 Good evening, everyone. Wonderful to see you all. Welcome to the British Library, to this evening's history of African and Caribbean people in Britain, Hakim Adi with David Olusoga. This evening's conversation based on Hakim's new book. Actually, I want to say that again. This evening's conversation based on Professor Hakim Adi's new book, African and Caribbean people, African and Caribbean people in Britain, a history exploring the long presence of Black people in Britain, promises, as I'm sure you know, to be a fascinating education for us all. At least one of you might be wondering who's this woman with the mic. My name is Nicole Rochelle, Nicole Rochelle Moore, and I'm the British Library's curator for Caribbean collections here, and thank you. I haven't done anything yet, wait. And for those of you who already have a British Library reader pass, but may not yet have started exploring the Caribbean collections, I urge you to do so. And remember, the Caribbean is a multiplicity of languages and cultures and stuff, so please avail yourself. And for those of you who don't yet have your British Library reader pass, which is free, I urge you to get one. Okay. So I'd like to extend a very special welcome as well to those of us joining, to those of you rather joining us online, and I hope that both on-site audience and online audience will enjoy this evening, and I'm sure you will. We'll be taking questions from our online and in-house audiences, and if you're watching online, you just need to submit your questions in the question box below the video. And for our audience here in the theatre, just raise your hand, and a colleague will come to you with a microphone. Also, if you're watching online, you can use the menu above on screen to provide us with feedback, and also you can use the book tab to purchase a copy of Hakim's book, African and Caribbean People in Britain, A History, and also David's book, Black and British, A Forgotten History. And for those of you here with us in person, or as I like to confuse my son and say I-R-L, you can get, you can buy books at the bookshop just across there, and there will be signings happening on that side there. So it is my pleasure to welcome and introduce our host for this evening, Professor David Olashoga. David is, David is an historian, author, presenter, and BAFTA-winning filmmaker. He's a professor of public history at Manchester, at the University of Manchester, and the author of a number of books. So I'm going to leave you in David's capable hands and enjoy the evening. Thank you. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Thank you to you all for coming out tonight. Welcome to the British Library and also welcome to those who are joining us online. My evening, my task this evening is to share a discussion with Professor Hakim Adi. We'll be in discussion for about 50, 55 minutes and then we've got about 30 minutes for questions from you, the audience. So please do think of your questions. I'm going to make the appeal I normally make. Could we please have questions rather than statements? And could you please, if at all possible, try to make the questions brief so we can get as many people to ask questions as possible. Professor Hakim Adi is a figure who's spent literally decades writing about this history. As long as I've been interested in this history, I've been reading his books. He is a figure who's fought for this history to be recognized, to be included into our narrative of our country. He's the author of among many titles, Pan-Africanism History, Pan-Africanism and Communism, West Africans in Britain, 1900 to 1960. He edited Black Voices on Britain and Black History, Black British History New Perspectives. But we are here to discuss his new book, African and Caribbean People in Britain. It's a book of almost 700 pages. It offers a detailed and in-depth analysis of a long history. And as an author, when I look at the book on that scale with that level of research behind it, I realize what goes into it and I congratulate you for getting to the end. There are many more people who start books than finish them as any publisher or agent will tell you. So I'm thrilled to have this chance to talk to Professor Adi about this book, about what it means and about the stories that it contains. And I'd like to begin, if I may, with a question or two questions I tend to always start with when I speak to writers, which is why did you write this book and why did you write it now? That's a difficult question. I'm actually with the audience's permission. I'm going to stand. I know I'm already rather high above you, as it were. But this chair is very uncomfortable. I can vouch for that. I have a bad back to start with. So I'm going to stand and address David and address all of you. The simple answer as to why the book was written is because I was asked to write the book. Penguin approached me and said, could I put something together? At that time, we were discussing an introductory history. So it is essentially an introductory history, just that there's rather a lot of history to introduce. And therefore, it's rather a long book, which I apologize for. It covers about 10,000 years, I guess in total, or 2,000, if you like. And so that's really the reason. I guess that's the reason why now, as you said in your introduction, I've been writing, researching, teaching this history for actually a very long time. I'm never quite sure whether it's 30 years or 40 years, something like that. I'm hardly old enough to have been doing it for 40 years, but it's something like that. And so the book brings hopefully all that experience and yes, some ideas. And as you will be aware from the introductory slide, it's called African and Caribbean People A History. It doesn't claim to be the history, but it's my history of that subject. And on that question of the title, I mean the language about race, the language about the place of black people in British history has been evolving over many years. Why that title, African and Caribbean People? Well, I mean, of course, there were many titles that were discussed. And eventually we decided on that particular one. There were a number of things to bear in mind. One was that, although I have edited books or maybe been associated with books which refer to black history, and we all tend to use that phrase as a kind of shorthand phrase, but I'm never really very comfortable with the concept of black history any more than I'd be very comfortable with the concept of white history. And so this was very much a history of Britain, but of people of very definite heritage or definite background. And it was important to that heritage was represented, that people aren't just a color. We come with particular cultures, particular heritage, particular languages. And it's important to recognize that, I think. The other thing is that very often a presentation of history is given which, and I won't at this point mention a certain ship which arrived at a certain time and a certain place, but a presentation of history is given which tends to present things through a particular Caribbean lens as if people only come from the Caribbean, even in the recent period. And that's a very inaccurate picture of particularly modern Britain. As some of you will know, if one wants to talk about the black population in Britain, the majority of that population are more intimately connected with the African continent than they are with the Caribbean. And so a presentation of history which kind of excludes Africans is a very bad and one-sided history. So for that reason too, I wanted to use both of those terms, African and Caribbean. Well, I am going to mention exactly that ship and mention another problem with the form of history that is built around the Windrush, which is that it's, there has been, as you know, for many years a phenomenon called the Windrush myth, the idea that this story begins somehow in Tilbury in 1948. That expectation has, I think, is beginning to be chipped away partly because of the work of yourself and other scholars. And yet it will be a surprise to many people to open a book on black British history and for it to begin not 70 years ago, but 10,000 years ago. Maybe people who are unfortunately uneducated in these things, I mean, that's, I suppose, that is a criticism perhaps of the British education system. I wouldn't dare. No, I know, but an implied criticism that people are so ignorant about the history of our own country. But unfortunately many people are very ignorant about many aspects of this history. And so, yes, the book does go back and we actually start off with a black figure for those people who are interested in black people. He wasn't somebody who came from Africa or from the Caribbean, at least not directly from Africa. Obviously his ancestors came from Africa, as the ancestors of everybody