I'm delighted to report that John Blanke, the African trumpeter at the Tudor court, has now taken his rightful place in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography! He is one of 119 new entries this September. 

As ODNB editor Henry Summerson writes on the OUP blog, Blanke's "fanfares enlivened the early Tudor court and [his] portrait image is the only identifiable likeness of a black person in sixteenth-century British art." 

When I wrote letters to nine historical figures for the Influential Black Londoners exhibition at Sutton House, Hackney for the National Trust last year, Blanke was the only one who didn't have an entry. Now that omission has been rectified. I was delighted to be able to write about this fascinating individual for a reference work that I find so useful in my research. I'm writing about him at greater length in my book, Black Tudors (forthcoming 2016), and he will feature in the Sutton House exhibition again this year, which launches with a Free Family Day this Sunday, and in the talk I'm giving with Michael Ohajuru on the Image and Reality of Black Africans in Renaissance England at Battersea Library at 6.30pm on Tuesday 14th October. 

To read the entry, click here: Blanke, John (fl.1507-1512), royal trumpeter. 

October was the 25th UK Black History Month.  I attended 20 related events over the last 8 weeks, and thought I'd write a blog diary of them in retrospect, to show the diversity of approaches and venues I encountered. As you will see, the diary begins in September and ends in November- showing that Black History Month is well on its way towards becoming Black History Season. But, ultimately, I'd like to see it disappear, because as Andrea Stuart has argued, it will only be a success once it has become redundant, because we have what Tony Warner of Black History Walks calls a "Full- Colour History", all year round. In the interim, we need Black History Month, to educate and campaign for an inclusive approach.  

I've tried to keep the entries brief, but sometimes there was a lot to say. Let me know which ones you'd like me to discuss further in later posts!

1. Sunday 29th September: Influential Black Londoners exhibition opens at National Trust Sutton House

Still on till the end of November, the exhibition opened with a Family Fun Day on the last Sunday of September, with activities and an appearance by John Blanke himself!

I was delighted to see the letters I'd written to 9 Londoners in situ, with great artwork by Jane Porter.

The featured individuals were: John Blanke, fl.1507-1512; Lascars, 17th-20th century; Ignatius Sancho, c.1729-1780; Francis Barber, c.1735-1801; Olaudah Equiano, c.1745-1797; Dido Elizabeth Belle, c.1761-1804; George Bridgetower, 1780-1860; Mary Seacole, 1805-1881; Samuel Coleridge- Taylor, 1875-1912.

Sutton House in Hackney was a great venue to tell the story of Black Londoners as it was built in the Tudor period by Ralph Sadleir, who might have encountered our earliest Black Londoner, John Blanke, at the court of Henry VIII. 

You can read more about the project here. And see more photos here. 

2. Monday 30th September: Othello at the National Theatre

What better play to watch on the eve of Black History Month? I've studied the "Moor of Venice" in the context of my research into Africans in Shakespeare's England but the experience of watching Adrian Lester, Rory Kinnear and Olivia Vinall play out the tragedy of jealousy was something else. My viewing was in part informed by having seen Toni Morrison's excellent Desdemona last year at the Barbican. I felt the modern setting was a distraction, but was most disturbed by the speed at which Othello is transformed from a hero to a violent, irrational murderer in the central scene. Food for thought as I write an article for Literature Compass on '"Making the beast with two backs": interracial relationships in early modern England'- due out next year. 

3. Thursday 10th October: Influential Black Londoners Launch

Back to Sutton House for the official launch event for the exhibition, with some honoured guests- including some of those Influential Black Londoners of the 1980s and 1990s nominated to be included in the exhibition next year. (The eventual winner was Doreen Lawrence). 

This was also my first glimpse of some of the local school children's fantastic artistic responses to the letters. See this photo album for more. 

4. Friday 11th October: Dan Lyndon-Cohen, Black History in the National Curriculum talk at Balham Library

Dan is Head of History at Henry Compton School, Fulham and the creator of www.blackhistory4schools.com. He gave us a useful summary of the complicated political wranglings over the curriculum over the last year and then proceeded to demonstrate how he manages to incorporate Black History into his own teaching. Much of his approach is summarised in this article he wrote for History Workshop. 

There was some strong feelings in the room- some wanted to get rid of Black History Month, others told of the troubles they'd had trying to convince their children's schools to teach Black History.

Nonetheless, Dan's pioneering approach is a model that others should emulate.

5. Wednesday 16th October: Africans in Stuart England 1603-1642 talk at Beauchamp College, Leicester. 

On a rainy Wednesday, I travelled to Leicester to speak to some 6th formers who were "doing" the Stuarts, 1603-1642 for A-Level. This was remarkably close to a paper I had sat back in 2000- and of course had no reference to the black presence in Britain at that time.  
Using plenty of images, I told the story of Africans in Stuart Britain, what they were doing, how they got here and how they were viewed in the eyes of the law. I enjoyed showing them pictures of both Oliver Cromwell and Prince Rupert depicted with black pages, and showing them a different side to history. Hopefully this will be reflected on their Black History Month display board next year- the teacher who invited me later tweeted: "my students want to start a hist soc to talk about things we don't normally do. Think your talk helped :-)."

