When World War II started, a whole new influx of people transformed the region as American soldiers came to the UK in the run-up to D-Day. Estimates of the numbers of African American soldiers, mostly GIs, range from 100,000 to 300,000, with many concentrated in port areas. Although British authorities expressed concern about the arrival of so many black men (particularly with regards to them mixing with white women), British people generally welcomed them. It was ironic—the British didn’t like the segregation the US Army brought with it, yet Britain was still steeped in a post-colonial racism. While they didn’t object to a transient community, when it came to the offspring these men left behind it was a different matter.
The white Americans, often from the Southern states, were not prepared to see their black colleagues mixing with white women—a crime punishable by death under US law during wartime. Many fights occurred, and some black soldiers were killed. This didn’t stop the African Americans mixing with locals, however, and many relationships were formed.
Across Britain a number of “Brown Babies” (as the children of black GIs were known in the press) were left behind after the war. Carole Travers, who first shared her story for my book We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset, was the result of a relationship between her white mother and a black soldier stationed in Poole. Carole’s mother decided to keep her child, but was already married, to a Scot with pale skin and red hair. “I had black hair and dark skin,” says Carole. “Something obviously wasn’t right.” After decades of searching for her father, she recently discovered, through DNA testing, that he was Archie Elworth Burton, 1920–2004.
Not all the babies were able to stay with their mothers. Deborah Prior, who was born in 1945 to a widow from Somerset and a black American serviceman, spoke to Professor Lucy Bland on Woman’s Hour. She spent five years at Holnicote House near Yeovil, a home for mixed-race children, after her mother was persuaded to give her up. This might seem remarkable in today’s Britain, where mixed-race people make up one of the fastest growing demographic groups, but acceptance of relationships that cross communities has been a relatively recent occurrence meaning many people don’t know about their heritage.
These stories are a mere handful showing that black history in the UK doesn’t just have one narrative, even just in South West England it includes more than we would expect.
Learning about rural multi-ethnic history enables us to subvert ideas of a “golden age” when Britain was an all-white nation. This has never existed, except in some people’s imaginations. British history—rural and urban—is intertwined with the history of non-white people. Black history is an integral part of British history.
There is already a plethora of information available, and yet more stories lie hidden in dusty records, waiting to be discovered.
Hannah Azieb Pool
An Eritrean-born journalist, author and curator, who writes regularly in the national and international media, she was a Guardian journalist for more than 14 years, and has also written for the Sunday Times, Vogue, the London Evening Standard, Grazia, and other publications. Former Associate Editor of Arise Magazine, she is the author of two books: Fashion Cities Africa (2016), celebrating the fashion landscapes of four cities at the compass points of the African continent—Casablanca, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Lagos; and My Fathers’ Daughter (2012), a memoir of her journey back to Eritrea to find her birth family. As Senior Programmer for Contemporary Culture at London’s Southbank Centre, she led the annual Africa Utopia festival (2012–18) and was a Senior Programmer for the WOW (Women of the World) festival, including WOW Hargeisa (Somaliland), WOW Aké (Nigeria) and WOW Baltimore (USA). She is Artistic Director of the Bernie Grant Arts Centre and a trustee of LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre).
Nairobi, from Fashion Cities Africa
It’s 10 a.m., on a crisp, clear Nairobi winter’s morning. Style bloggers Velma Rossa and Papa Petit, aka Oliver, are dressed down, in jeans, T-shirts and shoes that can take a good pounding, darting through tiny, crowded lanes that separate wooden shacks piled high with clothes. Velma and Oliver—better known by their blog title, 2ManySiblings—are bobbing and weaving through the lanes, like fashion ninjas, stopping suddenly when a gem catches their eye—a denim jacket here, a vintage beaded purse there.
Welcome to Gikomba market, Kamukunji Road, Nairobi, Kenya. East Africa’s largest second-hand clothing market, stretching out for approximately twenty acres (over eleven football pitches), where towering bales of second-hand clothes from Europe, North America and elsewhere, and cheap Chinese imports land daily, to be split open and sold for the highest shilling. Gikomba is not for the faint hearted.