here came from Africa. And in that sense we're all Africans, because some of us are more African than others. But he was a gentleman who's known as Cheddar Man. He lived about 10,000 years ago. And as the Daily Telegraph proudly proclaimed when he was reconstructed, the first Britons were black because Cheddar Man from the latest DNA analysis was a man with dark hair, dark skin, but blue eyes. And not only did he look like that, but everybody in Britain looked like that 10,000 years ago. In fact, everybody in Europe looked like that. So for those who are interested in black history, we start the book with the first Britain and the first black Britain just to satisfy everybody on that particular score. I don't really want to get into a particular ship that sailed, although in the book I do mention it in passing as a myth that needs to be, we need to rid ourselves of. Why people are fixated about a ship that arrived in June 1948? I have no idea. I actually have some idea, but the same ship arrived in 1947. So why don't we celebrate that? Or why don't we celebrate the ships that came in the post-war period before 1947? Why choose one in particular? But then to label everybody with that ship is just a falsification of history. That ship wasn't even particularly connected with the mass migrations of the 1950s, let alone those who were here for the 2000 or 3000 years before that. So you're right, David, as long as I've been, even when I first began 40 years ago or whatever, people were talking about 1948. And I think I've spent my whole career, such as it is, trying to present a different history and trying to say, well, this is not the truth of this. Africans were here in Roman times or in Saxon times, in Norman times, and even before Roman times. So why this constant falsification? And I think that, anyway, we can go into why there is that falsification. It's always of concern when the government of the day adopts a certain narrative, then it's always time to be a little bit worried about what's going on. And clearly the powers that be have adopted and promote that particular narrative as if to say that the history of this country is other than it actually was. And the powers that be continually falsify the history of this country, whether it's the history of the 20th century, the 19th century, the 18th century, the Roman period or whenever. And it's a constant struggle to present the truth and to deal with those falsifications. But that's what we as historians and others who teach it or are concerned about it, we have to do. Because they lie about everything, to put it bluntly. You begin the book also with reference to another book, a book that has been a foundational text for many of us. And I think anyone writing about Black British history will have to think about staying power, the book published in 1984 by the journalist Peter Fryer. And you begin the book in some ways talking about the way attacks on that book are, I think speak a lot to the ways in which this history has been taken as almost like a hostile alien narrative by some. If you could explain the story. Yes, the story in fact involves a GCSE course, which I and others were involved in developing a few years ago. It's a course on migration. And it just presents the facts of British history, which is that, I suppose you could say Britain is a country or the British Isles in general, but particularly England is a country of migrants. That's the nature of its history. Going back to Cheddar Man, Cheddar Man was also a migrant. And as part of showing that history of migration, one of the things that the course and the textbook which we wrote illustrates is that, as we've been saying, Africans have been here for a very long time. We're certainly here in Roman times and even before Roman times. So the Daily Mail had a headline and an article where they were criticizing us and what we'd said by quoting Peter Fryer. And Peter Fryer has a passage in staying power where he says it would be a strange irony if Africans were here before the ancestors of the English. In other words, before the angles, saxons and so on. Or words to that effect anyway. But I mean that is the history. Africans were here in Roman times and so on. The Romans were here before the angles, saxons, jutes, normans and so on. So they took Umbridge anyway. Even this suggestion that Africans could have been here before the angles and saxons. And then they found various dubious academics and others to also kind of pour scorn on this idea. This is outrageous. Someone should suggest that Africans were here before the English. But I mean this is just the facts of history. So these things happen. I mean it happens just a few months ago, somebody, how could one describe such a person? A racist actually. Made a video which he put on YouTube. This happens every couple of years. Somebody gets hold of something. And this was before this book came out. They'd found a children's book that I wrote in 1994 where I mentioned the same thing, that Africans were here in Roman Britain. And so I don't know what they said exactly in their video, but people reported it to me that they were claiming that I was brainwashing children and some kind of nonsense. Because I just said that Africans were here in Roman times. So this is the world we live in. That people are very confused about things. And you could say the same racist attitudes that those who made the video and other videos who attacked me for the same kind of thing is allowed to flourish because there's so much disinformation and falsification. And so somebody can feel some idiot, can feel that they have a point to say, how can you say that Africans are here? But I mean this is just a fact. Nothing particularly even particularly exciting about it. It's just the fact. So these are things that happen. You could say when you get attacked that you know that you're saying something useful. That's powerful of course, as I say. Stainpower was written a long time ago. A lot has happened. A lot of research, a lot of new material. And this is a history, the history of black people in Britain that is organic, it seems. We discover new people, we discover new lives, we discover new details, a new phenomenon all the time. I mean this book is full of new discoveries, of new pieces of evidence. Could you tell us something about the research and some of those findings? Well the aim of the book, I started off by saying that the aim of the book was to be an introductory history. But of course it also had to be an introductory history that summarised the research that's been done over the last 40 years or so since staying power. And so that's what I set out to do, to try and summarise that research, that work that's been done over that period of time. And so the book details some of that work. Of course there are new discoveries, I mean even Cheddar Man in that sense is new-ish. A huge amount of work because of isotope testing technologies weren't available in the 80s. Yeah it's basically DNA, various forms of DNA testing, some of it on tooth and amul, some other forms of DNA testing which allow scientists archaeologists to place the not only to date skeletal remains but to place their origin and also to, as you may have seen with some of the slides, slides seem to have stopped for some reason, I'm not sure why. They can reconstruct. So Ivory Bangal lady for example is a reconstruction obviously, somebody who lived 1700, 1800 years ago. But there is also other archaeological research of that kind which deals with, for example you probably know that just about a month ago there was a report released about a young girl who was found in Kent. And they were able to date her skeleton to the 7th century and from her DNA to present the view that her DNA was 33% Africa and that it was very likely that either her father or her grandfather came from what is today Nigeria. She had essentially Europa DNA. So that kind of research is now possible and in fact one of the exciting things I guess about this kind of scientific investigation is not very much of it has been done. Hitherto it's been quite expensive to do and so not very much research has been done but as it becomes easier and more precise there's going to be a lot more that we will find and already we know that of course there have been other finds of Africans here in Anglo-Saxon times, Norman times in the early medieval period. There's been some research recently on burials during the Black Death in the 14th century where again people have realised that many of those people who died during that period in England were also Africans or people of African heritage. So that period where previously we said we don't know very much that's from the basically from the end of the Roman occupation to around about 1500s. We've got bits and pieces and I mentioned them in the book. That