I was never taught about Black women in British history. So I decided to do something about it

As a second-generation Black British African immigrant woman growing up in Harlesden, north-west London, I was surrounded by people who looked like me. Yet in school I was never taught about Black British history, particularly the role Black women played.

I trained at drama school, but felt the stories I was being asked to perform were not culturally mine, which forced a form of assimilation that angered me, playing spinsters, nurses and maids. At home, all I had to do was look around me to understand that many of the archetypes that exist in mainstream work were not reflective of the Black women I knew.  

In 2017 I watched Guerrilla, a TV drama about a pair of activists in 1970s London who set out to free a political prisoner and wage a resistance movement. It prompted me to read more about the activism of the era, which led me to the Oval Four, the Stockwell Six and the Mangrove Nine. 

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The Nine were a group of British Black activists, who were taken to court for inciting a riot when they were protesting against police harassment and targeting of The Mangrove, a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill. Significantly, Black women such as Barbara Beese and Altheia Jones-LeCointe were at the heart of the movement. I discovered a world of Black British history that centered Black women, a world that I had not been taught, a world that is still barely highlighted on stage and screen.  

Despite growing awareness of these figures, thanks to films such as Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, I felt an urgency to acknowledge and celebrate their legacy. I discovered my youth worker and teaching assistant at school was a child of one of the Mangrove Nine. I continued to research and reach out to people, and became aware of the sensitivities that come with being a descendent of those activists. 

There was reluctance to speak on a personal level about that history – not because I was a random African British girl asking too many questions, but because their activism had come with personal consequences. I was conscious of how much Black trauma is accumulated throughout the history of our people. This brought me to ask: can activism be too costly to a Black person’s humanity? How do we balance the expectation to fight with our desires to live a full life? I wanted to explore these themes further, so chose to move away from telling a strictly biographical story, to a fictionalised historical narrative still set within that era. 

Read more:

• Black History Month: 12 forgotten Black heroes who defined and redefined modern Britain
• The unexplored relationship between Black history and the River Thames
• The extraordinary story of Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to hold a pilot’s licence

Music was my first love and during my exploration of theatre I knew I couldn’t abandon that part of myself. A core component of my work is artivism, for the unheard and unexplored stories of my people. To me it remains the best way to bring a story to a younger audience, allowing for exploration of heavy themes in an entertaining, dynamic way as evidenced so brilliantly by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hugely successful Hamilton. 

For me there had to be one crucial difference: Black Power Desk would be UK history told in a UK voice. I knew I had to bring onboard my long-time collaborator Gerel Falconer (also member of Highrise) to be my co-lyricist and rapperturg – this is a role he has pioneered within the industry, working to take story and dialogue and convert them into bars. He’s a genius – I don’t know many people in the industry who could take reams of dry archive on historical court cases, and deliver a dynamic, urgent – and funny – rap. 

The Ivor Novello award-winning composer Renell Shaw joined us, building on the work of early collaborator Richard Melkonian. We chatted about our favourite influences from the era and the flavours we wanted to bring in from today – calypso, ska, soca, grime, UK rap dancehall – to help us create a musical world that blended 1970s with contemporary sounds. 

From the very beginning we had a live band onstage partly because live music was such a strong component of the sound system era, but also because of the togetherness that comes from having live music. We’re bringing the audience into The Drum, where our show is set – they’re part of the
family, the party, the struggle, the fight and the hope. 

We are nearing opening night and I am watching our brilliant company breathe life into the world we’ve created as a love letter to the community and the African Caribbean legacy. This year when I danced at Notting Hill Carnival I was dancing in protest alongside many who danced before us for the right to be Black and British. 

Celebrating multiculturalism being pillars of this “Great” Britain, because “We dreamed this far… bled so much… mourned too much… fought too hard for all this … To be yours alone… Great Britain!” (Black Power Desk). 

Black Power Desk is at London Brixton House (1-28 September), Warwick Arts Centre (14 October), Manchester Lowry (16-18 October) and Birmingham Hippodrome (22-25 October)

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