Black Men In The Community presents: Women's Event 29th March 2013

Black Men in the Community (BMITC) in association with Yaa Asentewaa presents:

Celebrating Our Women’s Advancement and Leadership with Angie Le Mar

Good Friday, 29^th March 2013, 6:00 pm – 11:00 pm

The Tabernacle, 34-35 Powis Square, London W11

Overview of the BMITC movement

The BMITC movement is a partnership of organisations, networks and individuals working together to support the advancement of Black men and their families that are disproportionately impacted by the current challenging, deteriorating economic climate.

BMITC also aims to brings its members and the wider community together at regular events across the UK, where families, individuals and organisations can come together to share knowledge, ideas, resources and strategies that will strengthen and support the advancement of black men, women, families and the wider community as a whole.

BMITC’s Mission

To provide high calibre leadership and specialist support that will lead to the development of sustainable partnerships between new and existing Black led groups as part of a broader response to the immense financial opportunities and challenges facing Black men and their families in the UK.

BMITC’s Women’s event – Celebrating Our Women’s Advancement and Leadership,

Good Friday, 29^th March 2013

Event Partners and host

·         BMITC’s 2013 women’s event partner, Yaa Asantewaa, owned by Notting Hill’s Carnival Village Trust, Britain’s oldest black community arts and cultural organisations.  It’s named by royal assent, after the warrior queen mother who led the Asante rebellion in Ghana against British colonialism in 1900s.

·         The Tabernacle venue where the women’s event is taking place, is also owned by the Carnival Village Trust.

·         Angie Le Mar, the community’s beloved comedienne, playwright, producer and presenter will host the inspiring and empowering panel discussion  segment of the event.

Aims of the event

·         To host a fun evening of edutainment that will inspire and empower black women within the community

·         To address serious issues which affect the community, in a positive, progressive, solution-focused way.

·         Where women are revered and celebrated with opportunities connect with other forward thinking individuals and organisations

·         For BMITC to Build a strong network and raise funds that will go directly to actions helping girls and young women who have been sexually abused as a result of youth violence.

Key messages

·         This is the first gala evening event that BMITC has organised and it is dedicated to women

·         BMITC honours women during International women’s Month, in recognition of their advancement, leadership and invaluable contribution to the community.

·         BMITC are taking action towards preventing violence against young girls and women.

Themes

·         Celebrating women’s advancement and Leadership

§  A panel comprising of leading and advancing women from the public and private sectors, faith sector, The Arts, media and human rights spheres.

§  The panel includes young women who have been accoladed as Future Leaders 2013

§  Entertainment from talented up and coming female performers in music and spoken word

·         Making a stand against domestic violence and sexual exploitation of women and young girls

·         Celebrating Women’s Financial power

·         Promoting Healthy relationships

Event highlights

·         A powerful and diverse line up of leading and advancing women

·         Live Entertainment from talented up and coming female performers

·         DJs musically entertaining attendees whilst they network and enjoy Easter Caribbean canapés

·         Small businesses and start-ups promoting their products and services

·         Giveaway bags for each attendee

·         “Pamper and Spoil me” gift bags for first 50 adult ticket purchasers

Opportunities for attendees

·         To connect  with a diverse range of dynamic, strategic and forward looking people

·         To promote talents, businesses and to discuss and address issues that affect women within the community

·         To hear inspirational stories and messages and solutions

·         An opportunity to join the BMITC movement

·         An opportunity to keep updated with BMITC’s activities and initiatives

Speakers’ and Entertainers’ Briefing

Event Programme

Doors Open & Bar                                                                            6:00 pm

Caribbean Canapé Reception and Music                                         6:15 pm - 7:15 pm

Entertaining Panel Discussion and Q&A                                          7:15 pm - 8:45 pm

Live Soul, Motown, Reggae and Poetry                                            8:45 pm - 9:30 pm

Networking, Music and Stalls                                                           9:30 pm - 11:00 pm

Panel and Entertainment running order

Entertaining Panel Discussion and Q&A                                  7:15 pm - 8:45 pm

hosted by Angie Le Mar

Spoken word by Neelofor followed by live                                 8:45 pm – 9:30pm

music from The Top Level Band and Taymah

DJ Divine and Marc Anthony                                                      9:30 pm –   11:00pm                                 playing background music whilst

attendees network and browse stalls

The speakers and entertainers briefing will take place at 6:30pm for no more than 15 minutes, where Angie Le Mar will talk though the format of the panel discussion and introducing the entertainment segment.