knowledge will undoubtedly expand in the years to come and we'll know more hopefully about where these people came from why they came because very often you can as in the example I gave you can say yes this young girl or her father or grandfather came from West Africa but how, why, for what purpose and so on. We don't have very much information yet but that information will undoubtedly be developed as more and more work is done and hopefully more and more people will want to study that period because at the moment we have a lot of people who study the 20th century and if you look at the book there's a lot of information about the 20th century. There's quite a lot of people study the 18th century, there's quite a lot of information, the 18th century. The 19th century is still a lot of information but not perhaps as much as they're all to be but then as we go back in time there's less and less information. The Tudor period has now become popular or more popular and there several historians have worked on that period and produced very important research and information but we need more people to do that kind of work unless it's why it's so important as I always say to encourage young people to be researching this history. I'd like to come onto that at the end about what you're doing precisely on that but to sort of to focus on the book for a second, I mean you paint a picture of an enormously expanded area, the Tudor research, I mean people who are involved in that research here with us tonight. That again is an area that really catches people's excitement when we love that period we have this astonishing terrible ruling dynasty placing black people in that history that people are very comfortable with the idea that there were no black people that's been quite electrifying hasn't it for many people. Yeah I mean people in England love the Tudors, I don't know why particularly I mean it's the time we're not boring you have to give them that. Well it's an important period in England's history in the sense that it's the kind of development of modern England, modern Britain, the development of the modern world in which we live with all that goes with it, the capital-centered system and all that kind of thing and it's also the era in which the relationship between Africa and this country was transformed and so that's something about it that perhaps we don't think about as often as we should. But yes it's interesting to envisage people in Tudor England, in Elizabethan England and to realize that Africans were here, hundreds of Africans were here doing a variety of occupations, men, women, children. I mean we now know certainly not full biographies but we now these aren't just names anymore in registers. We know yes we have biographies of people to some degree, some more than others but certainly of some individuals. We know you know for example to a well-known figure like John Blank for example we know something about his marital status, the money he earned, the fact that he was the first African to demand a wage rise and was successful and we know about others as well from the terms of their professions, their trades. We know the fact that some people had a certain status, were yeoman or that status and had particular types of property and so on. So we know quite a lot about them. We know not so much about exactly where they came from and in which circumstance, what circumstances, probably many of them came from Europe, probably from Spain, also from Portugal and some people came directly from Africa as a result of England's overseas expansion in that period. Most importantly perhaps what we know about them is that they were free people. There's always an assumption of some people that if you find any Africans or people of African heritage here before 1948 they have to be enslaved people. Why anyone should have that view I'm not sure but that view abounds and generally speaking in the Tudor period the 16th century that was not the status of Africans in Britain. They generally seem to have been pretty well integrated to intermarry, to have relationships with other people here and so on. And that generally startles people. So people look first of all for enslavement and then they're disappointed when they don't find it. Then they look next for racism. When they don't find much of that they get a bit disappointed about that as well. But racism in the way we understand it is a relatively modern creation and probably didn't, almost certainly didn't exist in the way that we think of it in Tudor times. Incidentally going back to the young girl who was discovered from the 7th century in Kent I noticed that the, I don't want to be careful what I say, anyway one of the people who wrote the report said well she was buried in the same manner as everybody else as if this was something startling that a child of eight or nine years old, eight or nine years old should be buried in the same way that every other child in England was buried in the 7th century. Why is that startling? It's quite remarkable somebody should have that view in the 21st century. But anyway so these kinds of things are said. So this analysis of Tudor England is also important for us as is an analysis of the past in every case because it also helps us to reflect on the society we live in. One of the interesting things about racism just to finish with that is that you kind of come to the realization if you didn't before that it didn't always exist or it didn't exist in the form it exists now. And therefore history tells us that everything changes and that nothing is permanent and that in the future these things will disappear as well. Of course it also shows us that we are the agents of that change and so everything is in our grasp and if we want to rid ourselves of these things then we need to organize ourselves and take care of those problems that confront us. So history presents all these possibilities to us which is why the powers that be spend so much time falsifying everything and generally presenting everything as the deed of the white men of property only when history is never the deed of white men of property history is the deed of all of us in the past present and also in the future. Reading reading your book I felt that as I do whenever I read books on black British history that wonderful moment when you turn to the 18th century and as you said earlier we suddenly have so much material so many voices there is this chorus of black Britain which emerges and you being the latest person to write about this have the latest research at your fingertips there's almost too much to say about the 18th century isn't it we know we just have this wonderful richness. Yeah I mean the important thing about the 18th century in particular is that we have the voice of Africans that's obviously that it's not just this voice has just been discovered but we have the voice of Africans speaking to us about the world they inhabited and the problems that confronted them and the actions that they took to deal with these problems and so on. So that makes it very exciting you could say because you can read Equiano or Corguano or Guania Saw or whoever was around that you're particularly interested in and you can see what they had to say about the problems that confronted them. In the 18th century the the key problem which confronted Africans in this country and globally to some extent we could say was the problem of of human trafficking which in which this country led the world. Britain was the world's leading human trafficker of African men women and children so if you were an African here in the 18th century that was what you were mainly concerned about and we perhaps tend to forget that the enslavement of Africans not only took place in the Caribbean or in Africa or in North America but also here in London in Britain and so on. So the status that's not to say that everybody every African who was here was enslaved but certainly some were and they had to take action to remedy that situation which they did and those who were not enslaved also took action to assist their comrades we can say and also to deal with the general problem of human trafficking in Britain and so on and that action that campaign that they contributed to is one of the biggest political campaigns perhaps the biggest political campaign ever in Britain's history but because of the falsification of this history nobody talks about it. Well we talked about the Windrush myth the moment ago I mean there's also what you might call the Wilberforce myth there is the exclusion of Africans and people of African heritage from the campaign for the liberation of fellow Africans and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade so this history even though it is so well documented has been one that's also been lost. Indeed yeah I mean the the important thing is not just the