6. Friday 18th October: Righting Past Wrongs? The Case for and Against Reparations, Senate House

Having read about the latest move by Caricom to seek reparations for slavery, and that they were being advised by London law firm, Leigh Day, who won the Mau Mau case earlier this year, I was very curious to hear Daniel Leader of that firm talk. Also speaking were Sir Ronald Sanders, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and a former Caribbean diplomat (who has blogged about reparations here) and Professor Philip Murphy, Director of the Institute. 
It was agreed that there had always been a strong moral case for reparations, but the question was whether it was possible to bring a legal case.
Daniel Leader spent a long time explaining the details of the Mau Mau case, which was fascinating, but didn't give us much idea how he would go about bringing a case for slavery reparations. Professor Murphy made the point that it would be a bad idea to have politicians feeling morally cleansed, having paid reparations- can a residue of guilt serve as an inoculation against future mistakes? Sir Ronald brought up the worry that pursuing reparations might have a negative impact on the tourism industry on which Caribbean countries are dependent. 
There were some strong feeling in the room that it was wrong that the case for reparations was being judged in a European court by European legal standards. From a historical perspective, I found it interesting that the case was being brought against Britain, France and the Netherlands by their former colonies, but that there is no sign of a similar move by the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies- when the Spanish and Portuguese were the originators of the transatlantic slave trade, with over 13,000 voyages marked with their flags on the 
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages database.
Ultimately the issues involved are too varied to go into here but I will watch the progress of this with interest. There's already been some interesting comment in The Telegraph,  The Economist and the New York Times. 

7. Friday 18th October: My review of Slavery and the British Country House is published in the TLS.

A fascinating collection of essays based on the 2009 conference of the same name, making a big step towards breaking the silence on this subject that has been deafening for too long.

You can read my review here, and find out more about my own research into links between English Heritage properties and Slavery & Abolition here. The book was launched in September at the Little Britain's Memory of Slavery Conference, and has been made available to download for free on the English Heritage website. 

8. Monday 21st October: Image and Reality of Africans in Renaissance England (IRBARE) talk at Sutton House with Michael Ohajuru. 

Miraculously managed to arrive to give this talk on time, having attended my godfather's funeral in Vienna that morning! 
I presented on John Blanke, and the reality of the lives of Africans in England, in contrast to Michael's work on the Black Magi. You can read more about our double act on the IRBARE2013 website.

9. Thursday 24th October: Michael Ohajuru's Hidden in the Collections- Africans in Medieval & Renaissance Art- guided tour of the V&A

Really enjoyed Michael's tour of the V&A which he wrote up on his blog. It's a wonderful place, and the tour showed a different side to the art presented there. Michael's approach showed up some shortcomings in the museum's interpretation of some of the works on show- see his blog on this. I've heard they've already taken steps to rectify the mis-identification of Simon of Cyrene in the Marnhull Orphery (see this page for more accurate info, which has not yet been interpolated into the main listing), but it's even more vital to provide some context to the Tilman Reimenschneider statue to show that St. Maurice was usually depicted as of African origin. Michael has written a persuasive document to this effect here, but really all you need to see is the statue (below, left) alongside other images of the saint (below) and more on Pinterest:

10. Thursday 24th October: Unveiling of Mary Seacole statue maquette at the Royal College of Nursing

Having written about Mary Seacole earlier this year in The Times, it was fantastic to see the unveiling of this 1/4 size maquette of the statue, which is to be placed outside St. Thomas's hospital, striding towards the river and the Houses of Parliament. This will be the first statue erected to commemorate a black woman in Britain. More info on the Memorial Appeal website.

As a historian, I was particularly fascinated by artist Martin Jennings's account of his trip to the Crimea to find the site of Seacole's British Hotel. Using old maps and with the help of the local authorities, he was able to pinpoint the exact place, and found remnants of bottles and pots still lying on the ground. The 15 ft high disc behind Mary in the statue will bear the imprint of stone from a quarry near the site, which has a detonation mark from a WW2 tank. I'll be watching out for the documentary, due to air on ITV in 2015. 

11. Tuesday 29th October: Image and Reality of Africans in Renaissance England talk at SOAS with Michael Ohajuru. 

A second performance of the IRBARE double act, this time at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. Michael explained the appearance of a Black Magus in 1520s Devon while I talked about the realities of life for Africans in Renaissance England, through the experience of John Blanke, the Tudor court trumpeter (who I've now been asked to write an entry on for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Read more on the IRBARE2013 website.

12. Wednesday 30th October: Africans in London, 1500-1640 talk at Queen Mary University London. 
The next night, I rushed to QMUL after a day spent proof-reading the Sunday Times Food List, to talk about Africans in early modern London. I had kindly been recommended to my hosts, the QMUL History Journal, by Professor Kate Lowe, who is doing some fascinating research into sub-Saharan Africans and African objects in Southern Europe between 1440 and 1650, and was involved in the great Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe exhibition I reviewed for History Today earlier this year. The QMUL History Journal had a Black History theme this term (read it online here), with an essay entitled To what extent was ‘race’ used to categorise people as ‘other’ in early modern England? by Joanna Hill, one of Kate Lowe's students, which I look forward to reading. 

