BLACK HISTORY MONTH AND

Mummy was accepted at Central Middlesex Hospital in Harlesden, north-west London, where after the preliminary 3 month “observation” period, she was accepted for State Registered Nurse training, which she successfully completed in 3 years.

Although it’s often been said that Africans, particularly those from the Caribbean, were routinely funnelled into State Enrolled Nurse (SEN) courses, which was not recognised outside Britain, Mummy does not recall meeting any SEN students during her training.

With her SRN qualification, Mummy says “I could have stayed there forever. But I knew I was to return home sometime, and I wanted to do something else in nursing.” So she moved to South London Hospital For Women And Children to study midwifery, which was covered in two parts – one was mainly theory and the other practicals. She completed the latter at Kingsbury Hospital in north London, whereupon she qualified as a State Certified Midwife.

A smile cuts across her face as she recalls a mischievous ambition of a fellow trainee. The sign of the hospital’s name had the “o” in Women missing. So Mummy recalls “the greatest ambition” of this trainee midwife was to climb up and remove the “W” in Women, to have the sign read South London Hospital For Men And Children, and stand back and watch the pandemonium that was likely to ensue.

Mummy went on to study Health Visiting at Battersea Polytechnic, which is where that she met a Sierra Leonean fellow trainee, Adeline Lee, who was to become a long-life friend until her death.

So what does she recall of the Empire Windrush’s arrival from the Caribbean in 1948? It would surprise readers of this magazine, who no doubt are aware of the ubiquitous coverage of that ship’s one trip from the Caribbean, that it passed Mummy by. She doesn’t even recall the Caribbean nurses mentioning it at the time.

“It was interesting when,” decades later “people told me about this ship... We never really heard anything. I was surprised to hear such a thing, and none of us knew about it.”

Following the Windrush, there’s supposed to have been an “influx” of African Caribbean people coming to train as nurses. What does she recall? “I wouldn’t say ‘influx’. There were girls coming to do nursing,” she says. But adds: “Interestingly enough, either they didn’t like it, or, after the preliminary period of three months, they just left. They were not there any more.”

One of the things she particularly remembers from engaging with girls from the Caribbean was that after years of maintaining a natural hair style, they introduced her to straightening her hair “to make it easy to comb, and easy to keep.”

There is one more hirsute story Mummy recalls. It was a time when she was with a group of African Caribbean nurses having their hair done in someone’s house, as there were no African specialist hair salon then. These nurses were talking disparagingly about the non-chemicalised hairstyles of some of the continental African nurses.

So Mummy asked them why they were talking about their fellow nurses in that way? Their response was why was she bothered. It was then that she told them that she was from Africa. Perhaps she speculates, because of her fair complexion, she says: “They hadn’t realised all this time that I wasn’t a West Indian, I mean, a Caribbean girl.”

Mummy was training at Central Middlesex Hospital when the NHS (National Health Service) was launched in July 1948. She says the doctors were initially not keen on this development, and so to get them on side, they were allowed to have some private patients treated within the NHS. Also, unlike before, when the doctors wielded a lot of power, after the introduction of the NHS, the hospital management had increased powers over their affairs.

Unsurprisingly, she experienced racism within the health service. There were some patients who refused to be attended to by African nurses. Mummy recalls an incident where a patient would not allow her to prepare him for theatre. When she reported the matter to the nursing sister in charge, she supported Mummy by phoning the surgeon to say his patient was being brought to the theatre unprepared, because he refused prepared by an African nurse. The surgeon had to sort out the preparation himself.

Recreation was often going to the cinema, which one could stay in for hours, if one chose to watch repetition of the same film. She remembers coming out of the cinema one day, and everywhere was covered by smog. Visibility was so bad that the bus conductor had to go on foot using a torchlight to direct the bus driver!

Another form of recreation was window shopping. She recalls one incident that has a lasting memory. One day she and a group of girls from west Africa and the Caribbean went window shopping in Oxford Street. They ended up taking photos in a photographic studio. The following week when they went to collect their photos, she was so surprised to see her photo displayed in the shop window. The enlarged version is displayed in her house at La, and that’s the portrait she’s holding in the accompanying photograph.

Mummy was a bit of an activist in her youth. She would challenge the negative spin on Africa portrayed in talks or films provided by the Colonial Office or British Council. The crisis in Kenya at the time was one of the colonial issues she and her friends expressed solidarity with by supporting the few Kenyan students around.

It was no doubt her ability to speak up and to get her nursing friends to attend political type meetings that led to her being elected secretary of the Gold Coast Students Union. The one elected President was a socialistleaning statistics and mathematics student, KB Asante, who had come to London from Durham University.