actions of Africans in this country though that was also important in in highlighting you could say there was a problem of course there were also the actions of Africans in other places in the Caribbean North America and particularly the revolutionary events in Haiti but I think what is so important about the history of the struggle against human trafficking and enslavement in this country is that not only Africans are written out of it but the population of Britain in general is written out of that history so you you will meet people who will feel very guilty as I have I remember meeting a young teacher of history who was talking about this period of the 18th century and she said she felt she found it very difficult to teach this history and I said oh really that was strange why is that she said well I feel so embarrassed teaching it I said oh really I couldn't quite understand what she was saying asked her again well why she said well I feel so guilty because my ancestors were going around enslaving people and so on so I said to her well what what makes you think that it's more likely that your ancestors if they were here in the 18th century were campaigning against human trafficking or signing petitions against it were refusing to take sugar in their tea and coffee and whatever because that's what millions of people did for the first time working people were engaged in this mass political campaign women for the first time were engaged in it Africans were engaged in it but it's completely removed from the history of Britain as if it didn't exist and we're told that it's all to do with the mother of parliaments and William Wilberforce which is a complete falsification that's not to say William Wilberforce didn't do something but that's not the story that needs to be told and should be told and of course the the other question which arises from this falsification of the abolition story is why did the world's leading human trafficker in the 18th century seven years into the 19th century decide that it was such a terrible idea and it should all be stopped and this is never explained to anybody and cannot be explained if you just talk in terms of William Wilberforce and a few others I'm not going to explain it now but well I can't if you really I can't if you really want me to but the key thing about the abolition was that the actions of Africans and in particular the revolutionary events in Haiti and the Caribbean which completely transformed the situation as far as Britain was concerned because they began to be concerned that this these revolutionary events might also take place in other parts of the Caribbean and the whole slave system would be destroyed so then action had to be taken the other thing about Britain was that Britain was such a what's the word so zealous about the enslavement of Africans and the sale of Africans that they not only sold Africans in their own colonies but even sold Africans to their rivals the French the Spanish anybody else so during the wars against France and Spain people began to ask why are we supporting our rivals and so on so all of these things as well as others that I haven't got time to go into now led to a change in the policy of the British government there are other factors as well I won't go into them now I mentioned them in the book in passing because they also have their impact on what happened to what happened in Britain and their impact on Africans in Britain as well but as far as the history of Africans in Britain there too we find it was the actions of people in this country Africans liberating themselves organizing themselves to effect liberation which were very very key in raising this whole issue for the public in general so the 18th century is very very important and as I say the way it's generally been presented is a very you know grave distortion of what actually went on at the time so we have all that information we have people writing we have court cases we have a whole range of things to show the actions that Africans took during that century you know it's if a much of it is online everybody can access it and in the book I reference all these things that people can find all this information for themselves and it's the first moment in the book that the one of the central themes of the book emerges which is that issue of resistance of organization of the creation of collective organizations and that once that you you introduce us in the book to organizations like the Sons of Africa the black abolitionist movement the book continues to remind us that this history is one that is punctuated with black resistance and self-organization why is that so central to to writing this history for you because that's how things were people were the relationship between Britain and Africa had undergone a change and there was the clear exploitation of the African continent as well as of Africans in the diaspora in the Caribbean in Britain in North America which compelled people to act to resist to change things just as there was that history for people in Britain generally because in the 18th century most people in Britain had no rights couldn't vote etc etc etc and so you often people here often saw parallels between these two struggles the struggle for the liberation of Africans and the struggle for the liberation of the British now the British the working people in Britain and one finds that and I mention it in the book because Equiana was not just a member of the Sons of Africa which was one of the first you can say pan-African organizations in this country organizing against human trafficking and slavery but he was also a member of the London Corresponding Society which was an organization of workers a radical organization that eventually was banned by the government and their politics was if you're for the rights of the black man then you must also be for the rights of the white man if you're for the rights of the white man you must also be for the rights of the black man in other words you must be concerned with the rights of all and struggle for the rights of all and this is very enlightened political thinking even some people in the 21st century haven't got this political thinking but this is the politics of Equiana Thomas Hardy the London Corresponding Society and many others in that period and they saw if you want to be very blunt about it they had a common enemy a common problem that needed to be resolved and the liberation of all needed the action of all and you take that theme of self-organization and resistance from its emergence in the 18th century black communities and you show how it continues and punctuates through the 19th century particularly in the 20th century all the way up to organizations that people in this room might have been members of like the campaign against racial discrimination that that theme runs absolutely through the heart of the book those stories often marginalized often ignored why do you give them such prominence because that's what's at the center of things that's what that's what moves history forward we no longer have chattel slavery we no longer have the problem that we we can't vote or we don't have rights for this and so on we still have other problems but there are other people there are there are people who manage to write these histories and talk about the passing of laws without the pressure that led to the passing of laws and this that you seem to be you seem to populate how they can do that that's right people do but you seem to populate this history with people who have been marginalized and incredible stories of self-organization amongst often very small groups in individual cities work black semen in Liverpool or London for example yeah these are really important stories to recover you can't you can't really write history that's honest if you exclude people from it and you exclude the struggles of people to change things history is a study of change and it's human beings who are the agents of that change so if you exclude change or you exclude those who are the agents of change then you don't really have very much history to present in my view so explaining those individuals and organizations that fought for change some people gave their lives for that change or were imprisoned for that change that's central to this history the history of this country it's it's impossible to write that history the other thing your book achieves wonderfully is to give us really quite quite moving sketches of individuals from this 18th century right through into the to the 20th century of people who were prominent people who who had remarkable lives in the face very often of racism and discrimination there's we've seen some of their faces on the screen behind us tell us about those character sketches yeah i mean the aim of the book is to try and keep a balance between explaining the