13. Thursday 31st October: 100 Great Black Britons at the National Portrait Gallery

in 2003, as a response to the BBC's 100 Greatest Britons poll, in which the most diverse individual was Freddie Mercury (born in Zanzibar), Patrick Vernon launched 100 Great Black Britons, with Mary Seacole eventually topping the list.  Ten years later, the campaign is being re-launched. 
The debate at the NPG posed the questions:  What are the issues, challenges  and impact of black achievement in Britain today? And who should we be calling Great?
Patrice Lawrence of Every Generation Media chaired the debate on black achievement and British identity. The speakers were: Rev Rose Hudson–Wilkin, The House of Commons Speaker's Chaplain; Elizabeth Pears, News Editor, The Voice newspaper; Dean Atta, writer and poet and Patrick Vernon OBE, Founder of 100 Great Black Britons.

Luckily, not everyone arrived on time, so we were treated to an impromptu performance by Dean Atta. I liked the line: "Silence is not golden/Silence is the truth stolen"- seemed to chime with the Mansfield Park Complex of not speaking about slavery I wrote about here. Dean pointed out when he spoke later that all the terms "Great", "Black" and "Briton" are problematic and require definition. We discussed whether the list should expand in size, or include categories, such as Science, Law, Business, Medicine, Young achievers, Parenting, and Regional lists.


The Rev Hudson-Wilkin pointed out how important it is that white people see images of successful black people. In the same way as some people see BHM as a segregation, this Black-only list has the same problem. But, as long as the mainstream doesn't include these stories, we need BHM and 100GBB as campaigning tools. Elizabeth Pears made the point that perhaps the BBC should re-run their poll, to see whether attitudes have changed.  I pointed out in the discussion that, although there's still a long way to go,  there are some signs of progress in mainstream media- such as the increasing inclusion of people of African and Asian origin or descent in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the National Trust's Influential Black Londoners exhibition at Sutton House, Hackney and recent discussion on the BBC Radio 4 Media Show on how to reach black audiences. 

14. Friday 1st November: Black History's Future, Islington 

This event, organised by Everyvoice, brought together some key decision-makers from Islington Council with a great panel of speakers to debate the future of BHM. 
The conference sought to address the question: how do we reach a place where people’s histories are not marginalised, so there will be no need for Black History Month? How do we ensure that diversity is integrated in mainstream education and celebrations all year round?
 I had in mind the thought-provoking article I'd read by Andrea Stuart in the Guardian the day before on the same subject. I blogged my response to the article here.

The speakers were so engaging that no one seemed to mind that the event overrun its timetable. One of the most impressive images I saw was the map above that Patricia Lamour showed us that the African continent is larger than the United States, China and India put together. Dr. Robin Whitburn and Abdullahi Mohamud spoke about their Doing Justice to History project, which is designed to explode two false premises: 1) Black people did not play a significant role in British life before 1948; 2) Multiculturalism doesn't work. They used some fascinating case studies to prove their point, such as the story of Somali sailor Mahmood Hussein Mattan, who was unjustly hung in 1952.  Tony Warner, Director of Black History Walks showed us how Black History is everywhere when you know how to look,  and reminded us that the BFI has a regular African Odysseys  film programme, as well as showing us a very disturbing video of the black doll/white doll experiment. Kandace Chimbiri talked about her Black History books for children, including one to accompany the recent Origins of the Afro Comb exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. History teacher Martin Spafford summarised the latest curriculum wrangling and explained how Black History could still be taught within the new framework, sharing stories such as the North African "Ivory Bangle Lady" who lived in Roman York and the Indian Hockey team that beat Germany in the 1936 Olympics, which can easily be incorporated into study of "The Romans" or "Nazi Germany". 

The ensuing discussion was passionate and varied. It was mostly agreed that BHM needs to continue for now, as a campaigning tool, a stepping stone to where we'd like to be, with a "Full-colour" history. 

15. Wednesday 5th November: Graeme Evelyn's Call and Responses: Odyssey of the Moor at Kensington Palace

Was lucky enough to be invited to a private view, where Graeme spoke about the piece. You can see it at Kensington Palace until 6th January. 

The work is a contemporary response to John van Nost’s Bust of the Moor – a marble sculpture commissioned by King William III in 1688/1689. 

Evelyn places the bust within a gilded cage, but with its doors flung open to capture the view over Kensington Gardens, creating for the Moor a dream of self-determination and freedom. The inside of the cage is circled with a series of tiles telling an imagined story of the Moor's life, using the premise that this man had read Homer's Odyssey and seen parallels. 

Evelyn's earlier work, Reconciliation Reredos, an altarpiece in Bristol confronts the fact that the church, St Stephen’s, blessed every ship that left the port, including every slaver that left the city harbour for Africa to trade for enslaved people during the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Evelyn's work is part of a wider trend in which heritage institutions seeks to commission the work of black artists. Other temporary installations, e.g. Yinka Shonibare's Mrs Oswald and Colonel Tarleton Shooting (2007) for Scratch the Surface at the National Gallery and his current exhibition in Greenwich. This was discussed by 
Lubaina Himid, Joy Gregory and Sokari Douglas Camp  on the artists  in conversation panel at the Little Britain's Memory of Slavery conference at UCL in September.

