The story hit the press when a lawsuit was brought. The refusal to desegregate the Athenaeum, in spite of private assurances to do so, cost the theatre $500, paid as compensation to Sarah. She also insisted on being given four good tickets for the opera. William C. Neil’s assessment of the case appeared in the The Liberator on 17 December 1853:
American colorphobia is never more rampant towards its victims, than when one would avail himself of the facilities of mental improvement in common with the more favored dominant party—as if his complexion was indeed, prima facie evidence that he was an intruder within the sacred portals of knowledge.
Bedford College, founded in 1849, was one of the few sacred portals of knowledge for Victorian women. Poor girls got no schooling. Girls from wealthy families had the benefit of home schooling and some attended boarding-schools. The few who went higher received vocational training, often to become governesses in their turn. For Black Victorians, traditionally excluded from the sacred portals of knowledge, access to them could be transformative. At Cambridge University, Alexander Crummell, another anti-slavery orator, laid the foundations for Pan-African thought in the 1840s.
At Bedford, Sarah demonstrated her love of learning by registering for several courses: ancient history, mathematics, geography, French, Latin, elocution and vocal music, and away from her studies, she socialised widely, making friends with English women whose hospitality and lack of prejudice she appreciated deeply. In 1859 she toured Britain, making speeches against slavery. On some occasions, such as the Dublin address, she focused on the plight of women caught up in slavery, demonstrating an adeptness in handling gender, race and class issues together. The Dublin speech was published in the Anti-Slavery Advocate on 3 November 1859.
The English Woman’s Journal also recorded her views in “A Colored Lady Lecturer” in June 1861:
My strongest desire through life has been to be educated. I found the most exquisite pleasure in reading and as we had no library, I read every book which came in my way, and I longed for more. Again and again mother would endeavor to have us placed in some private school but being colored, we were refused.
Sarah found a genuine welcome at Bedford. She boarded with its founder, the philanthropist Jesser Reid, at her home in nearby Grenville Street. There was much for these two women to discuss, their lives being so rich and full of purpose. Church, State, Darwinism? Europe, America? Social strife? Civil wars?
Why should we imagine they talked and talked?
Because it’s not possible to imagine otherwise.
Jesser, born in 1789 to an ironmonger father and his wife, had become an extremely wealthy widow after just one year of marriage to her doctor husband; and in spite of prejudice and embarrassingly low student enrolment, she had written herself into the history books by founding Bedford College. She had seen first-hand what it meant to be voiceless. At the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, she had met Mott and other women delegates who had been refused the right to speak. Now here was Sarah, a black woman, whose metier had been public speaking since the age of sixteen. Sarah had toured North-East America and Canada on the anti-slavery trail, and by the time she stepped over the threshold of Jesser’s home at 6 Grenville Street, a single woman in her thirties, she had battled racial hostility at boarding houses, on steamships and in railway cars.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, both women signed the 1866 Suffrage petition calling on the government to grant Women’s Right to Vote. That August, Sarah arrived in Florence, Italy, via Switzerland. She was there to study medicine. Natural cures, attention to diet and the benefit of the housebound spending time in warm climes made sense to her, she discovered, while nevertheless, gaining her formal training at the prestigious Santa Maria Nuova, said to be the first truly modern hospital in Western Europe.
Sarah knew people in Italy. Mazzini, the founder of Friends of Italy, was an acquaintance. Also, Anne Whitney, the American poet and sculptor, who was struck by Sarah’s “handsome dark person set off by a broad gold thread wound round and round her head, and a white shawl.” Sarah enjoyed the more fluid European society and longed for the time when camaraderie between the races in the United States would become the norm. She had tried to make changes to the American way of life. Her failed attempt to have references to white males removed from New York State’s constitution would have extended rights to black people and to women. That failure had drawn her back to Europe. In Rome, Sarah married an Italian from Sardinia, Lazzaro Pintor, in 1877 and her lifestyle, as a physician mingling with intellectuals and artists, granted her peace of mind and contentment.
We do not always know who has influenced our lives. The names of our foremothers are often lost. Women can thrive without their cultural history but like samples of DNA taken and retained way back for future testing, sources help to categorise their blood line to let the heart grow strong.
My sister Daphne was in her late twenties when she left London for East Africa. In Kenya and Egypt, she worked for development organisations and championed women’s rights. Returning to England more than a decade later, she went into local government and in 2001 became the first black woman director of Social Services in the UK.
By that time at the start of the twenty-first century, Margaret Busby’s ambitious collection of the words and writings by women of African origin and descent Daughters of Africa was almost ten years old.
Margaret and Daphne, two of Bedford’s notable alumnae, had turned reading English into something global, explosive and urgent.
Why should we imagine they were compared?
Because it’s not possible to imagine otherwise.
When Daphne turned up at Bedford College, her lecturers frequently addressed her as Margaret Busby, mistaking her for the seventeen-year-old West African who had preceded her as the only young woman of colour in the class, following in the solitary footsteps of Sarah Parker Remond a hundred years earlier.