developments and changes of history but also presenting organizations as well as presenting individuals just to give one example one of the problems that we have with history is that women are very often excluded from it rather like Africans are excluded and workers are excluded women are very often excluded from history so it was very important in the book to try and put women back as it were in their rightful place sometimes quite difficult to do because the archive always tends to be male-centered as well but for example in in Britain and in London we we take great pride in the fact that the pan-African movement began here in London this upsets people in the US and other places but it's it's a fact so the first pan-African conference was held here in London in 1900 and it was organized by a an organization known as the African Association and that organization is often connected with a man called Henry Sylvester Williams who was a anyway he was a Trinidadian in origin who was here at the time and so on but in fact the woman who inspired or the person who inspired Henry Sylvester Williams was an African woman her name was Alice Kinloch she was from South Africa and she was the inspirer of the African Association the inspirer of Henry Sylvester Williams but until recently she'd kind of been written out of history so it was important in the book to include the latest research to put her back and to say that the modern pan-African movement was founded inspired created by an African woman so where did the possibility of doing that of course there are other opportunities to do that sometimes just to tell the stories of ordinary people as it were people who are not famous yes okay there are some well-known people you have to say maybe something about Mary Seacole because everyone's heard of Mary Seacole but it's then important to put Mary Seacole into some context and some but also to talk about perhaps people who are less well known or about the lives of many women African women Caribbean women the struggles that they underwent in the 19th century as well which is sometimes less well known so I've tried to present little biographies of people as well as trying to present something about the lives of many people as far as I can in a book of only 700 pages you can't present me a 700 page page yeah but a lot of history to pack in and a lot of history has been packed into those pages we've got about 10 minutes left and then may I remind you again we've got half an hour for questions so please to think of your questions I came out I want to talk a little bit about the world into which this book emerges you said a moment ago the the presence of black people in roman britain was just a fact and not even a particularly surprising or perhaps even interesting one there are people who don't only find it surprising there are people who find who are actively hostile to it there are people who feel threatened by this we live in a moment when this aspect of our nation's history is regarded not as an aspect of our nation's history by some but as an active threat to our nation's history can you describe this this atmosphere this culture war moment into which this book is born well we're we're living in a moment where the struggle over history is becoming more apparent I think to everybody because it's clear that for example the the government I'm trying to think of which government but anyway the government's governments recent governments have openly made their views known about history whether it's you know to do with public history and statues all with other things you know the leading politicians like Michael Gove for example you know pontificate about history which they know absolutely nothing about but they still falsify it so that's become more obvious to people you know the the government's think tank policy exchange has a whole register you can look at it about what's going on in history because they're very concerned that history is being changed history is not being changed it's just that people are speaking the truth and concerned that the crimes of the past should be recognized and that where there are people who have carried out crimes against humanity they shouldn't be glorified in various ways in names and statues and so on so so policy exchange the government think tank essentially also set up by Michael Gove coincidentally they monitor all this activity so if you've engaged in anything like that they'll have you listed if you're a university or your school or your town or it's all there so that makes it very public that there's a struggle over history but there's always been a struggle over history and there's always been the falsification of history but that process of making these debates public makes them more fraught it means that as drawings like yourself are attacked by people who who see this not as history but as political activism well i mean that there i mean people are entitled to their their view but i mean if if somebody gets upset because i tell them that the you know roman emperor septima severus was an african born in libya what what what am i supposed to do about it are you surprised that there genuinely are people who are genuinely not really because we live in a society in which as i say this falsification has been going on for so long um and that's why i mentioned Michael Gove Michael Gove you know came out and johnson they came out at the time of the commemoration of world war one you remember they came out and said this it was a just war well i mean this is just complete nonsense i mean nobody would ever think of saying that and uh it was all about saving poor little belgium belgium just being responsible for the murder of 10 million africans i mean this is just nonsense not only is it nonsense it's offensive that people should talk about the defense not the first of what anything to do with the defense of belgium but even if you present that the first world wars they did was about you know upholding western civilization it's offensive and it's a lie um but that is the world we're in but what it shows is that the powers that be are concerns that people actually know there's the truth of history um that there's a there is another view and people are affirming that in the demands that are being made over how history is taught in schools what is displayed in public history how archives and museums deal with those things which they've stolen from other places i'm not supposed to say anything about the british library and what they've stolen and why they won't return it so i won't say anything about that um but people talk about these things all the time openly so therefore we're in that period that world where we're in light and we're educated there's social meaning we know about these things and they're they are under pressure they are feeling the pressure to defend their falsifications so no it doesn't surprise me that they're they're concerned that they're upset that they're worried that they're concerned that everybody's trying to change history as they call it and we're not it's not that we're trying to change history is that they've been trying to change history to falsify it for so long and now they find there's a great opposition to that so that's the world we live in we've just got a few minutes left and i wanted to ask you some questions not about the work you've done in expanding and enriching history but the work that you are engaged in in thinking about the history the profession of historians we are a profession that has a pretty bleak record when it comes to including not just the stories but the actual members of our diverse communities in in in the uk you are one of a very small number of black history professors in the uk a frighteningly small number and you've been involved in work to try at the grassroots to try to change that could you tell me something about your work in the young historians project and why that's important to you well the young historians project came out of a conference that we held in 2015 called history matters and that conference was occasioned by the fact as they was just said that there were so few academic historians of african or carbian heritage but also that there weren't even very many postgraduate students doing research in history i can't remember the statistics they were the number of we were shocking and i was trying to remember earlier i mean the it was it was it was single figures yes well the number of professors is three and i mean two-thirds of them are here i mean not the lima math great mathematicians but um but even if you look all the way up or down depending on how you look at things so postgraduate level in in fact history matters came about because there was a headline in the times educational supplement that proclaimed that the previous year there had only been three black students