Call and Responses: Odyssey of the Moor poses many unanswered questions about Africans in late 17th Century England and Holland. Evelyn has thrown down the gauntlet to historians to answer some of these questions. For example, at it's base, the installation incorporates a contemporary report of William of Orange marching into Exeter in 1688 with: "200 Blacks brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America, Imbroyder'd Caps lin'd with white Fur, and Plumes of white Feathers, to attend the Horfe."  Evelyn hopes the piece will inspire historians to research the context of this, and what impact the advent of a Dutch monarch had on the history of Africans living in England and the history of English involvement in the slave trade. 

The work has already inspired a response by Delia Jarrett-Macauley, who won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her debut novel, 'Moses, Citizen and Me' and is currently a Fellow in English at the University of Warwick.

You can listen to the music Graeme Evelyn listened to while creating the work here:  ODYSSEY of the MOOR art 2013   

16. Wednesday 5th November: Making Freedom exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society

On until Sat 21st December, this important exhibition marks the 175th anniversary of the emancipation of nearly 1 million Africans in the Caribbean. This is taking the date of freedom as 1838, when indentured labour ended, as opposed to 1834, when slavery was officially abolished.

In front of a large map of the Caribbean created specially, to show all the islands and their capitals, Burt Caesar quoted Claude McKay's If We Must Die (1919), which sets the tone for this exhibition's tale of constant resistance, "Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!".  

Sir Keithlyn Smith, author of To Shoot Hard Labour told the story of his grandfather's great grandmother, Mother Rachel's quest to be reunited with her daughter Minty in 1838. You can listen to the story here.  Benjamin Zephaniah performed his powerful poem White Comedy and shared some of his own experiences of racism. He pointed out how important this exhibition is, to dispel the myth that "slaves were given freedom by the white man". In fact, their constant resistance and rebellion made the slave system increasingly hard to sustain. Toussaint L'Ouverture's  uprsing in Haiti in 1791, leading to the declaration of independence in 1804 was the most successful, but not an isolated occurrence. The exhibition tells the stories of other attempts to make freedom- in Barbados in 1816, Guyana in 1823 and in Jamaica in 1832. 

This exhibition put the agency back in African hands and tells the other side of the story we heard in 2007. A must -see! And there's now talk of putting it on at the House of Commons next year!

17. Thursday 6th November: Black People in Tudor England and Inclusive Curriculum  event at the House of Commons

There was an impressive crowd gathered in Committee Room 11 of the House of Commons to hear Onyeka talk about his new book, Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, their presence, status and origins, published by Narrative Eye and discuss how to get a more inclusive history curriculum with Stella Creasy MP, Chi Onwurah MP, Cllr Lester Holloway, and Tony Warner of Black History Walks.

Onyeka gave a passionate and gripping speech about his research- he has been working on the subject since 1991. When he first set out to look into the history of Tudor Africans, people told him he was wasting his time, that he would find nothing. I heard similar opinions when I started my research on the subject in 2004. I was very pleased to get my hands on a copy of his book, for although I've known Onyeka for years, this was the first time I'd been able to read his work at greater length.

It was fantastic to see the political support for the subject from Stella Creasy, Chi Onwurah and Lester Holloway. I'm looking forward to reading the book and engaging further on the challenge it poses to politicians and educators. 

18. Friday 8th November: Africans in Urban Britain, 1500-1640, talk at the University of Leicester

Went up to Leicester again, this time to talk about Africans in Urban Britain, 1500-1640 at the University's Centre for Urban History. I told some stories about the lives of Africans in 16th and 17th century England and Scotland's ports and cities, explaining how they arrived in Britain, what occupations and relationships they found in the city and how they were treated by the church, the law courts and the other inhabitants of urban Britain. This provoked a lively debate and I also learned about my host Dr Kidambi 's fascinating research into the All India Cricket Team's 1911 tour of England. 

19. Friday 8th November: Vincent Carretta on Ignatius Sancho: Britain's First African Man of Letters at the British Library

I rushed back from Leicester to catch expert Vincent Carretta talking about Ignatius Sancho, one of the Influential Black Londoners I had written to at Sutton House. 

The British Library has recently acquired 13 of Sancho’s signed letters to his friend and patron William Stevenson, plus two to his father the Rev. Seth Ellis Stevenson.  These are the only letters by Sancho that are known to survive.
The British Library's Untold Lives has an interesting blog post on this, but, as Carretta himself remarked, it's a great pity Sancho does not feature in the Georgians Revealed exhibition. 

