedded in our very being. So when I'm writing a story that's based with African or black characters, their lives are not linear. Their stories are not linear. So it becomes part of a non-linear narrative that goes backwards and forwards and does some flashbacks and it has memory. Our memories, we still have our ancestral traumas within us, but as we grow, as our children grow up in the diaspora, they are forgetting some of those memories. They don't share as many. So through our writing, through our stories, we have to tell them some of those stories, which means that even if the story is based on the present day, we have to go back and bring in some of our traditions, the things that we eat. When I'm writing, even though I'm writing in England, I tap into the memories that I have of being in Africa, of feeling the sun on me, of the smells, of the stories that my grandmother gave me and of the losses. We are filled with the losses of our ancestors and when we go into things like Black Lives Matter, it does matter because up until 2015, the government was paying from our taxes to the people who were recompensed for their slaves. So it's not something that's passed. When George Floyd's policeman knelt on George Floyd's neck, it reminds us of the things that happened to our ancestors. It's not so far away that we don't feel it within us. When our sons walk down the street and they have a hoodie, they're going to be stopped, and you're told where are you going because you're in a good area, all of these things go back to the memories that we have of our ancestors. Our stories are not linear. They are non-linear. They have to go backwards and forwards, and we have to see where we are going and to rejoice in the things that are changing, but not enough of it is changing. So I just feel that it's imperative that we teach our children. And as an adult, I don't believe in Black History Month. Our history is all year round, and it's not Black History because our history is white history. They came to Africa and took our people, and the riches that they have come from that, so our stories intermingle, and they go backwards and forwards. So when I'm writing, I want to showcase that complexity of the culture and the histories and how it goes backwards and forwards to the present day. That was beautifully put. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think it's really key that insight that we have to sustain that cultural imagination, as well as memory through kind of thinking about storytelling and also narratives around cultural history that go backwards and forwards. So thank you very much. So Goretti, this is really interesting because you've just spoken about passing on that legacy towards young people. So how are you currently working with young writers through your platform to extend their imaginative expressions of Africa in their representations? My platform at the moment is the African Writers Trust. So this is the organization that I founded in 2009, and basically the idea behind African Writers Trust is to bring together and connect African writers and publishing professionals in the diaspora and those on the continent. So we do this through trainings, mentorship. We run an international writers workshop. I'm in the conference every two years and we also run creative writing and publishing and editing workshops. So we work with young writers across the board. We work with writers who are focusing to develop their craft to higher standards or those who want to self-publish their works. We also work with writers who want to develop a career in the industry because in Africa it's so difficult to draw the line between who the writer is, who the editor is, who the publisher is, who the marketer is. It's usually one person wearing all those hats. So we work with all these writers who want to do different things with their craft. From my experience, there is an abundance of stories. There's no shortage of stories on the continent and talent and best skill. The main issue is the lack of the input of a professional book editor or publisher. So the stories are on one hand, but who comes to develop them to competitive levels, to cross the T's and dot the I's, as they say. That is what is generally lacking. It is a critical shortage of professional book editors on the continent. So how we usually address that is to invite the experts in the industry to come and mentor and run these editing and publishing workshops and work with these young writers. So in the past 10 years, we've worked with Ella Wakatama. I'm sure she's known to many of us. We've also invited Margaret Busby. She was in Uganda in 2016 to run an editing and publishing workshop and also to mentor. And as you said, to try and extend the imaginative vision of these young people. So the connection between the writers from the diaspora and the writers on the continent, I believe has contributed to expand that imaginative vision of the writers who remain on the continent. I should also mention that we've also worked with Jacob Ross, originally from Grenada. So that's what we've been focusing on. Thank you very much, Goethe. So there's a cross territorial exchange there with mentors for young writers. And for those that didn't catch the platform, the platform is African Writers Trust, and that's African Writers Trust, and you can find that online. So moving over, thank you very much, Goethe, to Sikiswa. We want to know more about your work, particularly made in SA. So that's South Africa. Local expressions appear in