 Mae'r ddaf yn ymdweud, mae'r ddweud o'r gwasanaeth, mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'n hynny, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r dr Gus Cacely Hayford. Gus Cacely Hayford, y dr, bydd yng nghymru yn afrofio, oherwydd, oedd yn ymddi'r brifetig brifetig, oedd yn ymddiad a'r brifetig. Yn ddweud yn ymddiad a'r ddweud o'r gwasanaeth yma, y gwnneun Rhys Gwneuwer, yn ymddiad sy'n gwneud, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, mae'n mynd i'r unrhyw fawr o York, oedd panafrolygu yn y 20rhyw. Gus' gwirioneddau yn ymddiad, oedd yn ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. GUS is an alumnus of SOAS, who has made a significant, a very significant contribution to our role in the world. He is, amongst other things, a research associate of the Centre of African Studies here at SOAS. And he's been a very big supporter of the Centre, for example, contributing to the understanding Africa summer school and engaging with the Centre's wider programme of events. Recently, Gus convened and hosted the Media Representation and Africa Conference at SOAS, that attracted more than 300 people from leading media outlets such as BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera, and a number of Africa-based media organisations. And the aim of that conference was to encourage real changes in the perceptions and representations of Africa in the UK and international media. Gus has played a number of roles, many roles with all sorts of different organisations, and these include, among others, having been Executive Director of Arts Strategy for the Arts Council England. He led the British Museum's Diversity Strategy. He directed Africa 05, the UK's largest ever African Arts Festival, in which more than 150 venues worked together to put on more than 1,000 events celebrating African culture. And he has sat on panels, including the National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Award, and in 2013 he was the Chair of the Cain Prize Jury for writing for African writers. And he's now a member of the Board of the Cain Prize. This year, he's one of the judges for the Arts Fund's Museum of the Year, and he's joined the Blue Plax Group, and he's also become a trustee of the National Trust. He's also at the same time a very keen supporter of Sense International, an organisation working with deaf-blind people. During just the past year, Gus has played a major role in the design and delivery of two highly successful exhibitions. The British Library's West African exhibition, Word, Song and Symbol, a show that one review described as a thrilling journey through a thousand years of West African history. And the other was Tate Britain's Artist and Empire. The Guardian, in its review, described this show as awe-inspiring, exciting and provocative in its exploration of how artists responded to the experience, the upheavals, and the ideologies of empire, but also of how the troubled history of British empire continues to reverberate in contemporary art. Gus's eye has turned very much on Britain, on the UK, as much as it is on Africa. He presented a TV study of William Hogarth in the 18th century, and if you look, there's a very nice short piece on the Tate's webpages about both Hogarth and the contemporary artist Sonia Boyce, and how what he likes in both is the way they puncture pomposities of British life and how they see but also celebrate Britain from the edge. And at the moment, he's working on a six-part TV series with Sky Arts and the Tate on landscape art and telling the story of some of the paintings in the Tate's collection by visiting and exploring the landscapes that inspired them. But perhaps Gus is best known as the presenter of the two series of BBC Four's Lost Kingdoms of Africa, airing in 2010 and 2012. When the first series aired, it was the channel's highest rated factual programme ever. These were programmes that paid close attention to the way that textiles, sculptures, jewellery, or buildings carry history, the way they codify and sustain deeply rooted and evolving meanings. But he's also interested in how African historical heritage is often precarious at a lecture at the BBC History magazine's Marnsbury weekend in 2015. He gave the example of Timbuk Tu's medieval library and the way it has been threatened recently under a very direct attack. Now earlier this month, so has held its first centenary event at the African Union building in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Our speaker there, the head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Dr Carlos Lopez, stressed the need to get beyond simplistic narratives of the hopeless continent or of Africa rising. And Gus's work very much pursues that same aim. In fact, he himself is giving one of our centenary lectures later this year at the University of Lagoon in Accra in Ghana. Of course, one of the most influential, infamous narratives on Africa is Hegel's. Hegel, you may remember, wrote in the 18th century that Africa is no historical part of the world. It has no movement or development to exhibit. Virtually everything that Gus has been involved in helps to destroy and to dispel that myth. And one of the best illustrations of this is the Lost Kingdoms of Africa series. Watch, for example, the Ethiopia episode. And you get, before anything else, a sense of Gus's infectious enthusiasm, his passion for the subject. And beyond that, there's a gracious handling of the relationship between fact and legend, which is anyone who has visited the astonishing mountain rock churches of Tigray in northern Ethiopia will know is often a slightly slippery relationship. And then what you get drawn into, drawn in by, is Gus's strong, sustained, critical observation as he sketches the windows and the structures of the churches of Lalibela using the design to push his own questioning and to draw out deep continuities within Ethiopian history. That close questioning observation, of course, is the key to the research process. It's key to what we all do here at SOAS. And it will doubtless light up amongst other future projects, one project that Gus is currently working on, with the National Portrait Gallery, a history of the movement for and struggle over the abolition of slavery, as told through portraits. In a world where unfree, bonded labour and slavery has far from gone away, this is a very relevant project that we should all look forward. Madam President, it's my privilege now to present Dr Gus Casely Hayford for the award of honorary fellow of SOAS and to invite him to address this assembly.