Carretta provided us with a handout with quotes from them and Sancho's other correspondence and proceeded to explain the significance of the new acquisition in context. One thing that makes these letters really significant is that they can now be studied alongside the printed text of 1782, revealing identities obscured and also proving beyond any doubt that Sancho wrote the letters himself. For this was questioned by none other than Thomas Jefferson who, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) grudgingly admitted  him "to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment", but went on to say "This criticism supposes the letters published under his name to be genuine, and to have received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be of easy investigation." The acquisition of the Stephenson archive has made this investigation much easier and will allow scholars to defend Sancho from this underhand attack. 

20. Tuesday 19th November: Image and Reality of Africans in Renaissance England talk at Greenwich University with Michael Ohajuru. 

A third outing for IRBARE, this time in Greenwich, the location of the old royal palace, built by Henry VII on the site of today’s Old Royal Naval College, where John Blanke would have worked.  You can read more about the presentation on the IRBARE2013 website. In the light of discussion of Black History Month's future, it's interesting to note that this talk took place in the second half of November, as part of the Greenwich Student Union's Black History Week (see poster). Could we be making a transition to a Black History Season?

Black History 365...

For me, this is really an artificial end, because I seek out events like these all year round! Check my Talks page for details of my upcoming talks, and if there isn't one near you, invite me to your local school, university, library or history society!

There's a mystery man in red on display in the In Fine Style, the Tudor and Stuart Fashion exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, on til 6th October. Well actually, there's two. One has a whole room devoted to him. The other is not even mentioned in the interpretation, which, both on the wall in the gallery and on p.258 of the catalogue, reads: "Anne of Denmark is shown alongside her horse and hounds." The Queen's animals seem to be of more interest to the curators than this man in red. The trend continues on the Royal Collection website, where a later copy of the painting by Jan Van Belcamp is described as "without the horse, landscape background and fewer dogs." It is also bereft of the man in red. 

It seems odd that such a finely dressed young man should be entirely overlooked in an exhibition devoted to fashion. The colour of his garment is one that is associated with royalty elsewhere in the exhibition, the lace of his collar is very fine, and the artist has lovingly rendered the red ribbon of  his shoe. And yet somehow, he has disappeared into the background of Paul Van Somer's painting, unworthy of mention.

I was so excited to finally see this painting in the flesh, after having written about it and used it to illustrate lectures. The silence surrounding Anne of Denmark's African groom was deafening for me. 


I took  some comfort in the fact that there was no mention of the groom in the adjoining painting of Prince Henry either. Indeed the exhibition had nothing to say on the subject of servants' fashion. 

Of course my instinctive reaction was to immediately start telling the old man standing next to me all about the black presence in Stuart Britain, then to take lots of pictures (it was kind of the Royal Collection to allow photography) with this blog in mind. 

So, what ought the curators have mentioned about this other man in red? Well, here it's my turn to go red, as I don't know his name, or anything else about his life. But I can provide you with some compelling context!

We know that there were Africans working in royal and aristocratic stables across Europe. A painting of c.1630-2 by Daniel Mytens shows an African groom bringing Charles I and Henrietta Maria their horses. 

We know from household and treasurer's accounts that Anne of Denmark had an African in her household back in Edinburgh, c.1590-94. She also commissioned and performed with her ladies in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness in 1605 and its sequel, the Masque of Beauty (1606), in which the black daughters of Niger seek "beauty" and become white, thanks to the rays of the British sun (which represented King James).

Going back to the painting, I was curious about the palace in the background, as this might be some clue to where the man in red lived. I learnt that this was Oatlands Palace, which James I granted to his wife in 1611. She made many improvements, including: "a new brick wall to compass and enclose her majesties vineyard at Otelands and the long privy walle addoiyninge to the same ass in levellinge the grene above the vineyarde being trenched very deep to kill the ferne rootes and making a Silkewormehouse ... seates of wainscott to stande in the vineyard ... A false dove for the privy walke..." The only part of the palace that remains today is a c.1545 entrance gate and part of the walls, swamped by suburban housing in Elmbridge, Surrey. 

So, perhaps we can have a Google Art Talk on this equally enigmatic man in red, or even better a whole exhibition devoted to the many Africans in British Portraits?

Last year Michael Ohajuru and I both spoke at an event at the British Library about Blacks in Renaissance Britain. He spoke about images of the Black Magi and other Africans in the art of the period, while I focused on a particular case in which 135 Africans had spent a week in Devon in October 1590. You can read my blog on the event here. 

The contrast between the image and the reality of the Black African experience really struck us, and so this year, we've decided to join forces during Black History Month in October to present our thoughts on The Image and Reality of Black Africans in Renaissance England, which we've called IRBARE for short. 
We've put together a website, Facebook page and Twitter account to promote this, so please do check those out/Like/Follow to hear more. Michael's already uploading lots of fascinating images, and I will be doing my best to keep up with some "reality checks"! And if you know any history societies, universities or other institutions who would like to book us for a Black History Month event, send them our way! To book, contact me or email IRBARE2013.

Hope to see you at one of our IRBARE events this October!

I really enjoyed my visit to the Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum last week: hurry and see it before it shuts on 25th November! Thought I'd do a little round-up of the exhibits related to Africans in Shakespeare's Britain for you... Staging Africa in 13 objects, if you will.  I've listed the objects in the order you would encounter them in the exhibition, with some help from the excellent exhibition catalogue. Some of the links are obvious, others a little more obscure!