Selected References:
Reyes, Angelita, “Allusive Autobiographical Performativity: Vicey Skipwith’s Home Place and Sarah Remond Parker’s Italian Retreat”, in Loopholes and Retreats: African-American Writers and the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Cullen Gruesser and Hanna Wallinger. Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2009.
Catherine Johnson
A British novelist and screenwriter, she is the author of several books for young readers, including Sawbones (2013, winner of Young Quills best historical fiction for children), and The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Shortlisted for The Bookseller YA Prize in 2016. Her latest books are Freedom, which has also been nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and Race to The Frozen North (2018). She has also written for film, including the award-winning Bullet Boy, as well as for television. Her radio play Fresh Berries was shortlisted for the Prix Italia. She studied at St Martin’s School of Art. She now has her own place, by the sea in Hastings, and is looking forward again.
The Year I Lost
I set out to write a memoir, capture a moment; something about being eight years old, lying in the bed wedged into the end of a caravan and hearing the sound of the blacksmiths’ hammer from across the valley. About being brown and odd and never finding anywhere I fitted in. But then the thoughts of now kept rushing in.
The void of now, which is where I have come to live.
I am at the end of a very long chapter in my life. Mourning for a life I had once, and the very ordinary—in the run of things—break up of a thirty-four-year partnership. It wasn’t perfect, nothing is. In fact my daughter said I should have left him years ago.
Why didn’t I?
Is it the devil you know? Is it the trade-off of being one half of something, of having a secure—as much as any future can be secure—future? Of being smug in my coupledom? I have been guilty of all that. And of taking him for granted. And also of lessening myself, of walking softly, of not knowing so much, of turning down work. Of trying to police what I wore and how I wore it. Not majorly. Subtly. Quietly. Ordinarily.
I worked hard—too hard, he says now—and was always, always, contrite for that one time twenty something years ago when I got drunk and kissed someone else.
Now I live in a spare room in someone else’s house. My belated punishment. What I deserve. After all, women like me, we are liars, neither one thing nor the other. Untrustworthy. It’s a fact. There are plays about us. Stories about us. Warnings about us. In some lights I might pass as Mediterranean—what a joke. Or North African, or South American. Something else I wasn’t, something I am not. Because what I am is uncertain, duplicitous. Two-faced.
I am fifty-six. I have two grown-up children. I have published twenty books and written more. I’ve written one feature film that got made (others didn’t) and won prizes for my writing. I have grey hair and lines that cut into the side of my face.
In a previous life, only one year ago, I had a favourite duvet cover and some bowls my friend gave me for my birthday. I had a house and a room at the top to work in with shelves and a window that looked out onto the sea. A picture a friend drew of my daughter in France. Those photos of the children. The eggcups. The yoghurt pots I saved (what for?). The blanket my mother gave me and the jacket my father made for me. My knitting-needles, bundles of them, sharp and slippery, just like me.
The endless endless books.
Today I live in someone else’s spare room. I have two suitcases. A few boxes of books. A growing number of bags, one for dirty washing, one for my swimming gear, one for my school visits when I have to appear like an author, clean and professional. Last year’s accounts in a selection of shoeboxes. My marriage certificate and some soap.
I thought I’d be here for a couple of months. It’s been ages now.
I’ve been mourning the future I thought I’d have, but learning to see a different one.
Of course I’ve been stupid.
“Don’t text him, mum!” “Don’t look at her Instagram!” But I can’t help it. It’s like picking scabs. And it shows me, reminds me, exactly what I am worth. Which of course feels like nothing. No thing.
He is reborn. Youthful, exciting and smug in his new love. I am bitter, old, empty. Two babies, four pregnancies. Those ghost children I murdered, is this their revenge? Have they moved in with their father? Are they sitting with him at night, leafing through photographs of her, listening to his sighs?
I have lost so much weight, my old clothes no longer fit. They belong to someone else. I tell myself it will be all right and if I say it enough, won’t it be true?
A long time ago when our relationship first hit the rocks—that drunken kissing, remember? I was terrified of what I had done to him, of what I might have lost. The holes in the wall, the words he spat at me. Of course I knew how much I deserved each and every one. I consoled myself by thinking how successful I was in putting myself in between him and the children. Of course I know now I failed at that too.
I was always making excuses then. Smoothing things over, still not cleaning enough. Trying to prove how good I was. How sorry I was. Then at Tesco’s buying long-life apple juice, I would read the date on the carton—it was always six months ahead. I would tell myself in six months I will be all right, we will be all right.
It is just me now.
And those ghost children are not my enemies. They were, are, happy not to be born. Both snug and secure in their never-being. After all, the youngest would be sixteen now and slamming doors.