“Wear comfortable clothes you can move around in,” says Oliver, when they agree to take me to the market. “Dress like a street urchin so people don’t think you have too much money,” adds Velma. When we meet the next morning Oliver looks up and down at my scruffy jeans and T-shirt and says: “Great. You’ve dressed perfectly.”
To the untrained eye, Gikomba is chaos, but once you get your head around the sheer scale of the place, it’s not that different to Topshop on a Saturday afternoon. The bale houses are in one section, the stalls in another. Men with trolleys take the bales to the stalls, others carry them on their shoulders.
In many ways Gikomba mirrors any urban high street. Stalls are grouped by category. Womenswear, menswear, children’s clothes, shoes and accessories each have their own, vast section. You’ll find stalls selling only denim skirts, rows of belts and a huge mountain of white shirts, it goes on and on. In the midst of it all sit tens of tailors ready to do instant alterations. It’s impossible to see more than the four or five stalls in your immediate vicinity. Luckily, this doesn’t matter, because Velma and Oliver know exactly where they are heading.
For those in the know, there’s an intricate system of runners—personal shoppers effectively—who’ll bring the best stuff directly to you. After a quick phone call, Oliver meets a couple of his guys near the mountain of white shirts. One contact pulls a leather jacket and a pair of boots out of a rucksack for Oliver to look at. Velma is busy eyeing up the other seller’s outfit. “How much for the jumper you’re wearing?” she asks, with a cute smile that I sense knocks quite a few shillings off the price. Oliver walks away with the jacket, Velma gets the jumper later, when the wearer has found something to change into. The brokers melt back into the market and we carry on shopping.
Mitumba—second-hand shopping—is a key part of the Nairobi fashion scene. As well as Gikomba market, there’s Toi, on the outskirts of Kibera, Ngara and many smaller markets dotted around the city.
The ability to buy good quality second-hand imports plays a key part in making fashion accessible, and if you’ve got the stamina it’s a lot of fun. “I get lost, in Gikomba, it’s like going to a casino. You’re just there, spending hours and you don’t notice,” says Oliver.
Stylist and designer Franklin Saiyalel, is another fan of mitumba. “Everything I’m wearing, apart from the shoes is thrift,” says Saiyalel who’s blog KenyanStylista.com has won him the moniker “Kenya’s best dressed man”.
But Nairobi’s fashion crowd have a mixed relationship with mitumba. Some see it as a great way to democratise fashion, enabling those with less money to buy essentials at knockdown prices and those with a good eye to pick up on trend bargains. Others see mitumba as damaging to local industry, flooding the market with other countries’ cast offs and making it impossible for local designers to compete on price.
While many wear their thrifting skills with pride—Velma and Oliver for example bring mitumba to the cool kids, minus the mud and hassle with regular “Thrift Socials”—even those who love it are keen for Nairobi fashion not to be reduced to mitumba.
Back in downtown Nairobi, on and around Biashara Street, is the area once known as the “Indian Bazaar”. Here you can pick up fabric and give it to a tailor who’ll take your measurements and have an outfit ready in a couple of days for a few hundr
ed shillings.
Roshini Shah, of Haria’s Stamp Shop, and her family have been selling fabric on Biashara Street since the 1920s when her great-grandfather would import material from America and Japan. In recent years she’s noticed a new generation coming into the shop buying East African fabrics such as kanga (a brightly patterned cotton cloth printed with slogans), kitenge (similar to kanga but with a different style of pattern) and kikoy (a striped, woven cotton fabric) to take to their tailor. For a long time, kanga was relegated in most people’s minds as the cloth their mother wore to clean the house or wrap them in as a child. But along with kitenge, kanga are enjoying a new popularity as a fashion item, says Shah. “People are using African prints to pull off western looks,” says Shah, who spoke on the history of kanga at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2014. Given the culture of tailoring, the accessibility of mitumba and the dominance of foreign labels, Nairobi can be a tough place to cut your teeth as a designer. All of which makes the current fashion buzz in the city even more exciting.
