 Ieidwch, ddaethwn oeddiad, a ddweud i gynhyrch i ddinodol, a'r hyn sy'n dweud y mae'r cwmhysgfaeth tuall y mynd i'r ffordd yma. Mae'r ddweud yma wedi cyfnod gyda ychydig yn ddweud o'r ddegwydd. Mae'r ddegwydd yma yn ddegwydd yn ddegwydd, ac mae'r ddegwydd yn ôl, yn gilydd cyddiadol, yn grif erbyr i gael ymddangos Yfhrif, As well as being the main currency of the most powerful creative industries in the world, in international media, the English language provides a mainstay for another powerful industry publishing. English publishing houses have thrived in London since the Renaissance. They have played a central role in the rise of a national consciousness and beyond that international links through trade, but also, of course, in the colonial era, through conquest, oppression and slavery. As Gauri Wyswanathen reminds us, English literature as a subject of study began in the colonies, but it was not long before writers with the colonial heritage began to use the language to articulate their own demands and often very different visions of the world. One of the richest and most potent legacies of this history has been the writing of Africa and its diaspora. Today we have amongst us a visionary figure whose drive and ambition has nurtured past, present and future African writers. She has, from the beginning of her career, worked to perform what in contemporary times we might call a decolonisation of English, providing a platform for writing on and off Africa. Margaret Busby is a trailblazer, pioneer and supporter of writing about and off Africa. Born in Ghana to parents of Fanti and Caribbean heritage, she is a woman of many firsts. She was the first black woman publisher in Great Britain, co-founding the revolutionary company of Alison and Busby in 1967. She also worked in co-operation with Jessica and Eric Huntley, who co-founded Bogle Le Overture in 1968, as well as with other black-led cultural organisations. She has had a long association with Wassafiri, the renowned magazine devoted to black British, Asian and South Pacific writing. Her work as an editor, a broadcaster, literary critic and dramatist is an inspiration, reminding us through the indelible power of language that black lives matter in Britain. She was at the centre of black and African writing before terms such as black British or BAME were coined. Her career has run from the beginnings of black publishing in Britain in the 1960s to the confrontations of the politically charged 1970s and 1980s onto the so-called multicultural 1990s, where cultural diversity was briefly celebrated and through to the present, when historical tensions over race and nation have resurfaced again since the Brexit vote in the forms of increased racism, the hostile environment, underpinning the Windrush scandal and the material inequalities that led to the Grenfell tragedy. Through this work, the indelible spirit of black Britain has found an outlet in all types of cultural forms, not least literature. Margaret Busby's ongoing work Charts and Channels the Spirit and its expression in fiction, poetry and drama. Her latest anthology New Daughters of Africa published in 2019 by Myriad is a sequel to her landmark volume Daughters of Africa published to acclaim by Jonathan Cape in 1992. It offers a testimony to the urgency of women's stories, celebrating African women writers with their narratives about gendered experience, politics, language, religion and culture. It marks the bonds shared between mothers and daughters and the gift of storytelling. Both anthologies are activist interventions mobilizing a unique feminist spirit of creativity. In the words of a publisher, Canada Lacey, Margaret gives people agency asking them to decide how they would like to be recognized. It is a matter of great pride that SOAS has joined forces with Margaret's publisher Myriad to create the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award dedicated to a black female African student for a selected MA in the arts. In her introduction to New Daughters of Africa, Margaret lets us into the secret of her success. My ambition, she says, was and is to shine a light on as many as possible of the deserving whether or not they are acknowledged or lauded by the gatekeepers who traditionally single out a privileged few. Seemingly, never too many to rock the boat, but the boat is going nowhere if it is content to drift in stagnating water. Margaret is no drifter and in producing this volume, she has opened a veritable floodgate of creativity. She is a mentor and inspiration whose activism encourages collaboration and discussions leading to dialogue along the lines that Bell Hooks envisaged in her book Teaching to Transgress. Braking free from institutional and disciplinary boundaries, Margaret's work urges us to think twice about who we include in the curriculum and why, paving the way for a truly transformative practice for staff and students. She is an OBE, a recipient of many prestigious prizes. Most recently, the Africa Rites Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. It is my privilege now, Madam President, to present to you Margaret Busby for the award of honorary doctor of literature and invite her to address this assembly. Thank you so much for those generous words, I'm in a Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, new graduates, eminent persons. I'm pleased to share this special honour with you all. Each of us was born with nothing but a voice if we were lucky. And look at this now. We have words, we have literature, we have a myriad ways to communicate with one another. How did we get here? I stand here today on behalf of the unsung women achievers and strivers, and yes, we have much to say. This is for my sister protector, denying herself to let others saw. My brothers, family of female warriors, friends who understand. It is for my mother who at times had just one dress, washing it at night and wearing it the next day while there were school fees to pay. Isn't that what women do? It's for my father who studied by candlelight to save on bills so he sent his scholarship money home to educated siblings. For my aunt whose role as a parental carer precluded her reaching her own full potential. It is for my maternal grandmother who bore 10 children and to whom so-called illiteracy was no break, who lived to be 99 working as a so-called petty trader till the age of 90. It is for my paternal grandmother who fell far shorter her three school years and ten. Whos care worn face gazes without resentment from the old photograph, exhausted