Obituary - Marika Sherwood (1937-2025)

Marika Sherwood 1937-2025. Historian determined to make sure that Black Lives do Matter in British History

Marika Sherwood who has sadly died at 87 on 16^th February 2025 was a co-founder of the Black and Asian Studies Association.

She was for many years a key researcher into the history of the slave trade, slavery and on a wider front Black History.

She spoke on a number of occasions to the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. Her final contribution was on October 4^th 2021:

''George Orwell told us that ‘the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their own history’. What has been obliterated from ‘our’ history here in the UK and in what used to be our colonies?''

She was involved in a (too) long running project under my control to look at gaps and issues in E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class and I worked with her closely on that. Hopefully her contribution on Thompson’s failure to look at the struggles of black people in Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century will see the light of day.

In June 2020 she wrote to then Tory Minister Gavin Williamson on the subject of black history and black studies

''As I trust you now agree that Black Lives Matter, it is more important than ever to change the school curricula. How would you feel if you attended school from the age of 4 till 18, and you just did not exist in any section of the school curricula! ‘English’ courses should include novels and poetry by Black authors, from Africa, the Caribbean and Britain. As Art courses should include the work of Black artists, whether these are paintings, sculptures, drawing/carvings. History courses should include not only the presence of peoples of African origin/descent in the UK since they arrived as a regiment within the conquering Roman army, but also the history of Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans.

If you don’t exist in the school curricula, wouldn’t you join a gang to become ‘somebody’? And as probably someone in your family has been at least once subject to ‘stop & search’, and probably experienced some level of racial discrimination while searching for work and at work, how would you feel towards the ‘mother country’?

We also need Black Studies departments in our universities with funding for research, as the history of Africans (and Indians) here has generally been ignored. (Many of the published works are by non-academics like me.) And our Teacher Training colleges/institutions need to include this in their curricula, which probably means training their lecturers – as well as the existing school teachers. Equally important is the need to educate the police!

Please, Mr Williamson, include the above in your response to Black Lives Matter.

I must conclude by telling you that when with a colleague I founded the Black & Asian Studies Association in 1991, this necessary change in the curricula and teacher training was one of the issues we took up. Even met with one Secretary of State many years ago. But got nowhere.''

Marika Sherwood was an essential voice in modern British history and her work needs to be continued by others.

Keith Flett