Please ask for Patricia Lamore or Calynda Henderson upon arrival. You will be escorted  to where the briefing will take place.

Biographies:

Angie Le Mar

Comedienne, actress, writer, producer, wife, mother and social commentator, Angie Le Mar is a versatile dynamo beloved by audiences young and old, male and female, both at home in the UK and abroad. 

Born in Lewisham, London of Jamaican parentage, Angie grew up with four older brothers. She has spoken openly about her difficult experiences at school, the root of which was her then undiagnosed dyslexia.  However, those school day difficulties did not prevent her from racking up lists of accomplishments too numerous to recall in their entirety.

Angie was the first Black British performer to appear at Harlem's Apollo Theatre and had the first ever sell out show by a female black comedian in London's West End. Her TV appearances include the BBC’s The Real McCoy and Channel 4’s Get Up, Stand Up, and she presented The Saturday Morning Show on Choice FM. She was also a commentator on Grumpy Old Women in 2005 and made her first appearance on ITV’s Loose Women in February 2011.  In October 2011, she opened at the Soho Theatre in a one-woman show called “In My Shoes”; a show she wrote. And, most recently, she wrote and produced a new sit-com called “The Ryan Sisters”, four episodes of which aired online in January and is scheduled to go into full production for television this summer. She hosts a new day time talk show, Ladies Talk on Vox Africa.

Socially conscious and community minded, Angie set up a strand within her production company (Straight To Audience Productions), called Straight To Audience Youth (STA-Youth) using it to develop young actors, writers and producers and to reach younger audiences through shows and activities with which they will identify in theatre productions, workshops and outreach.

Deservedly called Britain’s First Lady of Black Comedy, Angie has won numerous awards, including several Black Entertainment Comedy Awards and the prestigious EFBWO from the European Federation of Black Women in Business.  She has been voted one of Britain’s 100 Great Black Britons, one of the New Nation Newspaper’s Top 50 Black Powerful Woman and Pride Magazine’s included her as someone to look out for on their Top 50 UK Talent list. Angie also recently received the UNESCO Award for “Women Leading the Way” from the University of Connecticut for The Daughters Project.

 

Marcia Dixon

Marcia Dixon, is one of the UK’s most well-known gospel journalists through her work as Religious Columnist for The Voice, Britain’s best-selling black newspaper, and as Editor of Keep The Faith, the most widely distributed magazine about Britain’s black Christian community.

Ms Dixon also runs her own PR consultancy called Marcia Dixon Public Relations, which specialises in helping churches, ministries, business and organisations reach the black Christian community. 

Clients that have utilised MD PR’s services include The YMCA, the Metropolitan Police, The NHS, Sony Music, Syco Music, BET, World Vision, Jesus House, the New Testament Church of God and Christian Aid.

For the past two years, MD Public Relations has served as Project Manager/Key Organiser of the Wise Women Awards, the UK’s only award’s event that recognises the contribution of black Christian women in the church and wider society.

MD Public Relations was nominated for a European Federation of Black Women Business Owners Award in 2004, and in 2005, the African Caribbean Evangelical Alliance included Marcia Dixon in their list of 21 people who have contributed greatly to the development of Britain's black Christian community.

In 2010 Ms Dixon was appointed as a Faith Advisor to the British Labour Government, and was a member of a panel comprised of 13 faith advisors who acted as a 'sounding board' to advise the government on effective engagement with faith communities. 

Ms Dixon has been a Christian since her teens, and strongly believes that the church is one of the black community’s greatest success stories.  She currently attends The Arc in Forest Gate, east London.