the dialogue of your work quite a lot. How can other writers showcase the complexity of language in their work? What advice do you have? Firstly, may I just say to Annie how much I absolutely enjoyed reading your excerpt and I'm looking forward to your book. I just needed to say that. That's the fun girl. But regarding language, I've always been fascinated with language and I always try to play around with it. And the reason I write and the reason I read is I read to entertain, but also to educate. So I like it when people read my work and they're able to place themselves, they're able to maybe not understand that particular word, but if it's put contextually, they can get it. But there are also certain things that are so quintessentially African that I enjoy using them in language. For instance, in a lot of our countries where the expression, we never walk a lot. We walk and walk and walk and walk. And I like the idea of that. I like the idea of hearing the smell. We know what hearing the smell means, because of the senses. So I am constantly with language, perhaps just always trying to reimagine and centre. Because so often we've centred whiteness, we've centred the West. I'm so often trying to centre us to say our story is meta, but how we speak, our language also matters, who we are. So I was talking to a friend and I said my characters. I never mentioned that I have somebody is black in a book because I'm black. So that is the centre. But I might mention that somebody is white because that's the other in my world. So it's just the needing to centre yourself, to centre your humanity. I was telling somebody at some point in time that they did a review of my first novel and the White South African woman and they said the first black woman chic literature. So there are all these compartmentalisations and I wasn't very happy with that. And she didn't understand why I was unhappy with it. I was like listen, you live in a country that's 52% women and that's 90% black. So I'm not the other. I am the centre. But most also because you actually don't have dick lips as a category of literature, but you have dick lips. And so it's very interesting to figure that out, but yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for reminding us of how to centre ourselves and our humanity in our work. And we are slowly kind of running out of time but we will walk and walk and walk until we can then get more information from some of the other panellists with their questions. So one of the questions I actually have for Addy now is kind of around centering that humanity. So the theme of migration is interwoven throughout Pencara's box and some of your other work. Can you walk us through how this informs identity and the theme of identity in your work? Well as far as I'm concerned every single story is about identity. I don't know why the label is attached more to work by black people, African people, women, et cetera. When a Russian novelist or a French novelist writes about their heritage and their experience that's identity. So I've got no problem with writing identity. I just wish we'd be aware more or whatever every story is an element, an expression of identity. So I've always, the opposite of my sister from South Africa I've always lived in the West and I've always been what's been designated a minority but I've never felt that. I've always been conscious of being part of a global majority and even if numerically in England I grew up in West London, Notting Hill even if in England we were a numerical minority in Labyrinth Grove I wasn't actually aware that we were a minority I know it sounds ridiculous but there was such a world we lived in the world there were people from everywhere and it was actually only when I went to university where there was a numerical black people were a numerical majority so my work has always explored being African in the diaspora and Pandora's Box is my first play and it addressed a particular aspect of that diaspora experience which is you know the adeganes and ecstasies of raising children in the diaspora you want to connect to your home and your cultural family and world and country and you're also part of this country and what sorts of creative tensions does that throw up? So for me it's like my life I don't imagine I can write any story I could, I've been commissioned to write stories which don't deal with identity and diaspora but in terms of my experience it's so central the idea of always you know suitcase is always ready in the sense that my mother was always saying oh I'm going to go back to Nigeria so we always had this sense of being permanently temporary I wouldn't actually say that's necessarily a good thing but it's a part of my experience which is so part of my life that it's integral so in Pandora's Box it's a mother who's wrestling with whether or not to take her British born and she's also British born child she's wrestling about the choice about taking him back to school in Africa which as we all know many African parents in the diaspora do this if the child is having trouble as often young males sometimes run a cropper in this society for reasons we needn't go into here so it was a story which was inspired by a friend of mine and I was quite amazed at the extent to which it really connected with Asian audiences with Eastern European audiences it was quite a universal diaspora story how do we raise our young in a foreign land even though it's the home country of the mother it's still in the sense her second country so I think it's