One day, when I do get that place of my own, they will move in with me. Their flesh and blood siblings have moved on and there will be space. They will sit on the sofa or the kitchen chairs (I will have kitchen chairs) and sleep next to me in my bed, whispering in my ear through the night, telling me I did the right thing, telling me it will be all right. I will be all right.
Susan Nalugwa Kiguli
Born in Uganda, she is an academic and poet. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Leeds (UK), sponsored by the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, is an Associate Professor and has served as Head of the Department of Literature at Makerere University, Uganda. She was the 2011 African Studies Association Presidential Fellow, which gave her an opportunity to read her poetry at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, in November 2011. The former chairperson of FEMRITE—Uganda Women Writers’ Association, she currently serves on the Advisory Board for the African Writers Trust. She was the chief convener for both the second Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference, August 2015, and “Celebrating Ugandan Writing: Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino at 50”, held in March 2016 at Makerere University. She is the author of The African Saga (1998) and Home Floats in a Distance/Zuhause Treibt in der Ferne (Gedichte) (2012), a bilingual book in English and German.
The Naked Truth or The Truth of Nakedness
(On 17 April 2015, elderly women in Apaa village, Amuru district, stripped naked before the then minister of internal affairs General Aronda Nyakairima, lands minister Daudi Migereko and a team of land surveyors as they visited the disputed boundary between Amuru and Adjumani districts in Northern Uganda.)
The Amuru women realise that they have nothing left
So they rise and stand without their clothes.
They advance to fight with their bodies
Against power that has nothing to lose
Because it will take everything.
The Amuru women surge forward with their bodies
Resisting inscription
Erasing branding
They whirl with what they have
Compelling the gaze away from the land
Which everyone thinks they are fighting for . . .
The Amuru women force us to look upon
The human body that lives on the land.
They make powerful vehicles stop
Because the women are moving as they are
To claim their lives.
They exhort us to read their bodies
As the history of belonging
As stories of ownership
As tales of taboo facing taboo.
If the land must go
The women of the land
Must strip
To rearrange the protocol of knowledge
The women of Amuru without their dresses
Read again the theory of decency.
The women get up separate from their clothing
To decry the forced fracture from their land,
Their history,
Their life.
The Amuru women move as if in dance
Without fabric, without even leaves.
They move forward
With their bare breasts,
Bare bellies, bare hips
Vulnerable and weak
But alarmingly unassailable
So the wave of invaders must halt their chase
Their cultural antennae prevail on them
Not to move, not to look . . .
The women keep time regardless
They flow with the motion of their rage
Their emptiness
They are set to lose nothing
Since invaders will take everything.
N.B. the title of this poem is a favourite expression of my teacher, Prof. Timothy Wangusa.
Lauri Kubuitsile
She is the author of many works of fiction for children and adults, including the short-story collection In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata and Other Stories. She was the 2007 winner of the BTA/Anglo Platinum Short Story Competition and the recipient of the Botswana Ministry of Youth and Culture Orange Botswerere Award for Creative Writing in the same year. She has twice won the Golden Baobab Prize for children’s writing and was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize. Her most recent novel, The Scattering (Penguin 2016) won Best International Fiction Book at the 2017 Sharjah International Book Fair. She lives in Botswana.
The Colours of Love
He arrived with the spicy purple of the sunset, at the end of a long, hot, dusty day. They sat on the cool veranda and watched him wal
k up the side of the road into town.
“Where’s he from?” asked Mma Boago, the owner of Mable’s Takeaway, a takeaway that had never known a woman by the name of Mable.
“Don’t know. What’s that he’s carrying?” asked Johnny-Boy, Mma Boago’s perpetual customer and occasional bed-mate, squinting his eyes to get a better look.
“Looks like a guitar. Dirty long dreadlocks and a guitar. He’s not bringing anything we need around here, that’s for damn sure.” Mma Boago turned and went back inside; she had magwinya in the deep fryer and couldn’t waste time keeping track of unwanted strangers.
Warona was dragging her daughter, Kelapile, to the clinic when she spotted him. She wasn’t one to believe in love at first sight and fairy tales with happy endings, having witnessed Kelapile’s father’s profession of undying love just before he slipped into bed with the neighbour. It was more than being heart sore, Warona’s heart had been pulled out, knocked around for twelve rounds, and then placed back into her chest to perform only the bare minimum required to keep her moving. Some days she wished it would give up on that too.
“Hurry! They’ll fire me if I’m not back in an hour.” Kelapile’s legs could only go so fast, decided by their three-year-old length. In frustration, Warona bent down and pulled the child up onto her back. When she looked up again, there he was.
“Do you know where I can find the guest house?”
Practical Warona didn’t mention to anyone the way that her eyes went a bit funny the first time she saw him. She didn’t mention the golden light that surrounded this odd stranger. It made her feel warm, and a barely held memory flooded over her, a remembered feeling, one that she had flung away deep into the folds and creases of the grey matter in her brain to be forgotten forever. It was joy; she felt a warm, orange joy.
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