Her hobbies include reading, watching CSI, Law and Order and keeping fit.

 

Alice Ukoko

On the day Alice Ukoko (a “full moon” baby) was born, it rained and the sun shone at the same time.   Apparently, these circumstances indicated that she was not meant to survive.  What no one realised at the time was that a powerful advocate for the empowerment of African women and a human rights defender who has devoted her entire active life to the campaign to end human rights abuses in Nigeria and to being the “voice” for African women and their families, had been born.

As founder and CEO of Women Of Africa, the focus of Alice’s work has been to raise the awareness of the international community to human rights abuses taking place in Nigeria and to restore the status of African women to its traditional place as home, community and nation builders.  She speaks widely and passionately on the need to end sexual crimes against women across the African continent and has been a force in raising awareness about the difficulties inherent to adjusting to life as an African immigrant in the United Kingdom. 

In November 2000, Britain’s Channel 4 aired “The African Maiden” which Alice wrote to draw attention to the lifelong negative impact of female circumcision.  It contributed to the enactment of the British Female Circumcision Act of 2003.

Through her work with Women of Africa, Alice uses her personal experiences to highlight the need to support African women who suffer isolation and abusive relationships while living the U.K.  She also uses it as a platform to work with and support young adults in traditional and non-traditional educational settings.  Additionally, recognising that far too many African children are taken into care under UK Child Protection Laws, Alice works with families to help them examine child-rearing practices that are more “modern” in outlook and application, and less likely to result in the separation of parents from their children.

Though she arrived in the U.K. in 1970 with no formal education and married into an abusive relationship which ended with her taking her five children and raising them alone, Alice earned an Honours Bachelor of Laws from the University of London in 1992 and is a Graduate member of the Institute of Personal Management of Nigeria.

Recognised in 2012 by Worldwide Who’s Who for showing dedication and leadership in support of women’s rights and gender equality, Alice is working to launch the African Women’s Commission for Africa’s reform and the elimination of violence against women.

 

Jenni Steele -

Rising community leader, self-styled ‘mum on a mission’, Jenni Steele is an Operation Black Vote (OBV) graduate, Creative Director of Lioness Ladies (a women and families empowerment support network), a model/actress, and full time mum.  As if that weren’t enough, Jenni ran as a Councillor Candidate for the Liberal Democrats in 2011 and is Chair of the Bellingham Safer Neighbourhood Team (SNT).

It was while on OBV’s Lewisham Civic Leadership Programme in December 2009 that Jenni attended a Safer Neighbourhood Panel meeting and decided she wanted to become more involved in the organisation. Jenni initially joined the SNT team to gain more information about her community and to discover why young mothers, black women, and young people were so strikingly underrepresented on the board. Her goal was to empower people and that is exactly what she is doing.

In 2011, Jenni was honoured at OBV’s Make a Difference Awards and took home the Supporting Others Award given to those who donate their time and support to mentor others.  Jenni’s achievements to date are proof that, with talent, hard work and determination, positive strides can be made to ensure that communities are safer and united by common goals. Keep a close eye on Jenni, she’s not just known as ‘Supermum’ by those in her community, she’s also recognised as a leader in the making.

 

Sonia Meggie

Sonia Meggie is the founder of Inspirational YOU, a London based social enterprise launched in March 2010 with a mission to connect, inspire and empower people of all ages and backgrounds who want to make changes in their professional lives.

Prior to founding Inspirational YOU, Sonia worked in event organisation in the city of London. Unfulfilled by her job, she mustered the courage to leave her comfortable position and create her own business.

With Inspirational YOU, she sought to develop a meaningful career by designing programs and coordinating events, debates, conferences, shows, corporate training, professional coaching, well-being workshops and youth projects. She is also a mentor and football coach, and is driven by making an impact and giving back. Her objective is to leave a legacy that will support the progression of women, ethnic minorities and young people.  Her mantra is

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world”.