for African heritage writers and many of the books many of the pieces the extracts in Margaret's book speak to this experience of diaspora because we're global citizens and wherever we find ourselves positioned we're always looking to Africa because it's our homeland in lots of ways even if we never lived there I've never lived on the continent of Africa I've worked in Africa I've contributed to lots of African projects but I've always lived in either England and for a while in America so yeah, the idea of migration and I also think a lot about what will my son's children and his children be like that's something I'm beginning to think about in terms of the kinds of stories of diaspora they needn't just be about now what will the future of our diaspora be? I think those are interesting areas to explore too Definitely I think our young ones definitely need to start thinking about that themselves as well and that phrase that you mentioned permanently temporary resonated very deeply and the work the Black Curriculum does it really kind of grapples with those themes of identity so thank you for drawing our attention back to the fact that everyone experiences that as well I'm going to come back actually to Goretti and I want to know from you how optimism shapes your work I think if I remember correctly it was Desmond Tutu, Bishop Desmond Tutu who once said that we have to be prisoners of hope and I think whenever I'm doing my work it keeps coming back to me because giving up is the easier option I've worked on the continent I've been promoting literature and African writers for the past over 20 years and every time I think about giving up I always come back to that we have to keep up the hope we have to be optimistic but at the same time I want to believe that things are much better now than when I first published my first novel which was in 1996 there were virtually no support structures for writers the publisher who published me was the only publishing house in Uganda and now when I look through the past 15 or so years there are really a number of literary and publishing initiatives that have come up on the continent I can just mention a few there is the Archive Festival in Nigeria Hagaisa in Somariland there is a bantro in South Africa and then the Ugandan International Writers Conference which I organise in Uganda every two years there is Hoosa Press in Rwanda we know Kasawa Republic Press in Nigeria so I think things are beginning to look a little much better than they were about 25 years ago but I also look around and think that some things have actually remained the same in the past 20 odd years that I've been doing this work because most of these initiatives that I mentioned they are almost all of them are donor driven which indeed is a threat on itself and there is still virtually no support or very minimal support for arts and still a struggle as it was for me 20 years ago to raise the funds I need to run my work Thank you very much so whilst there is a sense of things changing there is still a lot of futility and instability with the structures that support writers and I think that is really crucial in terms of the work that we are putting out and what that means for our society so I want to move back to Zepiswa to understand within this society that we are speaking about what are some of the successes that you witnessed in writing and depicting polygamy? I've never written about polygamy and I don't know about any successes in depicting it My country's biggest polygamist or most famous Jacob Zuma probably can't tell you of any successes in polygamy if you look at his life so no I don't know Thank you for that I think one of the things that we want to move forward in thinking about is inspiration so if you could touch on some of the inspirations around your work that would be really good for some of the panellists to hear and also the audiences as well Well, suddenly Amad Tidw has been a big influence on me her outlook on the continent and the diaspora her panafocanism her feminism Maryse Conde is another very important literary figure to me and then the people like Zexm Da who is immensely generous he reads he comes he engages with your work in a very generous way so yeah I've been very lucky and of course Margaret Basby she is one of my major inspirations when I started setting up my publishing house because I loved what she did when she had Alison and Basby one of the most memorable books and I watched this movie at least twice twice three times a year and I read the book just as often the Spook who said by the door which was the first book that she published so yeah but yeah, I'm very lucky every woman and every man most writers that I've encountered have shaped me in some ways the amazing writers have made me want to become a better writer and the terrible ones have made me learn how not to be a writer so I guess you learned to be a writer thank you, thank you very much I do at Margaret Basby are inspirational very inspirational and Addy, if you could tell us more about Phyllis in London which is a story that you wrote why have you focussed on cross-national narratives about black people and why is that important to you I think you have mentioned before about the expression of identity and black protagonist but specifically how are those narratives also very important as well well Phyllis is a project I've been working on for several years and I've got a feeling I'll do the play in a couple of years and I may do a screen version of it and there are all sorts of