Organised by The Africa Centre
A History of African and Caribbean People in Britain: Professor Hakim Adi
A Black people’s history to transform our understanding of this country’s past. This event will take place at The Africa Centre. It will also be available to watch back on The Africa Centre website, three days after the event.
Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains a tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and one that continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only occasionally amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.
Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates in his new book, from the very beginning there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain’s heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian’s Wall while Rome’s first ‘African Emperor’ died in York. In Elizabethan England, ‘Black Tudors’ served in the land’s most eminent households while African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom – a struggle which raged throughout the 20th century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.
Adi reveals some of this past and its impact on the present moment, shining a light on how much our greatest collective achievements – universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, and the forging of the NHS – owe to these men and women.
- books
- history
- blackhistory
- african
- africa
- africandiaspora