who were training to be history teachers in the whole of this country there are i think at that time there were 16 000 history teachers and something like only 60 were black and the previous year there's only been three trains so this was like outrageous and we began to ask wasn't anyone concerned about this and nobody nobody was concerned when we looked into it we found at every level that young people young black people were being turned off history um those who got good grades at gcsc most didn't go into a level those who did well at a level didn't go and study history at university and so on um and so there was a general problem of a lack of historians a lack of history teachers and so we decided if no one's going to do anything about it we should do something about it so we held the conference and one of the things that came out of that conference was that there should be something established to encourage young black historians so we set up the young historians project in 2015 was that seven years ago and the project is led by young people that the aim is that they research an aspect of history they're interested in and then present it to their peers so that could be an exhibition it could be a film it could be a podcast it could be a mural it could be anything that appeals to young people and they're now just about to start their third project we get external funding from various sources heritage lottery fund and others um it's now run by completely run by young people we train train them up and then they become leaders the aim is everyone should be a leader and they develop this history and a lot of it is oral history they interview important people like zaynab who's sitting there trying to hide who was a am i not allowed to say anything about you no okay i won't say anything about zaynab very important person one of the founders of brigston black women's group one of the leading members of the black liberation front who played a very important part in the i won't say you played an important part in the spaghetti house siege because it makes it sound as if you were holding people up but she was doing something other than so people like zaynab and many many others are often written out of our history even though they're still alive and kicking as it were so one of the things that yhp do is to make sure they try and interview important people like zaynab record them present their histories um the last project they did was a project on african women because they consider that african women had been written out of history and that was a project on african women in the health service going back to the beginning of the 20th century because african women have been involved in the health service for more than a century and so on so they interviewed lots of african women and brought their stories to light and so on so that's the kind of work they do and now many of these young historians are themselves doing phd some are actually studying with me out some elsewhere they're producing things they're writing things they're making films they've done a whole series of murals with others on in hospitals they do podcasting they do i don't know all the things that they do um we aren't or they are national we have young people all over the country um so if there are any young people here who want to get engaged in history want to present history in any way let me know or google young historians project and you'll see the website you can link up yourselves so that's some of the work we do um there's also the history matters project which produces its own journal which comes out quarterly again you can google that and you'll find young people involved in that as well so important thing in life always is to encourage and develop the next generation you can't have old people like me doing things even though i'm not very old really but we need young people are full of vigor and enthusiasm and time and energy to do these things and to move things forward so that's what we try to develop okay thank you thank you so as as promised we have 30 minutes um my aim is for both quantity and quality um this gentleman here has got his hand up first can we get a mic to you if you tell us who you are before you speak and to remind you and you who are watching online please do submit your questions i've got the first of the online questions come through sir your question um just to say how came um as a young person um i understand that you've discovered the when what i'm interested in in terms of when people arrived and where i'm interested in is how people arrived in the economy economies that people made to get here so i know from my own parents that they made sacrifice to get here but what i struggled to understand how somebody in the 1600s and 1800s managed to find the money or the means to make the passage here to the UK i mean currently now we know about people coming in from Calais to Britain and the past there but how did those people make that journey well there i mean the simple answers they came on a ship um usually um depending on the circumstances some people came of their own free will some people were compelled in one way or another and we tend to think of people only being compelled in the 17th century or 18th century as uh trafficked individuals but of course many people were compelled to come here in the 20th century as well from other places um if you were you know you lived in a colony for example then and you wanted to be educated particularly in terms of higher education there was no higher education in the colonies generally speaking so if you had an ambition to be a doctor or you had to come to Britain or go somewhere else so people were compelled by the circumstances of colonialism or in the earlier period by the circumstances they found themselves in to come here some people going back a very long time were sent by their parents even going back to the 17th and 18th centuries we find that African rulers in particular sending their sons to be educated here from in fact even in the 16th century that was the case um and so there were obviously some wealthy individuals who did that other people stowed away stowing away on ship was very very common even in the 1940s and beyond people stowed away both from the Caribbean and from Africa to get here um sometimes so yes there were a variety of ways in which people came sometimes they were sponsored to come by people people collecting their fare sometimes people work their past passage that was also very common especially in the 19th century and early 20th century probably the majority of people who were here particularly men were seafarers of one sort or another either in the merchant fleet or sometimes in the Royal Navy so yes that was also very common people worked their passage and then when they got here they they stayed in Liverpool they stayed in Cardiff or they stayed in London wherever it might be so there are a variety of ways in which people get got here even going back to Roman times or and beyond so traveling around the world is not as difficult as we think it is people have always traveled around um you know how did cheddar man get here well presumably on a boat of some kind so that that has always been the nature of this country it's an island people have got to get here over water in some form or another so depending on the century depending on the person depending on their circumstances many different ways in which people found their way here it's a shortish answer thank you for that more questions please there's a lady just besides on the same row as our previous question though i'm interested in the idea that you talk about um falsification of history so i'm thinking um imagine there's someone who you know they read both of your books and they say like okay i understand that there have been um caribbean and african people in various time periods but still the main point of um the main thing that we need to focus on is the kind of wind rush generation because when we think about modern britain that is you know the biggest influence we can see is the the wind rush generation so i'm just wondering you know what are your thoughts kind of on on that idea falsification but still focusing on the wind rush generation um i'm not entirely sure i grasp the question i mean i think when you say have an impact that depends what that impact is yes larger numbers of people came to britain in the 1950s 1960s and beyond this this is definitely the case and that has made a difference but um the first thing to say is that most of those people came from africa they didn't come on board a ship in the 1940s from the caribbean they came from africa so if we're going to talk about post war migration um we can't do that without talking about those who came from the african continent and generally talking about those people as a wind