ways to tell her story for those who don't know Phyllis Wheatley was an African-American enslaved woman who came to this country in 1773 to publish the first book of poetry by an African in English I always stress it was the first book in English not the first book written by an African obviously we have African languages and books were published but 1773 is a moment a landmark in British literary history American literary history African literary history from that point of view and she's fascinating to me as a diaspora writer because she came to London because although she was born in Africa and kidnapped from there trafficked to America and enslaved was heralded as a prodigy and celebrated while she was still enslaved and came to England because for lots of reasons they wouldn't publish her in America I studied as a writer in America myself several years ago so 30 years ago I was not in the same position obviously I wasn't enslaved but I was an African writer abroad and she came here to do a publicity tour of her work I know it does sound really contradictory how can you be enslaved, how can you be a celebrity how can you be a prodigy but this is all the madness of what slavery really was of course people who were genius before they were enslaved didn't just evaporate so her story is one that fascinates me from that point of view obviously as an African woman writer in English she's one of the mothers of my writing tradition and also I'm interested in her because it's a way to explore this question which has been central to my work how far do we embrace our trauma and tell our trauma and dramatise it I think struggle isn't all our history is about but it's a key part at least in our encounter with the West and I think the struggle has given us as African people really extraordinary narratives but we don't want just trauma narratives so we often hear people especially around films like 12 Years of Slave oh we don't want to hear any more slave stories I really fundamentally disagree with that I don't think stories about racism are depressing and un-empowering of themselves is how they're told I think we can tell stories about enslaved people which are tales of resistance and resilience and overcoming of all the obstacles that are in obviously there and I also think something much more fundamental I don't think there's ever has been there's ever been any shame in having been a slave and we shouldn't I certainly don't feel it's our fault is the obvious word and so the sense of shame that we sometimes exhibit when stories about enslaved people come up is unnecessary I like stories about the past because as in the case of the Phyllis Whitby story they really teach me about today I actually couldn't understand certain things that happened in contemporary life until I began researching and exploring Phyllis's story and then it was like oh hey presto now I get it I actually understood my times and the place and time I find myself in by going back to the depths of slavery the 1770s slavery was at its height and illuminated my life today as in Phyllis wasn't published in America because it wasn't what a black person was supposed to do they knew she'd written the books they tested her they knew she had the talent but they just thought oh no it's not right and doesn't that feed into some of the experiences we have in the west today certain things that are deemed not right for black people to be doing is still a feature of our lives very powerful and thinking about Phyllis's story as well as the linear narratives that we spoke about earlier Annie what are your hopes for the future of British theatre well British theatre at the moment is in difficulties shall we say because of the pandemic there are not there's no theatre that's open properly they're just starting I'm so looking forward to next weekend going to the national theatre to see Death of England by Roy Williams and Clinton's diet the wire because it's sort of saying we have a future but our future is going to be very different to the future that we have now I don't suppose that we're going to go back to the kind of lifestyle that we had before you know I think that it's going to be that we are so lucky in a way that we have the internet the young have the ability to do things that my generation would have been stymled if this had happened 30-40 years ago we have means of looking for different ways of bringing theatre and the arts at the moment I'm directing a zoom play of Wellesha Inker Death of the King Horseman which is on Sunday and the ability to have a cast from different parts of the country to come together and to rehearse and to perform means that there is some hope there have been lots of short plays on from people's homes and from small studios this whole thing of doing the socially distanced theatre is working for a lot of people I went to see something that this theatre was putting on and it was done in a basketball court of course in the winter you can't do that but we're being adventurous and we're being innovative and there's hope I think that we'll have the theatre that we had before for a long time I don't see the west end with the visitors all over the world coming to see our shows it's going to happen but I think that smaller theatres are going to happen we needed, we saw what happened when we first went into lockdown and how all those things that were filmed were sort of gumbled up in no time at all we see how some of the shows just videos for posterity are being shown and we see them of course when we