Featured in the Powerlist 2013, which profiles the most influential people of African and African Caribbean heritage in the United Kingdom and listed on Blackenterprise.com as one of London’s most powerful black women, Sonia has a BA in Business Studies and Social Policy, and an MSc in E Commerce.

Inspirational YOU has been supported by global corporations such as Birkbeck, University of London, PwC, Pearsons, ITN, Sky, Daily Mail, BBC, University of London and the UK Supreme Court.

 

Osaseri Guobadia (Future Leader, 2013)

Currently nearing the end of her second year of her Engineering degree at Cambridge University,  Osaseri  Guobadia was the only first year selected as one of the top ten outstanding black students in the Future Leaders 2012/2013 edition. In 2012, she was selected as one of five shortlisted candidates for the Shell Women of the Future Young Star Award, as a result of her academic achievement and her design of a prototype for a transportable water filter for use in developing countries.

While still hoping to develop this in the future, she has recently founded the WhyNoWater Campaign, a social-media campaign aimed at changing the image of water scarcity and getting young people involved and interested.

Charlene Bello (Future Leader,  2013)

Charlene is a masters student from South London. She graduated from the University of Manchester in 2012, and went on to be named the Second Most Outstanding Black Graduate in the UK by Powerful Media, who also publish the Powerlist. She is now at SOAS, University of London studying African Politics. Charlene is also a prolific commentator on social and political issues in Africa. She writes the blog Journey. Learn. Speak. which has achieved global readership. She recently was a contributing member of the Ghana Decides initiative a non-partisan project, connecting Ghanaians in and outside of Ghana to ensure the 2012 elections were free, fair and well informed.  Charlene is the Black and Minority Ethnic Communities Ambassador for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the second largest charity and largest children's charity in the UK. In this role she advises the organisation's Director for BME Communities on how to deliver their five year plan. Before this role she was a member of the charity's inaugural Youth Advisory Board, which would advise on NSPCC and government policy. Charlene has spoken on behalf of the charity at party conferences and the launch of their partnership with Huawei, the telecommunications company, in 2011.

Charlene has proven to be dedicated to charitable causes as she joined the student-led VietnamJUMP charity when she was studying in Singapore in 2011. The charity built a school and taught lessons in English and Hygiene to children in the Vietnamese Highlands, all with funds they had raised themselves, supported by the Vietnamese Embassy in Singapore.

Taymah

Taymah is a talented singer and songwriter from South London. At just 2 years old, her singing talent was recognised and her raw sound has got fans feeling uplifted by her soulful vocals on rnb, hip hop and house tracks. 

Taymah has shared stages with other prominent artists and musicians, including the opening for Yolanda Brown at the barbican Theatre. She has also worked with a range of artists and producers in the industry including Yungen and Ratlin. In 2011 she released her mix cd ‘Love & Lies’ which she had written and was produced by Carns from Hill Productions. The CD was nominated for an OMA (Official Mixtape Awards) within the best RnB mixtape category and she was also nominated as best female artist of 2011. She is currently working on her 2nd album UNTAYMAHBLE produced by Dice Beats with features from other producers such as Versa Beatz. It's set to be released soon.

Taymah also has a passion for social issues and is in her 2nd year of studies for a BA Honours Social Work. During 2009 and 2010 she worked for Lambeth Council as a work placement co-ordinator, helping to find work experience for year 10 students in Lambeth Borough Schools. 

Since then, whilst studying and spending time in the studio, she has worked for a hostel for 16 – 25 year olds helping to get them back into education and employment and with a mental health charity for adults with poor mental health, supporting them with independent living skills.

You can follow Taymah on Twitter: @TaymahOfficial and send enquiries to TaymahOfficial@gmail.com

  Neelofer – A Spoken word artist for over 10 years.

The winner of Farrago Award in 2004 for best performance by a London Poet.  She has received over 95,000 plays on my spoken word tracks on MySpace and was invited to speak as part of a panel on BBC Asian Network ‘Nihal Show’.

Mr David Cameron, British Prime Minister: Where are my forty acres and a mule?

