Your beginnings
Why and how did History as a subject at school capture your imagination?
I understand you as a multidisciplinary scholar, therefore can you walk the reader through the modes that informed your choice of specialism and how you utilise the subject area of history?
As a male academic of African heritage within the UK academy can you share with readers what have been the challenges, the highs and lows that have impacted the way you teach, research and how you present historical interpretation to audiences?
I did enjoy history lessons until I began to question the black absence in anything we were being taught. This worsened when as a 15-year-old, in 1972, I started a Black History class at the Moonshot Youth Centre, in New Cross Southeast London, because I then had enough ammunition to challenge my teachers. Doing so however, along with other factors resulted in my expulsion from school at that age.
I suppose I am a multidisciplinary scholar, which for me is a product of the reasoning, guidance and teaching I received, before I returned to education as a 36-year-old. This is because I would attend evening and other pro black, African centred, courses across London, as well as grassroots, community gatherings, where I was exposed to information from an array of speakers and educators from many disciplines. Couple this with the fact that I am an avid reader, so despite being expelled from school at 15 and then college at 16, I frequented my local libraries and spent quite a bit of money on books that dealt with the global black experience. The reason I decided to study social anthropology and sociology is due to encouragement from a few close friends, some excellent black educators and my wife, who when we first met said I think like a sociologist. At that time in the mid-1980s, I didn’t know what sociology was so started reading those types of text. I was then introduced to anthropology through the seminal works of scholars like Cheikh Anta Diop, Walter Rodney and Ivan Van Sertima. This meant that I was guided to historicise my thoughts and reflections on the global African experience, which was also an aspect of my lyricism when I used to perform on reggae sound systems during the 1980s. That is why I often compare my writing and teaching to writing a song, where we have a start, a middle, and an end.
I have faced many challenges and to sum them up is quite readily done. The white/European “new world” and the rife racists who run it, are afraid of people of African ancestry, black people, who can think, particularly within HE. That is why they will act like they are supportive of what black scholars bring to the table, that which requires consideration of counter narratives that challenge their historical portrayal of the world and the people in it. However, in my experience, many of these whites in positions of power, are so fragile and so racist they ultimately do their darndest to undermine, demoralise and blatantly fail to support you which often leads to anxiety, depression, stress and worse. To counter this, I teach what I have lived and experienced as an African member of the human family, ensuring that my research and delivery are rigorous, thereby making it nigh on impossible for any member of the faculty to challenge my claims.
The HE sector
In the aftermath of the “Black Lives Matter” and the “Rhode Must Fall” movements have you noticed a rise in the number of students from African and Caribbean heritage taking up History as a subject of study at UG/PG level?
Due to global, financial, and political imperatives, many universities are revisiting their offer to the domestic and international students they seek to recruit; there is a drive for “curriculum transformation” across the board. Given the recent high-profile withdrawal of some courses where do you think teaching the histories of Africa, the African Diaspora and Black Britain sits in this shift?
What are your thoughts on the under-representation (RHS Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report of 2018) of those of African and Caribbean heritage at Undergrad, Postgrad on history courses and as academics in general?
As I do not teach history per se and it is not a subject taught where I am based, I cannot answer this question.
Again, this is an easy question to answer, based on what I have stated above. Europeans do not want peoples of African ancestry exposed to the readily available information, mostly collated by them, that will expose the true extent of the inequity and ongoing barbarous treatment of us on a global scale. This perfectly captures why as Africans; we are the only members of the human family who are expected to be historically amnesic to “make it” in their white supremacist world.
I cannot speak to history, but the two places I have taught there is no under-representation of black students at undergrad level. At postgrad you start to see a noticeable absence which in turn explains the lack of black academics, at all levels within HE. This is deliberate and can be traced to the disproportionality that gave rise to the research and findings on the Student Attainment Gap when it comes to institutionalised and systemic racism throughout HE.
Reflections
What questions do you feel should be asked of British historians and are not?
What top 3 tips and advice would you give your younger self starting a career as an academic in 2024?
Be clear within yourself why you want to enter such a hostile space, thus always remaining circumspect, thrusting only those who have earned it.
Do not confuse, as African Americans remind us, “skin folk for kin folk”!
Keep thinking, writing, researching and publishing, whilst navigating a sane path through an institutionally and systemically racist environment, where many of your white colleagues have only achieved their positions, due to the “skin they’re in”.
What more would you like to share with readers?
What do you do for fun that you would like to share with readers?
If by British you mean white Europeans, the answer is simple. Why do you not teach a more comprehensive and honest history of the human family that features the seminal role that peoples of African ancestry played in not only educating Europeans from day one but also civilising them? Why do you not teach the historical fact that it was Africans who introduced Europeans to a notion of a benign and beneficent God?
What is it about a thinking African, black person, that makes you lend your weight through positionality, to continuously peddling historical untruths that you know to be so?
This is difficult because I was 36 when I entered, HE, so for me this is not young. I was worldly wise and came into academia to overstand the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that enable a global minority to control the thoughts, feelings and aspirations of global majority peoples. As such:
Take time out of every single day to reconnect with your black/African self, otherwise HE as a white/European dominated space will grind you down to dust.
I take time out or every day to do things that have nothing to do with academia, from gardening, listening to music, playing with my grandchildren, to watching Sci Fi, films and certain sports, as well as reading for pleasure (if that is possible for a critically engaged academic). I also cycle between 5 and 10 miles every morning and I am a Shaolin Kung Fu Instructor, which helps with the mind and body balance that for me is essential to a good quality of life.