first went into lockdown they showed a lot of things for free which is fine but now thank God they're beginning to charge for it so that people who can take part in it can be paid because a lot of us are not having any funds either way we're not furlored we have claimed universal benefits and so on and it's not just the actors it's the stage hands it's the costume people the make up and so on that makes up the theatre it's the restaurants around the theatre and so on we're all in a difficult position and we're just hoping that things will change but it will never get back to what it was it might come back and it might be going we might have it going parallel but it's online as well as the live theatre but live theatre in some form will be there but it is very difficult and a lot of people are suffering and a lot of people will be out of work and they might try to do what we were told we were supposed to do go and find and train for other jobs where are these other jobs there are no other jobs and people will want entertainment they do want music they do want theatre because it's good for our mental stability so we are we are essential workers in a lot of ways and please God let the theatre continue and music continue and live theatre absolutely I think it's really really interesting that we've just reflected on a reality of precarity and we just don't know what's going to happen in the future but at the moment we have such wonderful contributions from you all and also a reminder that people will come to listen to education and to ways in which we can think about the world to represent black people and black contributions to the world in a better light so thank you very much for your contributions we have about seven minutes for questions so to the audience please submit all your questions using the question form we have wonderful panelists and we'll be able to take them so you can use the question feed and I will be able to read them out so we have one question so when you're writing your questions if you could pose it to one of the panelists that would be really helpful but I'm going to pose this one to everyone so how can we use online resources to benefit black history and learning are there free platforms we can access with our children in our schools and where can we go to hear those oral histories and stories Annie discusses so I'll leave that for everyone if we can respond in two minutes under two minutes so that we can get other questions in that would be great so that is online resources I think you're the one with your work you do as a black curriculum you're the answer we'll hand that over to you Lavinia okay cool I'll join you all some of the online resources include animations that you can find on YouTube there are also an array of videos on YouTube as well that document the experiences of black people in Britain in the early 1900s and also the early 20th century too and I think it's really important to start with visual elements as well as books as well there are a number of courses that you can take online available under black history I think it's black history books and also by Robin Walker who is now offering online courses as well for everyone to educate themselves on black history Instagram is a great learning tool I think we've all seen over the course of the pandemic everyone sharing loads of these infographics about this so you can access not only archives but also information on Instagram a few of the accounts that I know of are black in the day there is also another page called Free Black Uni which are doing an amazing job at the moment in boarding it out but I'm not going to spend too much time discussing that I would suggest people go to your website because that would be an absolute treasure trove I imagine you're being too humble so the Black Curriculum is a website that you can check out theblackcurriculum.com and we're having a rate of resources that we will be developing over the next couple of months that include black British history yeah thank you thank you Addy for the shout out cool so are there any other questions currently we are having problems and getting questions in don't be shy people just comment on one thing that's interesting in terms of the stage I've been thinking about this for a long time just connected to the issue of black protagonists I'd love to hear any thoughts I really relish any opportunity to see wonderful actors in any role but I often worry about sometimes the thing that's called colour blind casting may be detracting from original new material which is if you like about African subjects and stories if there's no question coming through that's something I think we should also think about in the context of this conversation about African representation when you put a black body on stage in the form of actors like Annie of the calibre of Annie and they're doing a role which is wonderful and they're doing a great job I think of Papa Essidu when he did Hamlet extraordinary performance I think Hamlet for me has never been performed so brilliantly and I've seen about 30 or 40 productions and the question still remains what happens when that body is emptied of its own history and heritage I'd like to just say something about that I think that we have for too long bow down to black American play we have so many very good black British writers and unless unless their plays are done we will not become part of the canon and we will have to keep falling back another thing I love Shakespeare, I teach Shakespeare and I think