Guest blog by David
Killingray
Talk at British Black History Conference 29 October 2015 at Senate House, Malet St
Much excellent
work has been done recently on black British history. This rich fare consists of biographies, family
histories, lengthy studies of political groups and organisations, theses and
books on the slave trade and slavery, and a broad range of studies that place
Britain’s black population in the context of the Imperial world and the Black
Atlantic. As we applaud achievement, it is also useful
to ask some questions about the endeavour: what is missing? What is new?
Is it bold in challenging received ideas? Are there people, group interests, relational
networks, ideas and beliefs that are being neglected or ignored? And who is reading what has been
written?
Historians
are faced with a particular challenge. By
writing history they have the responsibility and privilege of helping to shape
how the past is viewed and understood.
Are they being true to that calling to be objective and accurate in the
analyses that they write? History does
strange things to emotion, and this appears to be particularly so in the case
of black British history. It stokes
passions for the past, it kindle fires, a longing to right wrongs, and
sometimes a delight in identifying and magnifying the role of heroes and
denigrating rogues - all of which can also
distort vision and analysis. [1]
Let me
examine some of the challenges that I see facing black British history.
First of all its Context and Dimensions
I don’t think there is a specific ‘Black British history’. We
might choose to study the activities and institutions of black people in
Britain but that is research into a vital aspect of British history. That labour is for two primary purposes: first,
to write a largely untold history of black lives and activities principally of
interest to a contemporary black constituency; and second, to bring to the
attention of as many people as possible an important aspect of this country’s
past that has been ignored.
Black British
history is not exclusively about black communities in Britain. However distinctive a minority, it is
important to see its members in the context of the larger, in this case, white population
with whom they interact and relate. Due
recognition needs to be given to the way in which black ambitions and struggles
frequently involved white Britons. We
can see this in Caroline Bressey’s recent book on Catherine Impey;[2] work on
the Brotherhood Movement;[3] the Pan-African
Conference of 1900 which, although in the hands of people of African origin and
descent, leaned heavily and eagerly on the support of humanitarian-minded
whites.[4] The small handful of black Marxists in Europe
in the 1920s and 1930s worked with white comrades, and sometimes bitterly
disagreed with them, as we see in the two very substantial books by Hakim Adi
and by Holger Weiss published in 2013.[5] And, as with the earlier African Association
of the late 1890s, the League of Coloured Peoples in the 1930-40s worked closely
and profitably with its ‘honorary’ white members.[6]
Secondly Direction
I see a danger in black British
history of a desire by some to continue ploughing the same old furrow. There is more to black British history than
Equiano, Mary Seacole, Walter Tull, and C.L.R. James. This approach is sometimes marked by a lack
of curiosity, an apparent sense of comfort secured by adherence to old received
opinions, and a strong reluctance to think beyond a polarised world view of black
people as victims involved in an heroic struggle against white racist
villains. It is incumbent upon historians
to be broad in reading, deep in thinking, rigorous in critical scholarship, making
judgements and analyses that are firmly based on evidence, and, because the aim
is to get as many people as possible to read what is written, to write texts
marked by clarity and integrity.
Over-reliance
on old texts can continue to shape current views of black British history. For example, the books by Folarin Shyllon and
Peter Fryer written decades ago are still used uncritically by many as
authoritative touchstones.[7] Fryer’s seminal Staying Power was written with a Marxist perspective which severely
limited the author’s range of enquiry in to the lives and activities of black
people in Britain’s past. All these books will no doubt continue to be
of value but what now is needed is a published history which takes account of
the substantial volume of research undertaken during the past 40 years.
So what is
left out of the picture of black activity in Britain over the past 400-500
years? In addition to what I have
already said, there continues to be a substantial focus on the role of the political
left, work which I generally applaud, but its rhetoric should not be allowed to
frame the history of black activity and endeavour in Britain. Black British history is wider and more
complex than that.
May I
suggest four examples of that needed breadth:
(1) The ideas advanced by Kathleen Chater about
the status and role of black people in England and Wales during the 18th
century need to be further investigated.[8] Studies of the presence of black peoples in
specific localities would help further understanding of the diversity of black
lives and activities.
(2) More attention needs to be given to the endeavours
of black liberals and democrats from the Caribbean and Africa who shaped
pan-Africanist ideas in the early 20th century, and in the 1920s-40s,
for example those who congregated around Harold Moody and W. Arthur Lewis of the Fabian-minded League of Coloured Peoples. The League presented another radical and, I
would argue, a more dominant and effective voice. While Padmore, James, and Jones wished to
kick down the doors of government offices, and were thus ignored, Moody and
Lewis knocked politely and were invariably admitted across the threshold where
they persistently presented firm arguments, which actually led to limited changes.
At the same time it is wrong to imagine
that all black people living in Britain were caught up in some kind of struggle
for civil rights and representation. It
is clear that there were a good number of individuals who just got on with
their lives and, as with their white neighbours, made the best of what they
had.
(3) Then there is the long-enduring and important
Christian dimension to black British history which has largely been ignored,
less so for the late 18th century, but certainly through the 19th
and into the 20th centuries.[9] The primary sources for this are vast, not
least the ecclesiastical and Christian missionary records, and the burgeoning
religious press and missionary magazines generated over the past 200 years. Such
sources reveal a good deal about the lives of John Jea, Zilpha Elaw, Celestine
Edwards, Theophilus Scholes,[10] Amanda
Smith, Thomas Brem Wilson,[11] Felix E.M.