A Concise History of Slavery in the UK

Yesterday saw the Independent Newspaper report that new and previously unseen historical records that audit British involvement in transatlantic slavery detailing specific amounts paid in compensation to wealthy slave owners, at the time of the abolition of slavery, are to be released online on Wednesday by University College London. This follows an extensive three year research programme led by Dr Nick Draper.

What emerges is that whilst enslaved Africans were set free after abolition, in the vast majority of cases, they walked off the plantation into a life of tied servitude, abject poverty and racism, yet British slave owning families were all handsomely compensated by the British Government of the day.

The research identifies individuals naming some of Britain’s wealthiest, most powerful families and political dynasties that directly benefited from the huge amounts of compensation paid at the time. The research also knocks on the head a popular myth that only the very wealthy benefited from slavery; the research shows that lots of “very ordinary men and women” were compensated which illustrates the true extent and breadth of British involvement in slavery.

The British Prime Minister David Cameron’s family personally received £3 million in today’s money in compensation for the 202 enslaved Africans they owned at the Grange Sugar Estate in Jamaica.  Britain’s 19^th century Prime Minister William Gladstone’s father received the equivalent of £83 million.

The family of former Tory Cabinet Minister Douglas Hogg received the equivalent of £101 million. Sir Joseph Bazalgette an ancestor of current Arts Council boss Sir Peter Bazalgette was paid £5.7m in today's money for 420 enslaved Africans.

In total the British Treasury paid out £20 million, equating to 40 % of annual spend at the time, a staggering £16.5bn in today’s money

Slavery was abolished by Britain in 1830 after increasing rebellions on the plantations meant that Britain could no longer afford to maintain its armies throughout the British Caribbean that were used to quell rebellion and keep Africans on the plantation.

Once the brilliant African Toussaint Loverture defeated the British and French in their attempts to retake Haiti in the late 1700’s, African rebellion spread like wildfire to plantations throughout the world. Over the next 40 years rebellions increased, particularly in Jamaica, and the price of sugar collapsed. In order to understand the importance of sugar to world economy back then one should view sugar’s strategic importance as being the equivalent of oil in today’s economy.

These uprisings, combined with an unprecedented public abolition campaign supported by the British public (most of whom had never met an African) and driven by one of  Britain’s most foremost abolitionists Thomas Clarkson, led by the African and freeman, Olaudah Equiano, the radical campaigner William Fox, alongside religious groups such as the Quakers and radical Anglicans and later joined by British Women’s Emancipation movements, the institution of slavery was finally brought to its knees in 1830.

It is a fact of British history that Britain was made “Great” through the ruthless and brutal exploitation of African people during the period of its involvement in the singularly brutal economic enterprises of slavery and empire.

A United Nations resolution in late 2006 declared "the slave trade and slavery as among the worst violations of human rights in the history of humanity”

As is the want of men of my age of late I have been meandering and ruminating on my family’s cultural ancestry. It seems that once one reaches a certain age, you begin to feel a sort of mild panic at the process of coming to terms, with one’s own mortality, I have begun to philosophically reflect on the balance of my own life in an attempt to make sense of who we are as a people and what will be the legacy of our lives.

Like many Black people living in Britain today my own cultural history informs, defines, shapes me and in some ways makes me. The rich history, culture and geography of my family run’s through my veins, its echoes reverberates deep in my consciousness and infuses my heart with a passion that makes me the person I am today. Those histories represent an incredible journey through the history of the Britain Empire encapsulating the migration.

My father is a proud Jamaican and born in the beautiful remote hill top village of Bois Content, Western St Catherine, Kingston, Jamaica. His father was Jamaican and his mother Cuban. My mother was a matriarchal Mancunian whose father was African; her mother was English of Irish descent, born in desperate circumstances in 1901 in the Manchester Workhouse.

My African Grandfather was from the Kru Nation whose ancient homeland was split in two by the creation, by both Britain and America, of the modern day states of Sierra Leone and Liberia.

