Is Black British history finally being remembered?

Good morning. In Reni Eddo-Lodge’s seminal book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, she laments that while most Britons can recall the Montgomery bus boycott from the US civil rights movement, few know of the Bristol bus boycott that took place at a similar time. Many remain unaware that Britain had its own civil rights movement.

In 2020, Eddo-Lodge became the first Black British author to top the UK book charts, as readers reached for her work during the global uprising sparked by the killing of George Floyd. Protesters chanted that Black history is British history, demanding a reckoning with the country’s own struggles over race and injustice.

Months earlier, British rapper Dave had performed Black at the Brit Awards, a formative cultural moment for Black gen Z, which was followed by Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology on the BBC. Black Britain was at long last being allowed to assert its own identity.

Five years on, that desire for particularity has deepened even further. But what does this shift reveal about the evolution of Britain’s Black community, and why have Afro-American stories always dominated so much of Black History Month? To explore that, I spoke to Lanre Bakare, the Guardian’s culture correspondent and author of We Were There. That’s after the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘People do not have a clue because they’re not exposed to it’

Black History Month (BHM) was first celebrated in the UK in 1987. It was inspired by the American version, which began in the 1920s (though theirs is marked in February) and for many years Britain imported not only the concept but much of the content too.

“There’s been this emphasis on Black cultural figures and Black stories in the UK – so like the Bristol bus boycott, for example, is something that more people are talking about. That’s our civil-rights story,” Lanre told me.

It is notable that the Tate Modern is hosting the UK’s first major exhibition on modern art in Nigeria and its impact in the UK, while the Somali Week festival, now in its 17th year, expects a record 4,000 attenders, reflecting the growing confidence and reach of the British-Somali community. These events don’t just celebrate Black British culture, they delve deeper into the distinct heritages that make it up.

“As a British-Nigerian, it’s so incredible to see a cultural juggernaut like the Tate Modern hosting an exhibition on Nigerian Modernism. It comes off the back of the hugely successful 2017 show Soul of the Nation, which looked at a range of black artists during the US civil rights movement. Shows like that were a launchpad for what we are seeing today,” Lanre said. “Now the next evolution is: let’s get more specific.”

Fear of erasure

When I asked Lanre where this demand for specificity came from, he pointed to two competing feelings within the Black British community: a growing fear of erasure and a rising sense of confidence.

Let’s start with the first. Among some communities, there is anxiety about a slow fading of identity as Britain’s Black population expands and becomes more settled. Lanre noted that for much of the 20th century, the Black community in the UK was predominantly Caribbean, but this began to shift in the 1990s with the influx of Somali, Nigerian and other African migrants.

Lanre pointed to Carnival as one example, where recent years have seen debates about the importance of keeping Caribbean culture at its core rather than rebranding it simply as “Black British” and losing sight of its West Indian roots.

“We have also seen a massive loss of black cultural and community centres in recent decades in areas predominantly West Indian or Caribbean,” Lanre says, “And that’s something people really feel, because they were kind of centres for their Black culture; a place where you could play dominoes or hang out and talk and read the news, to pray and discuss issues that were going on or organise and protest. Those are slowly slipping away.”

Growing confidence

The other piece of the puzzle is the growing confidence within different Black British communities

“There has been a general shift within Black British culture over the past 15 years, there was this influx of people in the 90s, a lot of Nigerians, a lot of Somalis, who have then established bigger communities. Obviously, there were always Nigerians and Somalis in Britain, but their culture has come through,” Lanre says.

He sees this as a positive development. At the opening of the Nigerian Modernism exhibition at Tate Modern, he noted the overwhelming number of Black British people from different backgrounds who came to show support.

While I too welcome this new focus on heritage and detail, I wonder whether something might be lost if Black Britons retreat into silos. For some, this moment echoes the fading unity of the Pan-African era.

It isn’t a sentiment with which Lanre agrees. “The Pan-African ideas that arrived in the mid-20th century brought people together under this banner: let’s push back against colonialism and imperialism. These are big, important ideas; we shouldn’t dismiss them, but I see the current climate as positive, natural evolution, from that,” he explains.

“I think Black British people understand we’re made up of distinct elements, and a lot of people feel comfortable moving between them.”

Do we need Black History Month

Before we finished our conversation, I asked Lanre if I could play devil’s advocate for a moment. With the explosion of Black British culture and events taking place year-round, what would he say to those who question whether we still need a Black History Month?

His answer was unequivocal: yes. “There’s huge ignorance out there,” he said, pointing to a survey last year that found that more than half of Britons know so little about Black British history that they cannot name a single historical figure.

“When I was touring my book [you can check out future events here], so many people came up after and said, ‘I just didn’t know any of this.’ People do not have a clue because they’re not exposed to it,” Lanre says. Black History Month is an opportunity to change that.

Still, he added, “there’s a cynical side, where big institutions funnel all their Black-history efforts into October, then nothing for the rest of the year. That’s not great.” Even so, while acknowledging the argument that Black history is every month, Lanre insists that October remains an important organising tool.

When I was in primary school, the stories told during BHM didn’t connect to my reality as a black girl in east London. But that’s different for black children today who are growing up in an unprecedented era of cultural visibility and pride. There may still be much more to do, more to learn and enjoy about Black British culture and history, but it is worth pausing to celebrate just how far we have come.