from a lifetime sacrifice. Isn't that what women do? It was on all those shoulders that I stood when I chose book publishing as a career, with no experience, no money, no advice. The company I co-founded, Alison and Busby, was conceived when I was still at university, not yet of age, for I graduated when I was 20. So I knew no better, yet I knew no worse. And the strange thing about having been the first black woman publisher in Great Britain is that I was both very visible and completely invisible. Visible as when one looks around a room and feels no kinship, no sense of recognition. Invisible through the assumption that I must not be there in my own right, could not be ignored in favour of someone more important, someone male and white. But there were literary foremothers who inspired me, with whom I could identify. While still at school, I happened upon the name Noni Jababu, a South African woman born in the Eastern Cape into a family of intellectuals and educated in England from the age of 13, who strode the English journalistic stage as if to the manner born. Imagine my joy to see this elegant black woman gracing the cover of the prestigious journal John of London's. I still have the issue dated 23 March 1961. The caption explaining, the author of the highest successful book, Drawn in Colour, now in its fourth printing, leaves London today on the first stage of an all-African writing tour. Not only was she a regular reviewer and contributor to the national press, but she became, and she was also the first South African woman to publish an autobiography in London, but she became, in 1961, the first woman and black person to be the editor of a literary magazine. The news turned a relaunched version of the century-old monthly renown for publishing Coman Doyle, if she or not Comaswayne. Twenty years later, she wrote to me out of the blue, describing a title I had published as an absolute eye-opener, high praise from my shero, and too modestly to saying of herself, I'm only a private person with a black independent woman writer aged over 60 years. She died in 2008 aged 88. Next month would have been her hundredth birthday. With my involvement in publishing came awareness of the power of the word, not only to educate, but to change lives. With few accessible role models in the industry, in the 1970s, I was delighted to meet Toni Morrison, who shared her experiences on a senior editor with Random House publishing company in America. Sensitive to the knowledge, as she put it, that cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation's literature, she makes profound observation in her 1992 essay collection, Playing in the Dark. As a writer reading, I came to realise the obvious. The subject of the dream is the dreamer. This speaks to the need for the publishing industry to reflect the true face of society. African women's creativity has deep roots. Just last week, I spoke at the unveiling of the plaque in Allgate in East London, commemorating the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. Born in West Africa in 1753, she was taken captive at the age of seven to North America and brought up and bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. She was given the name of the ship that brought her there, the Phyllis, and the surname of her owners, who encouraged her education. So by the age of 12, Phyllis Wheatley was reading Greek and Latin classics, and at 14 was writing poems. Unable to get her collected works published in Boston, where columnists could not believe that an African slave wrote such excellent poetry, she accompanied the Wheatley's to London, where in 1773, when she was just 20, Phyllis Wheatley's poems on various subjects religious and moral found a publisher, going on to 11 editions. Phyllis died in 1784, barely 31, but at the time her book was published in London, she was the most famous African anywhere. In 1992, my anthology, Daughters of Africa, was published, an international collection of words and writings by women of African descent through the ages and from around the world, featuring Phyllis Wheatley and Noneja Bavu, Richard Macheta, whose husband had burned the manuscript of her first novel, and whom Google commemorated on what would have been her 70th birthday last Sunday. And Lorna Gooderton was now Jamaica's first woman laureate, and more than 200 other women deserving of their rightful place in any literary canon. For women to be silent or rendered invisible is a loss to the entire community. In 1892, the African American essayist and human rights advocate Anna Julia Cooper, who was a delegate at the first Pan-African Conference here in London in 1900, as was my maternal grandfather, wrote, We too often mistake individuals' honour for race development. A stream cannot rise higher than its source. The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is but a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes. To respect and honour our mothers, sisters and daughters is to elevate society as a whole. We need that more now than ever before. A stream cannot rise higher than its source. Yet though we celebrate the unloosing of our tongues and the fluency of our pens and appreciate how far we have progressed, the long journey is not yet over. New Doles of the Vapro, published this year on International Women's Day, represents a continuation of that struggle, a strengthening of intergenerational links. It is also a new beginning made possible by the generosity of the contributors who all waived their fees. For which reason I have appointed them to my own self-created honour, the venerable order of true African sisterhood, or Votas for short. That generosity of the 200 contributors has enabled the award that Armin has spoke of, the market must be New Doles of the Vapro award, which will be offered to a female student from Africa to pursue a designated course of study at SOAS free of the worry of tuition fees and accommodation costs, thanks to a partnership between Mirial Editions, SOAS University of London and International Students' House. I'm thrilled to be part of this unique initiative that has been invited into the SOAS family. SOAS has an unrivalled reputation for excellence and championing African studies. It epitomises what Nelson Mandela once said, education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. So never stop learning and maybe you can affect the change you want to see. But all remember those who have paved the way for you to excel. Congratulations and the very best of luck to all of you.