Hakim Adi participates in research development at the APC

29 Apr 2015
Prof. Hakim Adi addressing the recent 'History Matters' conference in London. He remarked that the issues discussed about history teaching were similar to those he observed in South Africa. Source: Hakim Adi
29 Apr 2015

 

June Bam-Hutchison

The APC was pleased to invite Hakim Adi, Professor of the History of African and the African Diaspora in the Department of History and Politics at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, to participate in the recent research workshop held from 7 to 9 April. Adi is widely recognised as the first black, and also the only, professor of African History in the UK; an active former Anti-Apartheid campaigner; a well-known British scholar and commentator in British media on the African presence in London over the past 2000 years; and is a trustee of the Black Cultural Archives (BCA). He is a former member of the Mayor of London’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage and was also a member of the advisory group on the establishment of the first permanent gallery at the Museum of London about London’s link to the transatlantic slave trade, London, Sugar and Slavery. In the process of making this gallery, along with fellow historians Catherine Hall (on Empire) and Caroline Bressey (on black Victorians), Adi’s voice was crucial in problematising colonial memorialisation in museums and bringing the ancient history of the African presence in London since Roman times into the mainstream Eurocentric narrative. The heritage sector in the UK continues to benefit from Adi’s scholarship in this area of research and his insights into the absence of black history in what remains a Eurocentric school curriculum in Britain.

APC’s Research Development Workshop

It came therefore as no surprise that Adi’s participation at the APC research development workshop was profoundly challenging to perceptions of what may be deemed “colonial discourse”.  In his intensely critical participation at the workshop, Adi encouraged APC scholars to ask questions about the relevance of “struggle” and its usefulness in global discourse today. It became clear at the workshop that “the struggle” had a very different meaning in South African discourse today. Professor John Wright, for example, pointed out that it had to do with the apartheid liberation struggle and particularly the ANC’s struggle for freedom. The use of the concept (both in theoretical and political senses) provoked heated debate about what the term really means and its usefulness in discourse today, especially among younger scholars.  For instance, some younger post-apartheid South African scholars may feel that they do not identify with the way previous “struggle generations” (including those based in Britain) identify with the notion of “struggle” as “we have arrived home” in South Africa.  However, for Adi and some others who participated in the workshop, the term is as relevant as it was during the struggle for liberation (and perhaps even more so) because we are not “free” yet (have not arrived “home” yet), not from apartheid, nor from Eurocentrism and various forms of global oppression in which we all share. 

Adi’s Cape Town Conversations 

Adi also spent some time during his stay in Cape Town in deep conversation about issues around the archive, memory and identity with South African History Online’s Omar Badsha (renowned apartheid activist photographer) and Lionel Davis (artist and former Robben Island political prisoner). Lionel Davis, like Adi, was troubled to learn that some young South African scholars feel so intensely dislocated from ‘struggle discourse’. What were the human sacrifices and long intellectual traditions for, he asked privately, that young scholars could today question whether it has a place in South African scholarship? Can we already speak about ‘the struggle’ being over? Are we already ‘home’? Is the ‘journey’ really over and is ‘struggle discourse’ already only relevant to a bygone era? Is this perhaps a new form of amnesia (the fact that the younger generation of students were not familiar with local Western Cape struggle icons like Johnny Gomas or perhaps interested in them) and if it is not, what is it? 

Contesting what he referred to as a case of “South African exceptionalism” (that “the struggle” had a particular meaning in South Africa, one which was not shared globally), Adi highlighted the universal and global relevance of the term “struggle” as it pertains to contemporary global movements for human rights, in which South Africans have historically played a part and still do today. 

Transnational struggles: contextualising the BCA

It was significant that this heated debate about “struggle” took place at the APC at the time of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign (which has its own varied interpretations of what the “struggle” means). The debate came as a key response to Adi’s presentation on the long journey of thirty years to establish the Black Cultural Archives in Britain. Adi’s presentation made the point that the campaign against apartheid in South Africa (through the political exile movement in which South African scholars, artists and musicians like Badsha were key participants in previous decades) was in itself integrally linked to the founding of the BCA through transnational conversations on history, identity and memory. Adi was insistent that “the struggle” in the UK has much to do with what was and is happening in South Africa; that it was and is a broader struggle for humanity and that the term has indeed not lost its usefulness and relevance. Our ‘struggle’ on the human level is certainly intertwined. He pointed out that it was Africans in Britain who had started the Anti-Apartheid movement in Britain in the 1950s and that throughout the 20th century many Africans in Britain had struggled alongside those in South Africa and on occasions represented South Africa at international gatherings when their South African comrades were prevented from attending by the racist regime.

Surreptitiously, during Adi’s visit, the South African government announced that school history will become compulsory up to grade 12. Quite remarkable is the fact that the Black Cultural Archives, which formally opened in Windrush Square (named to commemorate the migration of Caribbean people in the late 1940s to Britain), in Brixton, London in July 2014, was in fact founded by a black history teacher Len Garrison. Founded in 1981, to promote, preserve and understand black cultural heritage in Britain, this major initiative led to the establishment of a ‘community archive’ and a two-year project on ‘Documenting the Archive’. Consisting of a reference library of 6000 books including independently published literature (which ensured that the black people of Britain told their own stories in their own voices); these collections are available through an online catalogue. The Black Cultural Archives is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement in British history and its collections include objects of Septimius Severus the African Roman emperor, born in present-day Libya, dating back to 208AD. 

Significant also in terms of our worrying present South African situation, is the observation that the opening of the BCA was addressed by Doudou Diene, former UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that its patrons include playwright and author Benjamin Zephaniah who was requested by former President Nelson Mandela to host the Two Nations concert in London in 1996. 

This historic intervention into archiving, memorialising and preserving diverse British pasts  started with a simple question by history teacher Len Garrison, when he observed the invisibility of black people in the British memorial landscape: ‘Where are our heroes, martyrs and monuments’? (Questions similarly asked by the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaigners). It is an established fact that British history has officially been presented (especially in media) as one of monarchies, major battles, achievements of Empire globally, with a disregard for its deep history of diversity and its influence on present day British culture over the last 70 years in particular. Britain like many other countries, was shaped by waves of migrations. And, as in many countries, including South Africa, new migrants tend to be demonised (in the media and popular discourse) and this can lead to intolerance, racism and xenophobia. 

Adi, who also campaigns actively for inclusion of black history in British schools, countering racism, intolerance and xenophobia, expressed disappointment that in his short stay he did not get to meet fellow historians at UCT nor those who teach history education to aspiring teachers.  However, he was grateful to be hosted by APC senior scholar Mbongiseni Buthelezi who actively engaged him in discussions with the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaigners on “the struggle”. It was during these talks that Adi (who by pure coincidence arrived during the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign and left just days before South Africa was ignited by a wave of attacks on foreign black Africans) addressed with the student leadership the need to acknowledge diversity in “struggle” and the importance of acknowledging the contribution of “foreigners” (including white South Africans) in this; that much of a particular country’s history (including that of Britain) equates with waves of migration across landscapes and oceans. 

Adi was warmly received by Sakhela Buhlungu (Dean of Humanities) in an intense conversation on how to transform higher education, and also held a brief meeting on shared intellectual research interests with the head of School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, Harry Garuba, who invited him to launch his book Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora 1919-1939 (Africa World Press, 2013) at the Centre for African Studies on his next visit. On this very positive note, Adi departed our shores with renewed optimism for what sustaining transformation in “decolonial” discourse in higher education globally could possibly look like. This transnational conversation has, of course, only started at UCT.