Archives,race,class and rage

The ‘Global Futures’ title of your conference has led me to think about how futures are related to pasts and presents, and about the global in our local, and the local in our global. And this is my chosen focus: to privilege something of our local as it opens to global matters, theoretical and professional – and in all this to be concise.

In the hope that you will understand something beyond a blindingly obvious skin-colour reference, it may simplify things to say at the start that I’m going to take the approach of speaking to you out of ‘Blackness’. That is to say, I am voicing something of the Black experience in Britain across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To give some kind of intellectual context to my remarks, I want to reference the idea of ‘reparative history’, an umbrella concept that covers my personal intellectual endeavour as well as that of a number of other Black British activists, over many decades, and also bridges to a newish insurgent intervention in academic historiography.

In the January–March 2016 special issue of the journal Race & Class, guest editors Cathy Bergin and Anita Rupprecht, both of the Humanities Department at the University of Brighton, describe the ‘reparative history’ academic project with which they are engaged as concerned with ‘the complex interconnections between past and present in the context of contemporary resistances to racism and the legacies of colonialism’. ¹ Put more bluntly, their reparative history academic project might be said to be about reframing the radical histories of resistance to White supremacy, locally and globally.

When the essays for this special issue of Race & Class first came to the Editorial Working Committee of the journal, I immediately saw what they were on to. I recognised, for instance, the relevance of their insistence on ‘rebellious rage’ as a force in history, which should be addressed as such by academic historians. It occurred to me that this ‘reparative history’ business was what I’d been engaged with for all of my professional life – earlier, back in what is now the last century, as an academic sociologist, and latterly as what, for today’s purposes, I will call a ‘cultural animator’.

To be clear, my engagement with what Cathy Bergin and Anita Rupprecht refer to as ‘reparative history’ has not been what you might call a ‘career choice’. It has been an endeavour not so much chosen, as thrust upon me, given that I’ve found myself living in a society in which racism is ingrained. To the extent that there is any truth to the old African aphorism/adage-cum-provocation ‘Until the lions have their historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunters’, my endeavour and that of a community of grassroots heritage organisations that I want to bring to your attention, has been about the necessity of lions wresting the telling of their story away from the hunters.

In August 2016, the Guardian featured a piece referencing the case of the ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion, that is to say, the Kikuyu-Kenyan Land and Freedom Movement of the 1940s/50s, which occurred in an east African corner of the erstwhile British Empire. ² I cite the piece here because it was concerned with historical records, and it implicated archivists at the very highest level in startling, even scandalous, duplicity. It made reference to the work of a Harvard University historian, Caroline Elkins, who had delved in the archives, including the UK National Archives, first for her own academic research, and later to support the claim of Kenyans who had survived Britain’s brutal suppression of their anti-colonial rebellion/uprising back in the 1950s. Some 1.5 million Kenyans were held in detention camps and confined in villages, where they were evidently, argues Caroline Elkins, subjected to systematic and often murderous violence. As most of you will know, a lawsuit brought by now elderly Kenyans was settled in 2012/13, when the British government admitted its historical ‘crimes’ and moved to settle with an unprecedented offer to compensate 5,288 Kenyans for torture and abuse.

There are academic historians who are still debating the professionalism of the historiography that Caroline Elkins brought to the ‘Mau Mau’ issue – some attacking, some supporting. Two things are of special interest to us here. The first is that at the centre of this story is Elkins’ discovery and exposure of a cover-up spanning some fifty years – a cover-up that involved not simply the British government’s destroying, hiding and denying the existence of a secret cache of records, vital to any full understanding of a history of the Empire. And, it was evidently doing this with the active assistance of unnamed but powerfully well-placed professional archivists. The second and even more interesting matter for us here, professionally, is a continuing and fraught discussion as to how these very newly uncovered archives at Hanslope Park in the south of England, which contain records – not unlike those on Kenya – concerning British government practices in the days when its empire spanned the globe, are to be interpreted. ³ To put the question bluntly: are these now exposed practices to be seen as systematic or accidental? Evidence here, then, of the global in our local; and much to debate about how the global past impacts on our local/global present, as well as on our local/global future.

I would argue that what Bergin and Rupprecht and Elkins bring to their academic historiography is an ‘activist sense of agency’, what others might well call ‘an agenda’. And this is where my stumbling practice around archives and records joins with their more disciplined academic practice. Of course, I realise that this having of an agenda may be disturbing to some, even many, academic historians, and, I dare say, disturbing perhaps to some, even many, professional archivists. The argument is not so much about facts as about interpretation.