1. Africans in Shakespeare's London

One of the first things you see when you enter the exhibition is this amazing map of  London, created by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1647 (so technically a while after Shakespeare died). It shows the Globe, and also lots of churches, such as St. Olave Tooley Street, shown here across the Thames from the Tower.  St. Olave's was the parish where Reasonable Blackman, a silkweaver, and his family lived in the 1590s and ‘Constantyn a negare’ was buried  on 5 November 1605. Many of the other churches marked on the map have similar entries in their parish registers...

2. Bayning's ewer?

This Iznik Turkish ceramic ewer, made in London in 1597-8, may have been made for Paul Bayning, a prominent Levant merchant. What is not revealed in the exhibition is that Baning was also a huge sponsor of privateering voyages and had at least five Africans in his household. In 1593 ‘three maids, blackamores’, are recorded as lodging in his house. In March 1602 ‘Julyane A blackamore servant Wyth Mr Alldermanne Bannying of the age of 22 yeares’ was christened at St. Mary Bothaw. In 1609, ‘Abell a Blackamor’ appeared before the Governors of the Bridewell, ‘his M[aste]r Paul Bannyinge present’, and Bayning’s 1616 will made provision for the education of ‘Anthony my negro’. 

3. African horn

This horn was carved in the Calabar region (modern Nigeria) in the 1500s, then found its way to England, where in 1599 it was recarved as a drinking cup, and inscribed:

 "Drinke you this and thinke no scorne
   Although the cup be much like a horn."

It was later further adapted to be an oil lamp. This strange object has travelled a long way, through many incarnations. It demonstrates the existence of trading links with Africa in Shakespeare's time, which were increasingly regular from the 1550s.   Richard Hakluyt chronicled many of these early voyages in his Principall Navigations. 

4. Portrait of the Moroccan ambassador

Abd-al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, portrayed here, led an embassy to the court of the 'sultana Isabel' (Elizabeth I) in 1600, but was in fact only one of a series of such ambassadors. Moroccan envoys also visited London in 1551 and 1589. The shared enemy was Spain, but the proposed alliance never amounted to much.  A clue to the problems can be found in the letter John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton on 15 October 1600:

"The Barbarians take theyre leave sometime this week, to goe homeward for our merchants nor mariners will not carry them into Turkie, because they thinck it is a matter odious and scandalous to the world to be friendlie or familiar with Infidells but yet yt is no small honour to us that nations so far removed and every way different shold meet here to admire the glory and magnificence of our Queen of Saba [Sheba]." 

5. Sir Henry Unton's masque

The unusual biographical portrait of Sir Henry Unton, painted posthumously for his widow c.1596 shows this masque of Mercury and Diana being performed at his wedding in 1572. The procession behind these main characters consists of small, childlike black and white figures, which have been identified as Cupids. The black figures are of interest as they are a rare visual depiction of the trend for "counterfeit blackamoors" in pageantry and masques. For example, in 1566, on the occasion of the baptism of the future James VI and I, six shillings was laid out from the royal coffers for: ‘thre lamis skynnis quhairof was maid four bonnets of fals hair to the saidis mores’- so four Scots wore lamb's wool wigs to imitate African hair as part of their costumes.  Why were these "Masques of Moors" so popular in the sixteenth century? 

6. Sir Francis Drake

This German broadside  from the late 1580s celebrates Drake as a Protestant hero, freedom-fighter and scourge of the Catholic Spanish. 
The catalogue speaks of his circumnavigation and raids on the Spanish Caribbean, but doesn't mention his many encounters with Africans on those voyages (which I blogged about here) or the fact that some of them returned to England with him. 

7. Titus Andronicus

This drawing, c. 1594 by Henry Peacham illustrates Titus Andronicus. It shows that the character of Aaron, described as a 'moor' is certainly thought of as black, not merely 'tawny'. The actor is most likely an Englishman, in costume.  A good book on this (which in fact uses this image on its cover) is V.M. Vaughan's Performing Blackness on English Stages.

8. Cleopatra
Cleopatra was of course an African Queen, though some people seem to forget Egypt is in Africa, a complaint I've heard from Tony Walker, who shows people Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment  on his Black History Walks. Shakespeare at least imagined Cleopatra as having dark skin.  He describes her as having a ‘tawny front’ (Antony and Cleopatra, I. i. 4-6) and being 'with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black' (I. v. 29). This identity is not always clear in the various images of the Egyptian queen in the British Museum's collection.  The artists seem to have been more interested in portraying her death by snake venom- most including an asp biting her bared bosom. My favourite was the set of French playing cards (shown left): Le Jeu des Reynes Renommées (The Game of Famous Queens) by Stephano della Bella (1644). The gift shop really missed a trick by not stocking a replica pack! 

