Key stories 3

I could have gone to Newnham College, Cambridge, but they suggested a maturing ‘gap’ year. My mother saw in the papers that Princess Anne might be going to East Anglia university. So, I went there straight from school; Princess Anne didn’t! Despite studying American History and Literature for my first degree, followed by a Masters in Modern African Literature and a PGCE at the London Institute of Education, it was not until I got my first job as a Community Relations Officer that I realised something had to change. The young people I met didn’t even ask why? They just accepted that people of African descent had achieved nothing and White was right, better, best.

Then came Elizabeth 1 to the (partial) rescue for trying to chuck out (repatriate) the Black people in her realm. But the pictorial exhibition, Roots in Britain: Black and Asian Citizens from Elizabeth 1 to Elizabeth 11, was not born out of Africa and Asia. It was created in the image of my White educators, attracting criticism from some sections of the Black community because it lacked political oomph.

Then I co-edited the Mary Seacole autobiography and organised the Centenary Graveside, and the later Kensal Green ceremonies. More judgmental comments followed, so I turned to things I was good at.

Little did I know that forty years later I would be avidly scouring a single website that brought to life tens of thousands of my ancestors: Enslaved: peoples of the historical slave trade 

https://enslaved.org/