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It must be pretty clear to you by now that I engage with our dominant historical narratives as a rebel, as one always controlling my rage in the process of making sense of how and why my experience is marginalised and excluded. Here lies my central theme. I come to archives and records as a part of a project of contesting the dominant historical narratives that marginalise and exclude. And the frame for my remarks today is the story of my engagement with archives, and heritage, and history – my journey, personal, professional and political; from the margins to the mainstream and from the mainstream to the margins. To the extent that this strategy for a keynote risks my appearing to be merely anecdotal and self-aggrandising, bear with me, for my intention is to contribute to your conference discourses. A more modest and less sensationalist title for my keynote might be ‘Archives, history and heritage: Black British stations of the cross’. I want, then, to talk with you about Black British history.

We, Black folks, have a long history of twentieth-century insistence that Blackness belongs in and to any full history of what made Britain ‘Great’ (again, the global in our local). This insistence stands in the face of the notoriously ill-informed racist British National Party chant of the late twentieth-century ‘There ain’t no Black in the Union, Jack’. Get the pun?

We, Black folks, have a history that features resistance and rebellion, as well as, protest and participation. It is a history stretching from predicaments which include forced transportation across the Atlantic in our tens of millions; through oppression, exploitation, cruel brutalities and murderous violence in plantation-slavery and indenture, then colonial-imperialism; and continuing now into neocolonial ‘independence’ within a global imperialist system.

We, Black folks, have a history that brings us in recent times to the ‘mother country’, Britain, in significant numbers, as migrant-settlers, post-second world war. You will know that this settlement has not been unproblematic. And this brings me to the first notable stop, or station of the cross, on my journey (along with others) of engagement with archives and heritage: ‘The Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage (MCAAH) of 2003/4’, and its report Delivering Shared Heritage. ⁴

The commissioning mayor was Ken Livingstone whose ‘radical’ mayorship of London in the early part of this century reminded everyone that the state, local and national, is meant to be a state for all people in all classes, not just the tool of the current ruling or governing class. Accordingly, his mayor’s agenda included the setting up of the MCAAH, on which I served as a very active Vice-Chair. The active participants listed in the ‘hearings’ of the Commission included directors and senior staff from a number of the major heritage organisations (British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, English Heritage, National Gallery, National History Museum, Museum of London, Royal Geographical Society, London Libraries Development Agency, National Maritime Museum) as well as government ministries.

The MCAAH completed its Delivering Shared Heritage report in 2005. Central to its recommendations in regard to what it called ‘empowering community-based heritage’ was an insistence that there should be mainstream recognition and integration of the contribution of British Black (African and Asian) communities to the life, culture and history of London, and therefore to the nation.

The Commission took evidence and deliberated over a period of some months. The several, twenty-five-plus, community-based and largely volunteer-resourced heritage organisations that made presentations to the Commission clamoured for much greater support, not least for dedicated funding to support capacity building and especially training in core heritage skills.

And what I wish to emphasise about the MCAAH moment, so to speak, is that, quite apart from the firm follow-through commitments obtained by the Commission from all of the participating mainstream institutions, the participation of the Black community-based heritage organisations, fuelled, in itself, a confident surge of Black archives interventions beyond that point. This surge is a big part of the story that I am bringing to your attention.

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The next notable step on my journey, again along with others, came in 2007, with the state’s, indeed the government’s commitment to a commemoration-cum-celebration of Britain’s 1807 Parliamentary Act ending the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Of course the idea that there was something here that Britain had the right to celebrate was highly contested. Questions were raised. If there was some achievement here to be celebrated, was that achievement all down to a ‘William Wilberforce effect’ or was the role of, say, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the ‘rebellious rage’ of the late eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution more critically significant than that of any White historical figure? ⁵ And what was to be made of those British ships, and British captains of other nations’ ships, still trading in enslaved Africans up to the 1880s? There are records, attesting to this.

Notwithstanding the fudging of the commemoration/celebration question, Black citizens of Caribbean heritage were drawn into any number of the 2007 planning committees, up and down the nation, as key ‘interpreters’ of the historical record. They were invited by the major heritage institutions to participate; to be consultants; to assist in improving mainstream heritage interpretations.

I was invited to assist with (a) the National Maritime Museum’s (NMM’s) ‘Atlantic Worlds’ permanent gallery, and (b) the Museum of London’s (MoL[D]’s) ‘London, Sugar, and Slavery’ permanent gallery, at its Docklands site. I had very contrasting experiences across these two very different museums, in regard to the development and the mounting of their permanent galleries. To be brief, my NMM experience was ‘poor’ and, in the end, alienating; my MoL(D) experience was good, in that advisers were even permitted to define something of the tone and content of the gallery’s wall-text narrative. Overall, far too many of the Black community archivists, historians, and activists involved in this 2007 moment came away with unhappy experiences. Interestingly though, for all the disappointment and restricted achievement of the 2007 commemorations, this was, I would argue, a ‘watershed’ moment. The mainstream had acknowledged the archival authority of the normally marginalised and excluded Black keepers of the record – and this released a new confidence amongst the rebels.