What else we’ve been reading

• For a whole generation, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy is a seminal text – now he is completing his sequel Book of Dust trilogy, completing the story of heroine Lyra Belacqua, making this exclusive extract a must read (or listen). Toby Moses, head of newsletters

• Mazyouna is one of tens of thousands of children in Gaza who sustained life-altering injuries from Israeli airstrikes. Her journey and ongoing recovery in a hospital in the US offers a rare story of hope from the two-year Gaza war. Aamna

• This extraordinary piece of visual journalism traces the changing migration paths of the world’s birds – including beautiful illustrations, birdsong and fascinating flight paths, it’s a twitcher’s dream. (Also, who knew British nightingales stuck to the coast on their travels, while their continental European cousins are happy to venture further afield?!) Toby

• On the centenary of Margaret Thatcher’s birth, Jonathan Liew pays a visit to her home town of Grantham, and a local festival in her honour. What he finds is “a palimpsest; a dirty pint of projected feelings and half-remembered catchphrases, slavish adoration and bogeyman hatred”. Archie

• A new Kathryn Bigelow film is always a treat, and Danny Leigh has interviewed the Oscar-winning director ahead of the release of A House of Dynamite, about a nuclear missile hurtling towards a US city. Toby

Sport

Football | Arsenal secured their first win of the new Women’s Champions League campaign with a 2-0 victory over Benfica in Lisbon.

Motor sport | Mohammed Ben Sulayem will stand unopposed for another term as the president of the FIA, motor sport’s governing body. The last remaining candidate, Tim Mayer, is due to pull out on Friday because of an arcane election rule.

Boxing | Ricky Hatton, the former world champion boxer who died in September, is believed to have killed himself, according to a provisional cause of death given at the opening of his inquest at Stockport coroner’s court. The 46-year-old was found dead in his home on 14 September. News of his death caused an outpouring of grief across the world and thousands of people lined the streets for his funeral.

The front pages

“MPs press top prosecutor over collapse of spy case” is the lead story in the Guardian. “China and MI5 berate Labour over spying case” – that’s the Times, and the Financial Times also headlines on the backlash from the Communist party: “China hits out at ‘smear’ campaign as row deepens over collapsed spy case”. The Mirror has “MI5 chief’s Beijing warning … China is threat every day”. Similar in the i paper: “MI5 chief warns UK of need to confront ‘daily’ China spy threat”, and the Telegraph says “MI5 chief dismayed by China spy fiasco”. The Mail’s line is “Andrew and ‘spy chief’ at heart of China scandal”. The Metro has “Whose side are you on, Sir Keir?” under the strapline “Storm grows over ‘spy’ trial fiasco”. Lastly, football mixed with geopolitics in the Express: “Ban on Israeli fans is ‘a national disgrace’”.

Something for the weekend

Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read, play and listen to right now

TV
Riot Women | ★★★★☆
Sally Wainwright should be prescribed on the NHS as a form of HRT. Riot Women is about a quintet of menopausees facing the question of when all this shite is going to stop and how they are going to manage until it does. First, we meet Beth (Joanna Scanlan), who has decided that the only answer to this question is to take her own life. She only stops trying to see her plan through when her friend Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) rings. “D’you want to be in a rock band?” It is, of course, in Wainwright’s customary manner, perfectly seasoned with humour, from the lightest to the darkest. Like Wainwright’s Happy Valley, it looks at the multitudinous roles women manage, the caring responsibilities that accumulate and how they evolve over a lifetime. Lucy Mangan

Music
Tame Impala: Deadbeat | ★★★★☆
You could read the first Tame Impala album in five years as a treatise on trying to balance success with some kind of normality, the disjunction between the demands of fame and domesticity. On Dracula, Kevin Parker is riddled with self-loathing for enjoying himself like “fucking Pablo Escobar” when he should be at home. On Piece of Heaven, he seems to be in his children’s bedroom, haunted by his absence from their lives. There’s always been a melancholy undertow to his Tame Impala work, but here he sounds more disconsolate than ever. If it’s occasionally confused, it’s also painfully honest and genuinely wracked: you leave it hoping the man who made it is OK. Alexis Petridis

Film
Ballad of a Small Player | ★★★☆☆
The vast emptiness of luxury hotels is part of the mystery and spectacle of Edward Berger’s intriguing if static and overwrought psychological drama-thriller; it is about a desperate chancer and gambling addict, faced with the metaphysical crisis of renewing or annulling his existence by staking everything on a single bet. Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who styles himself “Lord Doyle”, adrift in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau, the Asian Vegas; Tilda Swinton has a frankly preposterous part as Betty, a cartoony woman who is pursuing Doyle and knows his terrible secret back in the UK. It’s a movie of big moods and grand gestures, undercut by the banal inevitability of losing. Peter Bradshaw

Games
Battlefield 6 (PC, PS5, Xbox ) | ★★★★☆
Barely a minute into your first round of the large-scale multiplayer mode, Conquest, you will know you are back in Battlefield at its absolute best. Fighter jets scorch over head, tanks rumble by, the side of a building is obliterated by a rocket-propelled grenade. When you’re caught in a battle in this game, it is exhilarating. The visuals and sound design are astonishingly good. The weak point is the game’s superfluous Campaign mode but, for the most part, Battlefield 6 is a brilliant return to form, a thrilling, almost operatic shooter experience, which manages to combine deafening combat with tactical subtlety. Keith Stuart