SuAndi

CREATIVE JOURNEY TO AFRO SOLO UK SuAndi

When Lesley Johnson donated his parent’s collection of photographs to the Archive,1 neither he nor anyone imagined the tears that would result. Over the course of this project I and almost everyone I have interviewed have felt the flow of tears, the quiet weeping type that leaves you feeling exhausted but somehow surprised and cleansed.

I have always preferred men over women even though I am very lucky to have a strong group of supporting females in my life. I blame my cousin John Tottoh because it is a family fact that before I was born he would clasp my mother’s protruding belly to embrace me and when I was a baby he would dribble in delight over me. Such was his strength that even though he was only a little boy he was not allowed to hold me for fear his love would crush my tiny body. There were nine years between my brother Malcolm and I and I would go to bed and wish that in the morning we would become twins. I so much wanted to spend every moment with my brother who wasn’t in the least bit interested in forming a friendship with his kid sister. That was not to happen for another 30 years and even then he called me his baby and bossed me at every opportunity. Little did he know that I in turn referred to him and my father as ‘my boys’ because I met their every need Even though I was very much a girly-girl in pretty dresses with Shirley Temple2 curls, I would swagger like a boy. I was loud and boisterous. Men definitely held secrets that I wanted to know so I constantly though not necessarily consciously sought out time with the men in my family. My eldest cousin Jimmy (James Tottoh) was truly the story teller of the family and I pleaded with him all the time to record his life, particularly as he was the eldest and he was also the tallest with his red hair and pale freckled skin. I wanted him to share what it was like to be the white (Welsh) son of a Nigerian.

1 Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre and Education Trust 2 www.shirleytemple.com/

Where Jimmy was relaxed and easy going, the others always had an edge of anger. I didn’t understand it then. I understand it much more now. In many ways they, like our fathers, were stranded in a land that rejected them. They lived in a war zone that often only their mothers were aware of.

While Afro Solo UK may be stories from the past of contemporary people it is also of the present – the issues remain live and sharp as the next paragraph illustrates.

I am disturbed from writing this chapter by a knock on the door; it is one of my neighbours. I haven’t lived here long but we greet each other. I have never been sure of her racial identity; her husband is Black, possibly mixed race. I learn today that her mother is of dual heritage Gambian and Irish. She is seeking my advice following an accident her son had in the gym of his primary school. She learns that for at least six weeks he has received his education sat in a corner behind a barricade formed by a bookcase and a piece of cardboard sellotaped into place. She now understands why he has started to show small bruises, the result of the other kids knocking against the bookcase causing it or the cardboard to make contact with him. When he is permitted to sit with the other pupils he is given a stool to perch on, perch because it is smaller and lower than the other chairs. When the teacher addresses him, she calls him ‘Rude Boy’. He is the only black child in the class. Her anger is justified. The teacher has been suspended but no one has given either an apology or explanation. I have already begun to call on friends and colleagues who might be able to assist her. (April 2014)

My journey towards this research has been not just personal as the daughter of a Nigerian but also professional as a poet and writer.

Working with and for National Black Arts Alliance, we formed a partnership with the Los Angeles based Hittite Empire,3 a company of 40 African-American men. When I saw their first production at the ICA4 London

3 http://artists.refuseandresist.org/artists/keithantarmason.html 4 http://www.ica.org.uk/

I was blown away. They were sharing secrets, not all but some. They were speaking their fears of the racists in a public arena so that we the audience might begin to understand what has forced too many Black men into incarceration, domestic violence and alcohol and drug abuse. Let me repeat myself by saying not all Black men but far too many. But even though the African sold into slavery had been genetically raped, none of the Hittites could reflect the life experience of what I call the first generation Africans here in the UK. Nor did the company share their personal hopes and dreams particularly around their families. In 2001 I produced and directed a production involving 147 Black men and youths. ‘In My Father’s House5’ it was a huge success and a credit to all the lead artists, but I wasn’t totally satisfied with it because it never explored the emotional link between fathers and sons. Two years later I single handily brought ‘In My Father’s House 2’ to the stage with 64 performers aged from 60 -14 but this time I led the workshops and wrote the ‘script’ based on their own words. I felt this was far closer to my intentions. The men around me were getting older. Friends of my brother and cousins no longer treated me as a younger nuisance and what’s more, they weren’t just fathers but grandfathers who were beginning to reflect not only on their own lives but those of their parents. The most common topic of memory was meal times. Whenever I rang my cousin Alan just before or after dinner he would say something on the lines that the meal he had made that night was almost as good but not as good as his father’s cooking. All my meals are prepared by the same measure and even though my father feared I would never learn to cook anything more tasty then my mother’s bacon butties and Sunday roast, I did work professionally as a chef and am a popular host but I still cannot hit the cooking skill of my dad. This growth of the African family I explore via a 2005 NBAA commission of the photographer Antony Jones6 for the exhibition ‘Once We Were Africans7’. Jones portraiture captured multi-generational African families as a means to ridicule the assumption that we are ‘newly arrived people’.

5 http://www.blackartists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ imfhevaldocument.pdf 6 http://www.ajphoto.info/ 7 http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/ articles/2005/08/23/230805_once_we_were_africans_feature.shtml

Fou-Fou Youth

My father would take fou-fou Pound, knead it until it formed a cloud in the bowl For we to roll, fingers eager To dip into soup of soft meat overlaying fish Smacking our lips on the tingle of hot pepper His smile of pleasure eased out the memories Of all the good ‘whupping’ that heated our backsides for failing, Saying, doing, something Unacceptable to the rules we never saw written down Now our wives struggle To make again that taste of home And delight out tongues with images of yesterday When our mother’s lap seemed as high as Mandara8

And our father’s voice boomed like the Niger Today we tell our kids to remember They are not just Mancunians9 they are also Nigerians Descendants of Ras Finni He who stood tall and determined for African Unity 1945 And now in 2005 we are still Africans

8 The Mandara Mountains of what is today Cameroon 9 The associated adjective and demonym of Manchester

The Black History Trail10 was an important element of the annual Black History Month celebrations that NABA coordinated under the banner of Acts of Achievement. In the second year, Dominque Tessier persuaded me to host the tour. I wasn’t prepared for the memories it would evoke not just of my city but of my family and the families I had grown up with. A seed of an idea was planted but it would never have taken root without the pictures of Jide and Renee Johnson and the encouragement of Jackie OuldOkojie.

I did not foresee it as an arduous task, after all this was my birth community, but how to begin aside from employing all the usual marketing techniques. The objective was to record for history the stories of 12 Africans who had come to England between the time period of 1920-1960. Even with the HLF funding support secured, I talked through the project with my cousins and Stan Finni and Anthony Oniomo Atta and to be honest neither were confident that there would be any response. This publication contains 40 and then that of my own father.

The format written here seems fairly simple 1. The interview is recorded 2. Then transcribed 3. I then rework the interview into a chapter 4. The chapter is then returned to the interviewee for them to make any necessary amendments.

The reality was that 1. I never learnt how to control the length of each interview as I became as engrossed as the person speaking 2. The project would never have been completed without Sadie Lund’s unbelievable patience in typing up hours of recordings 3. I often spent weeks trying to find the first line to open each life story with 4. Without exception everyone choose to remove something that they hadn’t realised they had shared as they became absorbed in their memories.

10 http://www.actsofachievement.org.uk/blackhistorytrail/ Developed from an idea formulated in 2000 by the AIEUT with Dominique Tessier, Maria Noble of Manchester Education, and NBAA