Hercules, Joseph Jackson Fuller, and the 12 or more black Anglican clergy
working in English parishes between 1799 and 1950.[12] Not
long ago I was dismayed to be told by the archivist of the Black Cultural
Archives in Brixton that there were no plans to collect material generated by the
many black churches on their very doorstep in London.
(4) Black British history also needs to be seen in
the wider context of the Atlantic world. There has been a substantial output of scholarly
work on the African slave trade, but to what extent has it informed school
teachers’ thinking, and the minds of others, about black British history? That research raises serious questions about
the patterns of transatlantic slave trading, and the extent of West African
merchants’ involvement in shaping that commerce.[13] Let me again emphasise that the task of the
historian is to analyse complex data and draw reasonable conclusions; their job
is not to label permanently Africans only as ‘victims’ however terrible the
structural violence and the inequalities in trade which helped sustain and
shape the transatlantic commerce in slaves over so many centuries.
Finally let me say a brief word about
Dissemination and Communication
A good deal is happening in black British history, but
there is a serious challenge as to how new research, writing, and ideas can
reach the wider readership it deserves.
Many studies appear in local and provincial publications, or get buried
in expensive scholarly books and academic journals that are largely
inaccessible to people up and down the country.
With the
demise of the BASA Newsletter in mid-2012, as a community of scholars and
enthusiasts we have lost a convenient medium for our research and queries. There is an urgent need to rescue current
research from obscurity. Perhaps this
requires a new online journal, freely accessible to all, a reference point
focussed on black British history and related overseas activities, which might
include peer-reviewed articles, research findings, and also a ‘notice board’. Is it too much to ask that this meeting
endorse such an idea and take action to put it in place?
David Killingray is Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Goldsmiths, and a Senior
Research Fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He taught
in secondary schools in Britain and Tanzania for 12 years, then helped train
teachers, studied for a PhD at SOAS, and subsequently for much of his career taught
African and Caribbean history in several universities. He has written books and articles on aspects
of African, Caribbean, Imperial, and English local history as well as on the
black diaspora.
[1] David Olusoga, ‘Back History Month needs a
rethink: it’s time to ditch the heroes’, The
Guardian, 9 October 2015.
[2] Empire,
Race and the Politics of ‘Anti-Caste’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[3] David Killingray, ‘Hands joined in
Brotherhood: the rise and decline of a movement for faith and social change,
1875-2000’, in Anthony R. Cross, Peter J Morden, and Ian M. Randall, eds., Pathways and Patterns in History. Essays on Baptists, Evangelicals, and the
Modern World in Honour of David Bebbington (Didcot: The Baptist Historical
Society, 2015), pp. 319-39. I mention
this here, and other chapters and papers of mine below, partly to emphasise a
point already made in the text above that work on black British history often appears
in fairly obscure publications.
[4] Marika Sherwood, Origins of Pan-Africanism. Henry
Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora (London: Routledge,
2011). The ideas of pan-Africanism in
this period form a central part of a book that I hope to complete in 2016,
provisionally entitle ‘Race, Religion and Gender in the Black Atlantic World,
1890-191’.
[5] Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism.
The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939
(Trenton, NJ.: Africa World Press, 2013). Holger Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic.
African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International
Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (Leiden: Brill, 2013). See
also Christian Høgsbjerg, C.L.R. James in
Imperial Britain (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2014).
[6] I am currently completing a book-length biography
of Dr Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples.
[7] Folarin Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1974);
and Black People in Britain 1555-1833
(London: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Peter Fryer, Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain
(London: Pluto, 1984).
[8] Kathleen Chater, Untold Histories. Black People
in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c.1660-1807
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
[9] Several of the black writers in Britain
during the late 18th century, Phillis Wheatley, James Albert Ukawsaw
Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cugoana, and Olaudah Equiano, were all evangelically-minded
Christians. See the recent research by
Ryan Hanley, now at New College, Oxford.
For a broader perspective on black British Christians see David
Killingray, ‘’Black evangelicals in Darkest Britain, 1770s-1930s’, in Mark
Smith, ed., British Evangelical
Identities Past and Present (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), pp. 128-42;
and David Killingray and Joel Edwards, Black
Voices. The shaping of our Christian
experiences (Nottingham: IVP, 2007).
[10] On Scholes see David Killingray, ‘The
Reverend Dr Theophilus Edward Samuel Scholes: Baptist missionary and imperial
critic at the heart of Empire, 1856-c.1940, in Anthony R. Cross and John H.Y.
Briggs, eds, Freedom and the Powers. Perspectives from Baptist History (Didcot:
The Baptist Historical Society, 2014), pp.175-202.
[11] Brem Wilson’s diaries, covering
intermittently the years 1899-1925, were located with his descendants in
southern England. I have transcribed
them and, along with an accompanying essay, they are soon to be deposited in
various appropriate archives and libraries.
[12]
I have recently written a paper on ‘Black Anglican clergy in the Established
Church in England, 1799-1950’, where I examine the ministry of, and public
responses to, black clergymen who served as parish ministers. In addition there were the many black
Christian ministers who served in British dissenting churches during the same
period; my files on that topic measure some six inches.
[13]
For example, Rebecca Shumway, The Fante
and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY.: Rochester University
Press, 2011); and Randy Sparks study of the West African trade of Anamabo , Where the Negroes are Masters: An African
port in the era of the slave trade (Cambridge ., MA.: Harvard University
Press, 2014); plus the articles by Lisa A. Lindsay and James A. Sweet in the Journal of African History, 55,2 (2014),
133-59.