rush generation is extremely misleading because they've got nothing to do with the wind rush or the caribbean so that's the problem i have with that presentation of things but then the the other thing is that saying um how do you judge impact the fact that africans were here in the 18th century also made a major impact you know people wrote about it there's too many africans here um you can't you can't bring these africans here as servants because they do this they do that they start running off with all these english women uh people were saying that in the 17th century the 16th century and so on so there's always been an impact um and it's important that we understand that impact the impact of having africans here in an enslaved status is important for understanding this this country's history the fact that people were sold in auctions in this country probably around here is important for understanding this history the fact that there were africans who were the governors of this country during the roman period or whenever is important for understanding this country's history so it's about understanding the country understanding the world in which we live today you know you could say if it's not a big deal why is it falsified if it's not a big deal why doesn't everybody learn about it so it clearly is a big deal and the fact that also that the focus is always on post-1948 is is misleading it is very misleading and it distorts the history of this country and leaves out very important sections of it so i think that's how i would look at that i'm going to ask you a question now if i may from the that's coming in from our audience online this is from uh penny hallowday and she asks do you think the national curriculum will ever be decolonized okay well there are two things i'd say about that one is what what does decolonized mean what is my next book is going to be on this subject what is decolonization that usually when we speak about decolonization it's something which the colonial powers did to the colonists it's what britain did to africa and they british government and some pride themselves we decolonized nigeria isn't that great well no it's not really if you look at what happened to nigeria or what is still happening to nigeria it's not really very great so if that's decolonization i'm not very keen on it the french president charles de gaulle once said decolonization is in our interest therefore it is our policy so if he thought it was a good thing why is everybody so why does everybody use this term so that's one thing anyway that's something to go into then the second thing is what is the significance of the national curriculum i'm sure there are some teachers here who will tell us that most schools these days are academies they don't have to follow the national curriculum back in the day when we were campaigning ambassador in the 1990s we made a big deal about national curriculum and changing it and we made affected some changes but the goalposts have shifted now even if you had a national curriculum that everybody thought was wonderful most schools wouldn't follow it or wouldn't have to follow it so the issue is that the whole education system really needs to be looked at it's not just a question of national curriculum yes people need to fight for change to have a history that informs young people about the world in which they live helps them to understand it not a history which confuses people i was looking at an a-level syllabus just today i think i couldn't really make sense of it it was about warfare in the 19th century and the changes that had been allegedly been made to the army or something i thought it wasn't about people who had to fight in the army or anything like that you couldn't understand what was the point of it what would it help young people understand about anything about the 19th century or about the 21st century so we need that kind of education which educates people which helps them make sense of the world so that's i think the task rather than just focusing on national curriculum thank you for that uh more questions lady in the front sorry if you can wait for the microphone dial here we go hi um a little great interest um to both of you really but right in the beginning i almost felt like you were putting the history of africa and the caribbean in opposition to each other and obviously as a descendant of people from the caribbean and ultimately people from africa you'd expect me to say something and what i would say is this that i have never read a serious history of the west indies that doesn't talk about africa and i would also say that i've never heard of a serious politician in the region particularly in the run-up to independence that didn't locate their politics in africa so maybe you could explain to me more what you think is the relationship between the region and africa thank you yeah i can i can do that i mean i should add that my book isn't about the caribbean all the history of the caribbean all the history of africa really although it has some it obviously has to touch on those things it's a history of people in britain um and so the history of the caribbean i think is well well known fairly well known um in that it's has a population which is made the made up of people of african descent although obviously there's a population of people from other parts of the world as well so i don't have any difficulty understanding that history i don't think especially as somebody who teaches it but as i explain the book doesn't do that it doesn't do that opposition oppositional thing it is no there is no there is no opposition there is no opposition i'm the only person in this country actually who teaches a history of africa and the african diaspora which means i teach the history of africa the caribbean britain north america whatever so there is no opposition between the history of africa and the history of the caribbean i'm not sure why you would so it's it's more about putting african stories into into a history that's sometimes seen through a caribbean lens particularly in the 1560s for example it's about um presenting the history of people in britain and giving a name to the particular region of the world that they came from or that their parents or grandparents immediately came from um and so i've used the term you know africa and caribbean i i don't find any particular problems with that but i mean there are other terms that people may wish to use but i did make the point and i continue to make the points um that i don't want a history which minimizes those who have come directly from the african continent or their parents come from the african continent and very often that is how things are presented and the whole windrush myth is lends itself to that presentation of history of the history of this country that suggests that everything should be seen through the prism of the caribbean and those who came from the caribbean unless not the reality but it's that perhaps a london thing because i mean i've lived in liverpool liverpool's community is both caribbean and african many people in liverpool are for themselves their families their family backgrounds are both caribbean and african maybe it's a more a london thing that the weather windrush myth has that impact well i think uh i think the myth is a national myth um you're quite right to say that maybe people in manchester liverpool cardiff and other parts of the country are more knowledgeable about this history um and are clear about it the fact that you one mentions african caribbean doesn't exclude the fact that people may have relatives or families that come from both geographical locations in the world that's the nature of the world um but i don't see the as i say they're not as far as i'm gonna say they're not in opposition with each other in any way i'm not quite sure why anyone should think that should be the case but they are distinct geographical regions as far as i understand this they have i hope i hope that's a relief that we're not putting these opposites between these two communities yeah i mean you just read the book and if you think that you know if you if you see some sign of that then let me know but i don't think you will see any sign of it i can assure you on that score we've got about 10 minutes left and i wanted to do some rapid questions so i'm gonna stress again brevity there's a gentleman here if we can get a mic to him and then there's a lady here oh she already has the mic could you could we have your question first yes very quick comments firstly thank you so much this is so wonderful um also it's great to hear about the young historians i'm going to be working with them soon very excited about that we're doing away with black history month it's black toba less words and i think we just like black toba yeah so black toba um okay maybe not so