The ‘conceit’ of those of us who were drawn to assisting the mainstream in the run up to 2007 was that we thought that we would manage to have historic effects, given this opportunity. That is to say, that we would make a significant and lasting impact on the dominant discourse. But, as already indicated, we were either totally disappointed, or only partially successful; which, in my opinion, provoked us to develop even sterner ambitions. Black archives came of age. The lions discovered their duty to refute the hunters’ historiography.

It is as though that ‘2007, Atlantic slave trade bi-centenary’ experience underlined the fact that what we had done in this and earlier centuries was undeniably civilisationally significant. It meant that our records deserved to be taken seriously, more seriously. It demanded that we should take the struggle to belong to a new level, not just asking questions of those who controlled heritage discourse but providing answers and solutions; daring to lead, not merely following.

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Coming after and out of that 2007 experience, we saw, and still see today, a raised profile in London and beyond, of, for example, the Black Cultural Archives; the George Padmore Institute’s archives; the Friends of the Huntley Archives at the London Metropolitan Archives; and the Black History Collection at the Institute of Race Relations – along with other Black archive initiatives concerned with cinema/film; TV and broadcasting; photography; dance; cinema; music and so on. All of these start-ups are now revving to go – as I speak!

So what has been made of and in this post-2007 moment? Everything has not been plain sailing. Some initiatives have failed, or disappointed. This is in the nature of cultural insurgency. But some initiatives have delivered. I was very closely involved with one such project. Figure 1, the ‘No Colour Bar’ 2015/16 archive and art exhibition, will give you a sense of this. It drew moving plaudits from those who managed to visit during its six-month stay at the Guildhall Art Gallery, at the heart of one of London’s iconic heritage sites. Indeed, the Guildhall Art Gallery and the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) were crucially important partners in the delivery of this exhibition.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The ‘No Colour Bar’ 2015/16 archive and art exhibition.

‘No Colour Bar’s’ sub-title was ‘Black British Art in Action – 1960 to 1990’. The ‘Art’ of the exhibition was painting and sculpture, along with a number of book-cover designs, featuring the works of twenty-five or so Black British fine-artists. Some of these artists, struggling and unrecognised back in the period of the 1960s to the 1980s are, today, quite distinguished and celebrated, like Sonia Boyce, Sokari Douglas Camp, Chila Kumari Burman, George ‘Fowokan’ Kelly, Eddie Chambers, Denzil Forrester and Keith Piper. But ‘No Colour Bar’ was just as importantly an archive exhibition, using that archive to give social and historical context and to add a socio-political narrative as a complement to aesthetic appreciation of the break-through artworks displayed. So, the ‘Action’ signalled in the exhibition’s sub-title was to be found in the archived material included, which displayed records of Black community struggles against racism; for justice; and for dignified ‘belonging’. This animation of archives aimed high, and it struck a chord with audiences. It is arguable that the archive content of ‘No Colour Bar’ made by far the greater impression on audiences, and drew the most heartfelt responses entered in recorded comments of visitors. I should add that the exhibition was supported by a programme of tours and educational talk-events running throughout its six-month stay.

‘Exhibition of the year’ suggested one informed and enthusiastic reviewer. ⁶ Another reviewer, Lola Okolosie, claimed to have been ‘moved to tears’, when standing in the Guildhall Gallery at the sight of this fine, fine-art exhibition of strident works by Black British painters and sculptors, mounted in a surround of archive materials conveying something of the community spirit of those times (posters, print, a/v recordings, book covers, letters, newspaper clippings, and so on). Walking into this space, in this particular place, felt like an act of resistance in itself, she ventured. ⁷

The particular archived ephemera used to give historical context to the art works and the art narrative of the exhibition illustrated and demonstrated the personal and political courage, militancy and imaginative force of the remarkable Guyanese-British couple, Jessica and Eric Huntley. But this archived material also demonstrated the very same strengths in the individuals and communities that they had served, responded to, and belonged to, in an era, now almost forgotten, of principled, militant, courageous, and imaginative community struggles – against racist injustices, and for belonging as dignified citizens.

The Huntleys had founded a bookshop where people, Black and White, could find Black literature – in a time when such literature was not readily available in the main bookshops. They initiated and supported a number of self-help, supplementary education initiatives – in a time when, literally, the British education system was declaring West Indian children to be ‘educationally-subnormal’. ⁸ They made themselves into significant publishers of significant Black literature, including the early writings of the Guyanese scholar-historian and activist Walter Rodney. They centred any number of anti-racist and justice campaigns. Their book-shop was also a community resource. Moreover they had kept records of all their activities. Theirs was, and is, a rich archive, now deposited and curatorially managed at the LMA in the category of ‘business archives’.