He arrived in the UK, having stowed away on a British Merchant Navy ship sometime in the earl 1990’s at the age of 15, found and deported and returned at the age of 16. He and my Grandmother married in the 1920’s in Manchester.

I have managed to trace my British grandmothers family tree back to 1776, my African grandfathers history is less clear but much is being revealed as I write, having recently located his British Merchant Navy records and uncovering further research about the Kru Nation,

When we turn to my Jamaican father’s early history, finding information here is much more difficult. I am slowly piecing this together but such was the devastating effect of British slavery in Jamaica, much is lost as a result and untraceable. My historical search has been bogged down and become clouded in a blood miasma born of the greatest crime in human history.

Much is lost and that which is found, is painful and seared with pain. An important part of my historical legacy is gone, destroyed and there are millions of others, just like me, whose cultural, social, economic, theological histories have been stolen and by and large eradicated during the great Maffa.

The loss to me today is profound, all of the pregnant possibilities and potential legacies are denied. The psychological ballast that knowledge of personal histories provides those with unbroken histories, the joy and meaning associated with the cultural transmission of tradition, the psychological, cultural and economic legacies that are taken for granted by others, are denied to me and are a constant reminder of that 400m year, violent rip in the temporal and spiritual historical timeline of my ancestors.

This period of non-history haunts the majority of the present day descendants of those enslaved Africans, usually in the form of guilt and or denial.

There are none so ashamed of slavery than the modern day descendants of slavery, the mental and economic toll of decades of struggle against modern day racism that infects our reality, the gruelling biological stress that has been injected into our genes by virtue hundreds of years of sustained and unremitting brutality, the continual denigration of our culture’s and faiths made us so.

Acute and unimaginable levels of generational stress fed to us in our mother’s wombs and transmitted after birth in our mothers milk and reinforced by our contemporary experience, can today be discerned in the behaviour attitude, culture and customs of the some of the descendents of enslaved Africans.

Dr Na’im Akbar the world famous African American Psychologist writing about slavery and its modern day impact on African Americans wrote:

 “This shock (slavery) was so destructive to natural life processes that the current generation of African-Americans, although we are five to six generations removed from the actual experience of slavery, still carries the scars of this experience in both our social and mental lives. Psychologists and sociologists have failed to attend to the persistence of problems in our mental and social lives which clearly have roots in slavery. Only the historian has given proper attention to the shattering realities of slavery, and he has dealt with it only as descriptive of past events.”

The economic legacy was equally profound both for Britain and the descendants of slaves. It was the period of the greatest capital accumulation in British history. Britain now had necessary cash to fund the research and development that produced the Industrial Revolution.

Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of Trinidad in his book Capitalism and Slavery  puts it neatly,

“By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.”

London's importance as a world city today, with its financial service sector, owes its success largely to profits made from the slave trade. Slavery was a respectable occupation in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries, and many City of London merchants grew wealthy on it by providing credit and insurance for slave voyages.

The Bank of England set up in 1694, made capital available for slave voyages and the City became the financial centre of the slave trade. Alexander and David Barclay were Quaker slave traders who operated in the West Indies, and founded Barclay’s Bank on slave trade profits. Sir Francis Baring whose family eventually founded Barings Bank, had major financial interests in slavery. Today Baring Road in Lewisham south east London is named after him.

The footprint of slavery can also be seen in the world of art, culture, and religion. The Church of England was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade. In February 2006, the Church voted to apologies to the descendants of victims of the slave trade, ‘recognising the damage done’ to those enslaved.

Debating the motion, Rev Simon Bessant, from Pleckgate, Blackburn, described the Church's involvement in the trade, saying: "We were at the heart of it." The amendment was supported by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Archbishop of York John Sentamu. Rev Blessant explained the involvement of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the slave trade. The organisation owned the Codrington Plantation in Barbados, where slaves had the word "SOCIETY" branded on their backs with a red-hot iron.

The National Gallery was founded on an art collection of pictures given to it by John Julius Angerston, which he built up with money from the slave trade. This included his activities as one of the underwriters of Lloyds of London that insured slave voyages. The Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery were also founded on profits from sugar cane grown in the Caribbean and cut by African slaves.