9. Portrait of an African Man

This amazing portrait was painted by Jan Jansz. Mostaert c. 1525-30. He worked at the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, in Mechelen, near Antwerp. Unfortunately, we know very little about the man in this painting. We don't even know his name. But he has all the trappings of a high-ranking courtier. Of special significance is the badge in his hat, which has been identified as a badge given to pilgrims who had visited the Madonna of Hal, a shrine associated with the Valois and Hapsburgs.  The British Museum has one in its collection (below, right). This sends a clear message that this man, like Othello (II, iii, 307) and at least 67 Africans in Britain, 1500-1640, was a baptised Christian. Curiously, the Madonna of Hal (below, left) is a Black Madonna, an ambiguous symbol, but one that seems strangely appropriate here!  

10. Allegorical African

This illustration of a commission granted to Tommaso Morosini dalla Sbarra (1546-1622), a Venetian patrician, is sadly not a portrait, but part of an allegory  of Truth and Justice that has yet to be fully explained. It's suggested that the black figure wearing the family's heraldic colours of gold and blue may be a pun on the 'Moro' (Moor in Italian) of 'Morosini'. So in some ways, this is a more artistic development of the Moor's heads found on heraldic coats of arms across Europe, and even in the arms of the current Pope, Benedict XVI.

11. Aesthetic of blackness
Black Africans appeared in decorative works of art, from cameos, like this one showing an African woman, made c.1600 in Prague or North Italy (now set in a modern gold ring), to sculptures, such as this marble, classically-inspired bust made by Nicholas Cordier in Rome (below, left), and even the splendid gilt-silver cup made by  leading Nuremberg goldsmith,Christoph Jamnitzer in about 1602 (below, right).  This cup may in fact have been a sports trophy at a Saxon court tournament to celebrate Christian II's wedding to Hedvig of Denmark, which makes me think of the Tournament of the Black Lady held at the court of James IV of Scotland a hundred years before, described in William Dunbar's poem, Ane Blak Moir. 

12. Sycorax and Circe
Shakespeare's ‘damned witch Sycorax’, mother to Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-11), was a native of Algiers. Her name may have been inspired by Circe, the witch who turned Odysseus's men into swine on her Greek island.

Interestingly, this Greek pot shows Circe as a black African woman.  In the Tempest, Sycorax is said to have been: 
'hither [to the island] brought with child,
And here was left by th’sailors.’ (I. ii. 318-20)

Her fate is not entirely fictional. On his circumnavigation voyage of 1577-80, Drake abandoned a heavily pregnant African woman on Crab Island, Indonesia, an action for which he 'purchased much blame' at the time, but not in later legend.

13. A Daughter of Niger

On 6 January (Twelfth Night) 1605, Ben Jonson's Masque of Blacknesse was performed at the Old Banqueting House before the court of James I and Anne of Denmark.  This sketch by architect and scenery-builder extraordinaire Inigo Jones shows the costume of one of the masquers, to be dressed as a 'Daughter of Niger'. This performance and its sequel, the Masque of Beauty (1606), in which the Queen and her ladies themselves blacked up to play the daughters of Niger, who seek beauty and become white thanks to the rays of the British sun (which represented King James) were perhaps the most sophisticated expression of  an ongoing interest in 'Masques of Moors' (see no.5, above).   

So, as you can see, there are plenty of fascinating things in the Shakespeare exhibition that illuminate the history of Africans in Early Modern Britain and Europe. I'd seen pictures of some of these things in books, and it was a thrill to see them for real. Others were new, and so all the more intriguing. I hope you get the chance to see them before 25th November- and even better, to see them alongside so many other relics of that long-ago time, all lovingly linked to a snippet of Shakespearean verse. And as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I will leave you with these words: 

"I speak of Africa and golden joys" (Henry IV, Part 2: V, iii, 101)

As Black History Month drew to a close, I found myself addressing the Department for Education. My 'lunchtime seminar' talk  was called " Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain: before the slave trade." (I hastened to add that I meant before the English really got going at the slave trade, not before the Portuguese and Spanish slave trade, and pointed out that John Hawkins' voyages in the 1560s were something of an aberration, which were not to be repeated for some 70 years). 

A few days before my talk, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah had been quoted  by the BBC as saying that black and Asian pupils are turned off history because they are told only "half the story" in British schools.

The same BBC article reported that Education Secretary Michael Gove "has said schools should focus on a traditional narrative of British history in response to concerns it had become too politically correct [and]... that the current approach to history denies 'children the opportunity to hear our island story', and... this has to change."

Continue reading the main story... the current approach to history denies "children the opportunity to hear our island story", and this has to change."The phrase "our island story"  jumped out at me because it reminded me of an old book I'd grown up with.  Our Island Story is a nostalgic, patriotic storybook written in Australia in 1905  by Henrietta E. Marshall. This Edwardian tome was reprinted in 2005 by the think-tank Civitas, with the aim to send a free copy to each of the UK's primary schools. David Cameron told the RSC it was his favourite childhood book in 2010, and that it "really captured [his] imagination and ... nurtured [his] interest in the history of our great nation.”  But what stories does this book tell? And are they really only "half the story"?

Take Sir Francis Drake, for example. A classic Elizabethan hero, he appears of course in Our Island Story, where Marshall describes him as "very bold and daring", and tells the story of the singeing of the King of Spain's beard, and him refusing to face the Armada before he'd finished his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe. But my research has shown me another side of Drake, that is writ large upon the Drake Jewel (above, a present from the Queen in 1588, which Drake wore  hanging from his belt in this 1591 portrait) but that is not included in Marshall's version of events. 