it's fine for us to I think that for us to represent ourselves and where we stand as black British in England is vital for young people to come and see themselves when we did Three Sisters although it was based on Chekhov's Three Sisters after it was moved to Biafra the number of people who came and then brought their parents or brought their children because they were learning about Biafra and about the history of the connection between Biafra and England, Biafra and the rest of the world and it was absolutely amazing to some people to come on to go to the theatre and see 18 black people on stage all British presenting some British and black history I see Lavigne wants to say something I'm just coming because all the questions are coming in so a question for any quick we have two minutes and we're going to watch the Wale Srincher production this coming Sunday and another question for all the panellists where is the best place to start when exploring African female writers and who are the must reads The zoom thing is on Utopia Utopia Theatre if you go to their website you can see how to get a ticket for Sunday at 4.30 Wale Srincher get of the King's Horseman that I directed with Mojitola talking about where they can get about black female writers they can go to there's some anthologies that will give you an idea of what place they are and then you can get to some of the female writers but there are people like Winston Pinnock there's a day here there are Paulette Randall there are so many of them I could give a whole list but go online and find out there's actually the National Theatre has something called Black Theatre online which is a portal that also is a good resource and I can see Utopia Utopia is a fantastic resource and so is the Dotson of Africa which is the original so if you get new Dotson of Africa this is an amazing resource to start with and I've been doing since March an online libfest a virtual libfest as a response to the pandemic called Afrolid Sons Frontiers and it's got writers in English and in Portuguese and in French from all over the black world whether it's Brazil or you know Angola or Cameroon or you know just all of us so that's another place you can just check it out on www.AfrolidSonsFrontiers.com and you'll see a lot of women writers thank you one more question from the Margaret Busby so she said what she wanted to say thank you all for your wonderful contributions to the anthology how do you all feel about having helped the book to happen in collaboration with myriad editions who have put on this amazing event with the British Library and so has and enabling one student from Africa to have a free course of study how does it feel 30 seconds each I think it's just so wonderful because everything we're doing in the anthology with this talk with the work Jonah and the other the team at the British Library with what you're doing at the black curriculum all of us we're saying in our own different ways black women's voices and lives matter so to put our energy and the wonderful resources the money that's coming from this book into fueling the development of the talent of another black woman whether she's a writer, a scientist a botanist we don't really care but she's contributing to making the world a better place so I think it's just a great honour and privilege to be part of this thank you Margaret it's a wonderful thing to be able to do I got into the novel for the anthology because myriad did a competition which is the first novel edition which I won and if it wasn't for that encouragement I would not have been among such amazing writers so to have the opportunity for somebody else to come from Africa to have some training in England and to have that opportunity is absolutely wonderful and I'm thrilled that I'm able in my small way to make that happen hi Margaret hi Margaret thank you very much thank you for coming to Uganda and for us it was a great opportunity it's very inspiring and please come again I know we went dancing and would like to do that again thank you thank you Goethe and to Keiswa and we'll end I think it was an absolute honour to be part of this project of course my big fantasy is where we all over this continent maybe some of the money that's used on weapons that end up killing us by our governments is moved so that it goes to books so that more people can benefit from the scholarship like this one so thank you very much Margaret it was an initiative and was an absolute honour to be in this book I know a lot of my writer friends who were very envious that they didn't make it so yay me can I just quickly add although we now have two daughters of Africa Margaret you can't rest for more than a few more weeks we want number three okay we're looking forward to the same volume yes please number three thank you all for your contributions this evening for all your wonderful work we'd love to continue the conversation and please to the audience and the panellists please continue the conversation online and you can find the handles for my additions and also the British Library on Twitter where you can continue the conversation but thank you each for your contributions and we hope that you all start your learning with daughters of Africa and have a lovely evening thank you thank you good evening everyone bye bye a huge thanks to our brilliant panel and special thanks to myriad additions and to the black curriculum and thanks to you for joining us please do check out the rest of our events program for the unfinished business exhibition