The Royal Dockyard at Deptford, one of Britain's major ports and centres for shipbuilding, and Blackheath and Greenwich, was where prosperous captains and merchants made rich by the slave trade lived in comfortable mansions. Greenwich resident, Ambrose Crowley, was an iron merchant who made his fortune producing manacles, ankle irons, and collars to secure slaves to prevent them from running away or throwing themselves overboard on the dreadful journey from Africa to the Caribbean or London.

Thomas King of the slave trading company Camden, Calvert and King also lived in Greenwich. This was the largest company in London and at one stage, owned one in five slave ships that sailed from London to Africa. The Pett family, master shipbuilders in Deptford, built many of the ships that were involved in the trade. The woodland that provided much of the trees for their shipbuilding and is named after the family is near Chislehurst in Kent. It is familiar to many Londoners today as Pett’s Wood.

The economic, cultural and political legacies of slavery are rarely discussed but surely the modern conception of racism and white supremacy constitutes the most damaging social evil in human history, bearing in mind, particularly, the scale, duration and lingering impact of both slavery and Empire.

The ideas that informed the institution of slavery are at the heart of profound social and economic inequality, hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice which continue to affect people of African descent today.

Who knows what my people would have become had they not been subject to the evils of slavery and colonialism. On the one hand, a Kru nation was displaced from their lands and on the other a people enslaved in chains and whipped into centuries of slavery.

I can’t tell today what my family may have accomplished had they not suffered from the twin evils of British colonialism and transatlantic slavery. What I do know is that as a consequence, both I and millions of descendants of enslaved Africans have been forced to endure grinding poverty, cultural and political marginalisation and the post traumatic stress associated both with slavery and racism.

We do not have the access to wealthy family connections or familial assets whether in terms of resources built up over centuries. Our countries of origin have been impoverished by slavery, colonialism and now neo liberalism and so are unable to support us, on the contrary, we in the Diasporas support them, through the millions of pounds of remittances we send home every year.

Should there be reparations paid for Britain’s involvement on transatlantic slavery?  Yes, hell yes, reparations should be paid by the Government, those institutions and families who directly benefited form the greatest crime in human history, should now do the decent thing and follow the example of Quaker companies such as Cadburys or Joseph Rowntree, who have both had long standing commitment through their charitable trust to fund work on race equality issues.

I don’t want a cheque but I do want formal recognition. I do want to see companies like Lloyds of London and Unilever paying up. Millionaires whose family assets can now be traced like British Prime Minister David Cameron and the Douglass Hogg and Bazalgette’s families should make donations to our cause. Institutions like the National Gallery, the Royal family, the Church of England and others can donate substantial sums commiserate with the crime and the profits made into a charitable trust that can address the continued legacies of slavery; namely racism and poverty.

The British Government could cancel all outstanding historic debts from former colonial nations.

The Queen herself could apologise under instruction form the Government so to do.

Otherwise the festering malignant resentment of a people, some of whom were robbed of their land, some enslaved and then made destitute, systematically stripped of their language and culture, their families sold like cattle, whose countries of origin were raped of resources, who were forced to work for hundreds of years under the brutal lash of the slave masters whip, whose descendants endured and continue to endure modern day Jim Crow racism, will forever view British society and its blind refusal to acknowledge the greatest crime in human history as a gross affront to our common citizenship and humanity.

Lee Jasper

NB.

On Wednesday 27th February, Catherine Hall will give a public lecture entitled 'Towards a New Past: the legacies of British Slave-ownership' to celebrate the publication of the Encyclopedia of British Slave-ownership and the inauguration of our new project, The Structure and Significance of British Caribbean Slave-ownership, 1763-1833. The event will be followed by a demonstration of the Encyclopedia by Nick Draper and Keith McClelland. The event will take place at 6pm in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre at UCL and a reception will take place afterwards in the South Cloisters. For directions to the lecture theatre, see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucesswo/gustave_map.pdf