The bust of an African man on the Drake jewel has been interpreted as a symbol of Drake's alliance with the Cimaroons.  These were the Africans who had runaway from the Spanish who had enslaved them and set up their own communities. Their local knowledge was invaluable to Drake when he allied with them to capture the Spanish silver train in Panama in 1573.  One of these Cimaroons, a man named Diego, returned to Plymouth with Drake and accompanied him on his circumnavigation voyage of 1577-80. Unfortunately he died near the Moluccas, from wounds received from the hostile inhabitants of Mocha Isle, off the coast of Chile. 

Diego was not the only African onboard. We know of at least three more, one of which, a woman named either Francesca or Maria, who was abandoned, heavily pregnant, on Crab Island, Indonesia. William Camden, the first historian of Elizabeth I's reign, reported in his Annales that Drake "purchased much blame…for having most inhumanely exposed in an island that negro or blackamore maid who had been gotten with child in his ship.” However this, and other stories of Africans who encountered Drake, seem to have disappeared from popular record. 

Drake's cousin, John Hawkins doesn't appear in Our Island Story at all. Drake may well have accompanied him on some of his slaving voyages in the 1560s. And later voyages that Drake made to the Caribbean, for example his raid of 1585-6, also resulted in Africans coming to England. 

The idea of "Our Island Story" needs to be re-imagined. To be 'insular' can mean to be cut off from the rest of the world. But the histories of most islands, from Crab and Mocha isles, mentioned here, to the Island of Britain, are stories of comings and goings, of invaders and immigrants.  The story of our island is one of these. And we need to tell our children the whole story, and to do so we need to re-tell it for our time and not rely on the imaginings of an Edwardian patriot, however picturesque. 

Last Tuesday, I headed for Peckham Library to give a talk billed as "African musicians and Renaissance royal celebrations".  This consisted of an exploration of what is known of the lives of John Blanke, pictured here playing at the Westminster Tournament of 1511, and the 'More taubronar', a drummer at the court of James IV of Scotland in the early 1500s. 

The  Southwark Council theme for this year's Black History Month was "Celebration" and in line with that, I showed the role these musicians played in royal celebrations.

 John Blanke performed at Henry VIII's coronation in 1509, and in 1511 at the Westminster Tournament, a huge celebration organised in honour of the new prince, Henry. This child was born to Katherine of Aragon on 1st January 1511, but sadly died only ten days after the Tournament in February. I wonder if the 60 ft long Tournament Roll, (which depicts John Blanke twice, in the procession of people coming to and from the jousting event shown in the centre), was completed in that brief time, or whether they carried on painting it after the prince's death? The Royal Exchequer accounts show that Blanke was paid ten times his usual wage for the Tournament, so he had cause for celebration too! And the following year, he had a personal celebration, as we know he married in 1512 and that Henry VIII gave him a wedding present!

Up in Scotland, we find the More taubronar playing alongside four Italian minstrels at the court of James IV.  He might have sounded something like this. They travelled around Scotland with the court- and at one point the king bought him his own horse. Not just a drummer, the taubronar was also a skilled choreographer who devised a dance to celebrate Shrove Tuesday in 1505.  He was also paid wages and  was married, with a child. Though he seems to have been injured, possibly fatally in 1506: the royal payments to a doctor survive. Nor was he the only African at the Scottish court at that time- but that's another story.

Both men are part of a much longer tradition of black musicians in European royal courts- going back to at least 1194 when Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI was preceded by black trumpeters in his entry  into Palermo, Sicily (see below).  Valued for their skill and paid wages, we can still only guess at the daily details of these men's lives.

You can read more about Africans at European courts here.

Just wanted to draw your attention to this great resource.  Kathy is the expert on Africans in the period following mine, and has amassed a huge database of references to their lives here in Britain. This is a recording of her speaking at the National Archives last year. You can download it here. 

The talk  is described  on the site as follows:

"What was life like for the ‘average’ black person in England before the 20th century? Most were quietly getting on with their lives, seeking employment, getting married and raising families. It takes a lot of work to uncover their life histories because there was no legal discrimination against these individuals. Glimpses into their lives can be found buried in The National Archives’ vast collection, which reveals unexpected stories. Dr Chater’s talk challenges some commonly held assumptions that have been made about the lives of black Britons during the period of the British slave trade. Dr Kathleen Chater is an independent historian and writer. Her doctoral thesis is published as Untold Histories: Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c. 1660-1807. She came to the history of Black British people through genealogy and has written books and articles on this subject. This talk was part of our diversity week event in November, highlighting the diversity of The National Archives’ collection." 

Kathy has also written a book on the subject which I've illustrated above, and is giving a talk about Black People at the Old Bailey in Islington next month, which looks really interesting.  The records of the Old Bailey are available online and are a fascinating source of information on everyday life from 1674-1913, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.  So once you've listened to Kathy, you can look up some of the cases for yourself!