“There’s a renaissance happening in Nairobi. The creative industry is doing extremely well and that’s affecting the fashion scene,” says stylist Sunny Dolat, who runs Chico Leco, The Nest art collective’s fashion hub, which won an award at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival with their short film To Catch A Dream. Starring one of Kenya’s best known models, Ajuma Nasenyana, and eight of Nairobi’s leading designers—Katungulu Mwendwa, Kepha Maina, Namnyak Odupoy, Jami and Azra Walki, Ann McCreath, Ami Doshi Shah and Adele Dejak—To Catch a Dream, is a celebration of local talent.
The film, alongside platforms like 2ManySiblings, This is Ess, Kenyan Stylista and the rise of bands like Souti Sol (the video of the band dancing with Barack Obama went viral), who wear cutting edge local designers like Nick Ondu on the international circuit, shows how much Nairobi fashion has changed in recent years. “Kenyans are very conservative. Because of how we were influenced by the British, a suit and tie is what goes. If you walk in with something different, people don’t seem to understand you or don’t take you seriously. But things are changing,” says John Kaveke, one of Nairobi’s most established menswear designers.
The flamboyance that, for example Lagos or Accra might be known for isn’t big here, says Sunny Dolat at The Nest. “Growing up, we were never really taught to express ourselves through clothes, we’ve been very conservative.”
The blame for this conservatism lands squarely at the feet of the British colonisers and missionaries, who banned a lot of indigenous Kenyan clothing. This colonial fashion hangover meant that people were encouraged to aspire to foreign labels as a result the domestic industry suffered, says Dolat. “But people are starting to shift their mentality to see the value of investing in local designers and local brands.” Hang out with the Nairobi fashion crowd and it’s not long before you’ll see kanga, kitenge and kikoy as well as West African ankara and kente worn with skinny jeans and trainers, styled as maxi-skirts and blazers or in other contemporary ways.
Higher end Nairobi labels such as Ann McCreath’s Kiko Romeo and John Kaveke come with great tailoring and a fresh take on traditional fabrics. Accessories designers such as Ami Doshi Shah and Adèle Dejak are unashamedly rooting their brands in Nairobi by sourcing local materials to create bespoke pieces of such beauty that they smash the tired stereotype that Africa “doesn’t do luxury”.
Many are re-framing what it means to be a Kenyan designer by pairing fabrics like kanga and kitenge or locally sourced leathers, with contemporary silhouettes. You’ll find patches of Maasai shuka blanket reworked into an evening clutch bag by emerging label Ziko Africa or kanga lining on a John Kaveke blazer. Designers like Katungulu Mwendwa (“Katungulu”), with her complex but clean structuring, or Nick Ondu (“Nick Ondu—Sartorial”), with his sharp menswear are giving this new breed of “experimental” Nairobi dresser plenty of options. Rising stars like Anthony Mulli are seeking out craftspeople, learning their skills and finding ways to modernise them for today’s tastes. It’s about changing perceptions of what constitutes African fashion, says Mulli, of his Katchy Kollections, which combine intricate Maasai beadwork with international seasonal trends to create bags that work as well in New York as Nairobi.
The notion of changing perceptions of African fashion, comes up repeatedly. “We don’t do curios. Our whole ethos is to create beautiful products made in Africa,” says Adèle Dejak, who has shown at Milan fashion week, collaborated with Salvatore Ferragamo and been featured in Vogue Italia. “Our pieces are all handmade, it’s a piece of art,” says Dejak. Of course you can find luxury in Africa, says Mulli, it’s just a matter of how you choose to look at things. “We need to sensitise people to what we’re doing and appreciating it.”
Olúmìdé Pópóọlá
Nigerian-German by birth, she is a London-based writer of essays, poetry and fiction. Her novella this is not about sadness was published in 2010, her play Also by Mail in 2013, and a short-story collection Breach (co-authored with Annie Holmes) in 2015. She also wrote the critically acclaimed novel When We Speak of Nothing, published by Cassava Republic Press in 2017. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and has lectured in creative writing at various universities. In 2018 she curated the African Book Festival Berlin, which focused on the themes of transnationalism and migration.