They would end up marrying in 1958, and having two sons and two daughters. Mummy went on to have a long career as a senior public health practitioner in Ghana. Her husband had a distinguished career as an aide to President Kwame Nkrumah and his diplomatic service included becoming Ghana’s High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland. Their marriage lasted 60 years, until the death of her husband in 2018.

Dzagbele Matilda Asante is still somewhat involved in the health service – her compound is used for the local weekly health meetings for mothers with young children.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH AND THE SHAPING OF KNOWLEDGE

BY PROF WILLIAM LEZ HENRY

“I realise that, generationally and historically, those of us who are custodians of a certain historical memory [we] have a responsibility to share that memory, and to offer it to a wide range of eager people who are very much concerned to educate themselves about historical processes that shape the moment we are in.” Prof Paul Gilroy (OUTERVIEW, June 2020)

In June 2020, I began a series of reasonings with various social commentators on my YouTube channel entitled ‘The OUTERVIEW, Where Reason Comes First’, from which the above Prof Paul Gilroy extract is taken. The rationale behind the series is to demonstrate that it is possible to have profound discussions, premised in REASON, that seek to inform, uplift, and edify on matters of the Black experience in 21st century Britain. It is important for me to place emphasis on this aspect of the Black struggles for liberation because overstanding the ‘historical processes that shape the moment we are in’ is crucial to overcoming systemic, systematic, and institutionalised racism. That is why I have a forthcoming publication entitled ‘Black Lives Matter, Decolonisation, and the Legacy of African Enslavement’, wherein I explain that as an educator it continues to amaze me that as a person of African ancestry I still have to ‘prove’, usually during one calendar month, that I have a rich history that predates chattel enslavement. Equally, because Black history is generally regarded as a story about African people suffering chattel enslavement and then being freed, with an emphasis on the Abolition and the Civil Rights Movement, the scope for meaningful and informed discussion is limited. Consequently, as a ‘custodian of a certain historical memory’ it is incumbent on me to share with those who are eager to listen and learn whatever I bring to the table that I believe will uplift and empower them from an Africentric perspective, without compromise.

Black History Month, despite the obvious and overly reductionist drawbacks, lends itself to an annual opportunity for alternate ‘world histories’ to be discussed, documented and disseminated in the wider public arena. I deliberately state ‘world histories’ to ensure that we work from the premise that Africans are, and always will be, part of any historical worldview, which is quite different from the racist European whitewashing that renders the African - read as Black people globally - as the ‘white man’s burden’. For instance, when I go into schools that are predominantly filled with African and African Caribbean students to deliver BHM talks, there is an overwhelming and palpable sense of shame in the air. I am talking about Black students visibly sliding down in their seats, like veritable ostriches burying their heads in the proverbial sand, because they expect to hear solely about the horrors of ‘slavery’, coupled with an attack on white people. Considering what they are being ‘taught’ on this historical moment, coupled with the fact that the teachers of these children are predominantly White, we can sympathise with them. I say this because it is perhaps only human, whether young or old, to more often than not react to what we expect to hear based on what we know, or even think we know, and switch off before anything has been shared. This realisation led to a research publication based on some work I delivered in a couple of London Schools, where I discussed this sense of ‘shame’ with year 10 and year 11 students and some of their teachers. The article is entitled ‘Schooling, Education and the Reproduction of Inequality: Understanding Black and Minority Ethnic Attitudes to Learning in two London Schools’. You will notice that I link ‘attitudes to learning’ with the ‘reproduction of inequality’ and to make sense of this relationship the framework for the discussion was the relevance of BHM and the absence of meaningful Black historical content within the National Curriculum.

My approach is generally to inform the students and their teachers that I am here to discuss history and, if Black people have made a contribution that I am aware of, I will share that knowledge with them as an aspect of a decolonisation process. This pragmatic approach is a radical departure from the expected, and immediately piques the interest of those gathered as it gives us a unique opportunity to reason through ‘hidden’ aspects of British history that challenges the way history is presently taught in schools. I therefore explain to the students that by giving them examples of how we experience Black history every single day in some way, shape or form, means it is the mind-set that needs changing as the history is always there. We just need to learn how to not be afraid to discuss it in an open and honest way. Everyone has a history and therefore everyone should have a say in how that history is taught in schools, colleges and universities, as history cannot and should not be racialised. I believe that if BHM was given the level of importance that other annual celebrations receive, we would soon see a shift in the way we view each other as valid and valued members of the human family.

Henry W, A. (2020) ‘Black Lives Matter, Decolonisation, and the Legacy of African Enslavement’ (in) Isaacs, S. (ed) Social Problems in the UK: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Henry, W, A. (2020) ‘Schooling, Education and the Reproduction of Inequality: Understanding Black and Minority Ethnic Attitudes to Learning in Two London Schools’

LinkedIn: Prof William Lez Henry