What was accomplished and inserted culturally by the communities of migrant-settlers and by the ‘No Colour Bar’ artists who came out of those communities was momentous. ‘No Colour Bar’ set out to demonstrate these truths, and to make these truths more than just a matter of hearsay for new generations. The archived material spoke of and to the making of Black community in Britain from the 1960s through the 1980s. The exhibition reminded visitors that the people (Caribbean/sub-continental Asian/continental African, in the main) whose lives would throw up the banner slogan ‘Here to stay. Here to fight’, had come out of Empire – out of long, brutal exploitative, impoverished, oppressive, racist Empire; out of the worst end of a capitalist imperialist world-system; and that back in the 1950s and 1960s they were coming to the ‘mother country’ of that Empire. The exhibition also showed that these people arriving here came out of militant resistance to colonialism, and prolonged struggles for some kind of ‘independence’ (albeit still within the British Commonwealth).

The archived material in the ‘No Colour Bar’ exhibition also showed that wherever these Black communities met intransigent prejudice and unfair discrimination, they rejoined their liberation march through history – first forging a new kind of ‘Caribbeanness’, shifting from West Indian, small-island loyalties to uniting in their Caribbean-ness; then inventing ‘Blackness’ not as mere skin-colour, but as the colour of resistance – across ethnicities, eschewing petty-nationalisms; and, eventually, forging new anti-racist struggles here, a spur to others struggling against injustice – an internationalism with trans-Atlantic Civil Rights and Black Power movements. ⁹ Let me say it out, loud and proud: the archives demonstrate that these migrant-settler communities were part and parcel of the most significant social forces in late twentieth-century Britain.

The mingling of art and activism in the ‘No Colour Bar’ exhibition, with art taken as integral to social, political and intellectual action against injustice, was no mere curatorial fancy. ‘No Colour Bar’ sought to demonstrate convincingly that Black British art, and Black British activism, were and are integral to twentieth-century British history and heritage. They belong. And there was and is a need to insist on this. The story of what happened between 1960 and 1990 is legend. They came. They saw – and were disappointed by what they saw. They challenged, at every turn. They changed themselves, and they changed the society. They made struggle against racism and unfair discrimination. They made struggle to belong, on their own terms, with some kind of dignity. And the story is backed by archives and records.

So, ‘No Colour Bar’, in combining archive with activism, with reparative cultural history, succeeded as an example of what I refer to as ‘eventing’ the Huntley Archives – capturing the imagination, and connecting to an urgent need in our times. It recovered buried archives, and revivified community-business records: records of migration to settlement; records of courageous struggles to survive in the face of racism and injustice; records of imaginative self-reliance; records of the educational imperative, as witnessed in the community development of supplementary schools; records about cosmopolitanism, internationalism and conviviality. At the heart of it all were the records of the human stories, records about the personal and the communal; the global in the local; and the local in the global.

It is important to add that, in my informed opinion, the exercise of applying for funding to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and convincing it of not just the worthiness but the necessity of supporting ‘No Colour Bar’, was in itself an act of educating what one might term ‘the establishment’, the mainstream. And in addition, I would suggest that this education should also be informed by No Colour Bar’s achieving what turned out to be a spectacularly successful result.

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But still we rage. We are the beggars who would be choosers. So note, please, that I’ve not been talking about merely being acknowledged in the record(s). The journey that I’ve framed my remarks around continues to be connected with rage against ‘othering’; rage against ‘White-washing’ the record; rage against systemic, institutionalised denial; rage against continuing, intransigent, irritating, debilitating, distracting and destructive racism. This is rage about the necessity of transformation, a million miles from mere toleration. This is rage about making curatorial interventions into curative interventions. Archives have become a site of struggle.

Finally, let me admit that, for all my bullish bragging about the journey of a vigorous Black community archives and heritage constituency, there remain major archival challenges in the pursuit of these ambitions, presently and into the future. The challenges around collecting, conserving, interpreting and making records and archival material accessible, will require new skills. They will bring new demands of existing professional practice – not least in regard to the ‘documentation’ of ‘received’ oral historical accounts. To overcome these challenges, there is the necessary but difficult matter of obtaining the active, indeed pro-active, assistance of established archives and archivists (that is to say, you, the people at this conference) while, figuratively speaking, biting the hand that feeds, and insisting, as already expressed, on being beggars who would be choosers.

I would suggest that these challenges around heritage, history, and historiography are, for what I’ve been calling Black British communities, part and parcel of the journey to belonging in dignified ways. On our terms. So, the provocative question that I leave you professional archivists and record-keepers with is this. Are you ready to engage as archivists with agency, as archivists with attitude?