Mixed Race Studies

Impact of the forgotten black Europeans

Islington Tribune
London, United Kingdom
2022-05-12

Angela Cobbinah

Scholars, poets, writers, composers… a new book focuses on the wide influence of Africa abroad, writes Angela Cobbinah

ALESSANDRO de Medici, Duke of Florence, virtuoso 18th-century French violinist and composer Joseph Bologne and 1922 world light heavyweight boxing champion Battling Siki from France via Senegal are probably people we know little about, if at all.

They are part of a forgotten European past explored by Olivette Otele in her scholarly book, African Europeans, which travels through time to reveal how trade, war, slavery and colonialism resulted in a black presence in Europe from as far back as the third century.

This is where Otele, professor of the history and memory of slavery at Bristol University, kicks off, telling the story of St Maurice, Egyptian leader of a Roman legion who was famously executed for refusing to crush a Christian revolt in Gaul.

Celebrated as a martyr across Germany, he is clearly represented as an African in a statue at Magdeburg Cathedral and other church iconography.

Black saints and Madonnas appeared across Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, perhaps Otele speculates, to symbolise the transformative power of the Catholic Church in converting those it considered heathen…

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‘In trying to enthuse the students, I definitely enthused myself’

Islington Tribune
London, United Kingdom
2022-02-10

Anna Lamche, Reporter

Hannah Lowe

The recipient of the Costa book of the year for The Kids, Hannah Lowe may have just about achieved her goal, learns Anna Lamche

TRACKING down a physical copy of Hannah Lowe’s The Kids has been difficult since the poet won the Costa Book Award last week, a fact she attributes more to a “national shortage of paper” than to her publisher’s surprise at her unexpected win.

Hannah won the prestigious prize last Tuesday for her book of sonnets, a beautiful and haunting ode to teaching and childhood. Her collection reflects on the junctures between education and the superstructures of history, class and race – the result is a tightly rendered meditation on human experience, spanning birth to death and grief to laughter, often within a matter of lines…

…Born to a “half Jamaican, half Chinese” father, Hannah’s own experience – she recalls being called “white wog” at school in one poem – allows her to relate to the alienation of her own black and diasporan students in the wake of the 7/7 bombings and beyond. The Kids continually demands we consider “the stakes when teachers rarely look like those/they teach”….

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