much now but when you first because i'm always delighted and excited by anything that i read from both of you that you know i discover newly that i never learned at school but i'm now teaching to the children i work with what excites you what piece of information or history did you ever hear that you were like you know what it may be not so much now but then what excited delighted and yeah fascinating then as in when only just i know you're quite young so you know not too long ago perhaps are you still do you open a book and still do you still get really excited the useful exuberance of discovery when i when i open my books yes because i'm always very worried about them and then i read them i actually listened to my book because there's a an audio version of the book today i was very pleasantly surprised it all sounded quite sensible to me so but if there's one story one life one event that you still find amazing what would that be it's difficult to pick out one life one event well i've already i've already mentioned i've already mentioned alice king lock i would have to mention her again because that's a kind of very glaring example of somebody who's kind of been written out of history and played a very important role you know maybe only for a relatively short period but a very important role just to come back on your comment about october it's rather like i'm not very keen on ships that arrive in june 1948 i'm not very keen on october either not as a month in itself but as a as the only month in which people wish to talk about the history that i'm chiefly concerned with and i mean i suppose we congratulate ourselves in that we've chosen the longest month for that whereas those in the us have chosen the shortest month but i'm not choosing representing things in that way is the recognition of a problem it tells us that there's a problem for the other 11 months but is it really because i never hear that complaint about holocaust remembrance day i never hear the the accusation that by having a day in which we focus on a moment in history that it excludes it from the other 360 well it does that's that's the problem it wouldn't be so bad if it didn't but it generally does exclude it from the other 11 months yes i even wonder about that because i look um like rather like you at my own books now look at my look at when when they're bought and they're most important december christmas has a far far bigger impact on sales of black history books than than black history month maybe so but i think that but that idea of imprisoning the history into one month i mean the you know we can look at when people access websites we can look at when they purchase books we can look at when programs are broadcast when people watch things on the iPlayer or watch things on netflix and the data doesn't support the idea that black history month is a prison it supports the idea that it's a super charge well that's not that's not my impression that's definitely not my impression but the data doesn't support it i'm just i'm interested because it's a i i worry that we have this amazing thing that we've created and we are very negative about it i think it's i mean my friends work in disability in other areas they often say look at black history month with huge envy well that's not my i mean i've been whatever celebrating it if that's the right word for whatever over 40 years as other people have and as i say it's it's a recognition of a problem however you look at it whatever the data says it is actually the recognition that there's a problem and it's not celebrated in the same way there's not the focus on it for the other 11 months and i mean that's why it was created in the first place so of course if it can be used to if there's any opportunity to use it to encourage people to be concerned about this history all all the year i mean obviously that has to be taken but as i as i say it's i'm concerned about the problem and i look forward to the day when or the month when we don't have a black history month as such that this history is a history which is represented all the time that's my view i mean other people in time to tell them views i'm i'm just saying what the data says i'm giving my view i'm just saying what the data says yeah which it doesn't imprison it well it maybe it does maybe it doesn't maybe the data does say that i mean data can tell you i think almost anything you want it to tell you i think when you get your book sales for december you'll see that they're bigger than october so you well i'm not yeah i'm not we need to take another question i'm not really that book sales are not what i'm about to be honest um our history is not just about book sales the gentleman history is about how people no but we're talking about them as a metric and i'm not talking about them well yeah but book sales is not as i'm saying it's not what history is about history is a the the presentation of history the understanding of history is something which needs to be going on throughout the year and which needs to be part of the history of this country throughout the whole year and that is not the case that does not happen whatever your book sales are in december i'm going to talk about my book sometime but we we know all the book sales we know whenever the book sales are in december on on i'm concerned about the book sales in january february march april may june july august and so on there's a gentleman here hi okay my name is pierre i hope this question does that affect your book sales um i think uh it's a 700 page epic um the question i've got to ask you is is what were there any questions or facts that you omitted that you had to omit politically um that you'd like to share with the group because it's not in the book if that makes sense uh no short question short response exactly what i like at this time of the evening we've got five minutes left um can we get a mic over to here we've dominated the questions coming from this part so if we can rush over to this side young ladies here at the front thank you so much so um as a young person myself i'm here with my classmates we wanted to ask we know that a lot of young people who are interested in anything to do with history would for the majority rather turn to the media and to hollywood and to all these other forms to get these pieces of information so i wanted to ask from your point of view how misled are we by hollywood by the media about history i would say that the main problem with um the media representation is is rather one of omission of leaving things out um of course recently there have been you know verse uh tv programs i mean obviously david's series but there have been other programs which have presented particularly recent history um but again it's they come along every few years or they come along once a year or whatever it is and so when we think about the way that this history has been omitted over many years they don't really do enough to address the problems that we face and one of those problems is as you say with young people that young people are kind of turned off history very very often or certainly turned off the history as it relates to people of african heritage people of caribbean heritage and so on so that's partly a media problem it's you know it's a societal problem in that society doesn't really present acknowledge that history it's also a problem of what is taught in schools and taught in universities and so on so i think it's very difficult we could say yes it's much better than when i was a young person when there was probably nothing at all so now there is something but that's something in my view is not sufficient yet um and as we've discussed today you know people there are people are often surprised by the kind of things that i write in my my books so others write so we're we're a long way away and i think um you know i remember when i was young which is quite a long time ago i have to be honest uh actually in the last century um and the days before the internet it was very very difficult to find the kinds of things that i wanted to read about when i was a teen a teenager um and i listened to young people today and they're still saying even with the internet with everything they're still finding it saying it's difficult to find things um and as i said earlier that's one of the reasons we started the young historians project the young people can work together to create this history which doesn't exist and present it to their their peers their classmates so i think this it's still a big problem um and i encourage you to get involved with in the young historians project or at least find out about what they do um and and change things for other young people i'm sorry to say that i'm afraid is the last question that we have time for will you please join me in in thanking professor Hakeem thank you thank you very much