The Swimmer
To look up from up from underneath, it made the sun blurry. The water swishing against my face, a thin layer, not enough to enter my nostrils. I was looking for him. I wanted to know the drowning, the losing your breathing to suffocation.
Of course, I didn’t last. I didn’t have enough drive to do it, actually I didn’t have enough reasons. It is hard to take your own life. I think it is against your own body. Such an effort, incredible. I knew that before I jumped into the river Lea with my clothes on. You had to orchestrate the whole thing and pay attention to the variables. The only thing I had done was leave Mum’s after the not so unusual but still weird morning. For some reason I went straight to Hackney Wick thinking, Let’s see this thing, drowning.
Mum was stable as we both called it but on the unstable side of that. She had been rummaging through a big cardboard box packed tight with clothes. I thought she was looking for something that belonged to Jabori. It was ten years this year. I thought she was reminiscing, going to tell me a story I did or did not know about my dead brother. Instead she brought out a skirt. Something she had worn on a trip to Palestine in a completely different lifetime when she really worked as a photographer, as she said. I would have loved to know the story of the skirt. The story of the trip, the stuff mum had been doing when she included really in the telling but her voice already had that edge to it. I could sense that tone even in the tiniest whisper and knew exactly where she was on the spectrum of a manic episode. It was the same with hospital admissions. I would dream she would die and she would be admitted, without fail, soon after that. Sectioned mostly but sometimes she went of her own accord.
The person that had died was Jabori. I hadn’t dreamt about him.
A couple of morning joggers slowed down when they saw me. They looked like one of those sharing hobbies couples.
It was still too early for most people. Mum and I had found ourselves in the kitchen at 4 a.m. She had woken early and I had not yet slept after leaving Temi in the club.
“Do you need some help?”
So much, I thought. But nothing you can sort out for me.
“I’m okay,” I replied instead. “Just cooling off my high.”
It wasn’t truthful but then I hadn’t said drugs. My eyes hadn’t felt strained or hot or inflamed but the cool water was certainly soothing my eyelids. I was telling some version of the truth. It was promising, nice, the way the early sun was filtered by moving water before it reached my eyes, tiny leaves covering the surface. My long sleeve got covered in moss green. So cooling too, the green, the colour.
Temi had talked about someone we knew who had rearranged someone else’s living-room.
> “You get it, the woman went out to get some beers and came back to all the lamps rearranged, cushions moved about, armchair in a different spot, papers and books on a shelf instead of the table. All in the space of fifteen minutes. It was a completely different room.”
I looked at her in a “and what” way.
And I said, “and what?”
“My friend lost it. She didn’t know how to handle it.”
I had gotten tired, very tired at that moment.
“Let’s go to the other place,” she said.
I followed because that’s what I do. I follow Temi and let her let me touch her only to not hear from her for the following two weeks. And then we find ourselves in an all-nighter that lasts from Thursday evening until Monday morning if I can handle it. Lately I couldn’t always make it through. Here I was Sunday morning, sober, alone, swimming without doing anything, really just lying on my back.
The joggers were still looking at me.
“Really. All okay here. I know it looks weird.”
I lifted my head and showed them my perfectly healthy face. Issues, like everyone, but nothing that required institutional enforcement. At least I didn’t think so. I even waved. And laughed.
“You wouldn’t believe my night or morning. Honestly, I’m just cooling off.”
“Oh, okay then.”
They had been spot running through the whole exchange, one foot touching the ground, the other one lifted, arms moving along, held up close to the torso.
“We’ll be back this side in half hour. If . . .”
“I won’t be here, don’t worry.”
I hoped not.
Mum had waved the long skirt around, then draped it over her head, the fabric falling over her shoulders.
“Remember you used to do that, pretend your hair was moving when it was short.”
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