Black History in 2020

[From LSHG Newsletter No. 69 Spring 2020] 

Black History in 2020 

2020 is the 150th anniversary of the death of William Cuffay, the black leader of London Chartism in 1848. He was transported to Tasmania after a rigged trial but continued to be a labour movement activist in Australia to his death.

The LSHG plan to mark the anniversary and encourage others to do so.

Below is a letter that appeared in The Guardian (13 January 2020) from Marika Sherwood, who the LSHG have worked with regularly over many years. In the age of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump and a rising acceptability of racism black history is more important than ever.
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The Black and Asian Studies Association began campaigning about this missing history almost 30 years ago (Black British history syllabus devised for diversity in schools, 9 January). We even met the then education minister, whose ignorance of this history was as profound as that of 99% of teachers. If we want to understand our “nation” we have to look at how multicultural/ethnic it has always been. Africans, as far as we know, arrived in large numbers as a regiment in the conquering Roman armies. Some settled here, and undoubtedly some would have fathered children by native women. Two fairly recent books on black people in Tudor Britain tell us about the increase in the black population. This, of course, grew as the trade in enslaved Africans increased, and again when freedom was granted to the enslaved in the colonies in 1833.

So we should be teaching about Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, about the wars encouraged by the Europeans to obtain prisoners of war, who were declared slaves and sold to the Europeans, and about Africans here – their treatment, work, protests about slavery and contributions to society for so many years.

It is not only the school curriculum that has to be changed, but the training of teachers. And inservice training should be provided for all existing teachers as their ignorance, one could argue, is one reason why many black pupils do badly as school. Peter Fryer’s book Staying Power, still the best on this history, should be available in all school libraries.

Marika Sherwood
Research fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London