By Nesrine Malik for The Guardian
The UK’s first black female history professor talks about slavery, Black Lives Matter and the long thread of resistance among Africans in Europe.
livette Otele is the quintessential African European. She was born in Cameroon, grew up in France where she received her education, and now lives in Wales. In 2018, she became the UK’s first black female history professor, and this she year was included in the “100 Great Black Britons” list. When Edward Colston’s statue was torn down and dragged into Bristol’s harbour, Otele, who teaches the history of slavery at the University of Bristol, could not have been better placed to witness and process the moment.
“I live just across the [Severn] bridge in Newport,” she says, “and I was very surprised by the whole movement. It was coming from young people taking matters into their own hands. But I also understand that this conversation has been going for decades and it looked as if we’d exhausted all other avenues.” Her first thought, when she saw the statue being thrown into the harbour was that it reminded her of underwater slave memorials. Colston’s statue, she believes, belongs in a museum, with the scars and dents of his journey to the harbour intact. “It would be interesting to see those moments within the body of the statue, as long as we have it somewhere where it can be contextualised. It’s part of the history of Bristol.”
Otele has a fundamentally hopeful view about Britain and its race relations. She moved to the UK from France “for love”, but also from anxiety. “Twenty years ago, Britain offered a space I couldn’t find in France. In France, I wouldn’t want to have children. I wouldn’t want them to have to fight, emotionally and physically. Britain gave me a space and a chance to regenerate.”
That regeneration and space were needed because – living in France – she found her identity was always presented to her as “an either/or”. With her first book in English, she attempts to challenge that dichotomy by revealing a long history of African European identity that does not conform to the boundaries applied today. African Europeans: An Untold Story is a broad historical sweep that begins with the queens of Merowe on the Nile a few centuries BC, and ends in present-day Britain. Otele speaks to me from one of her children’s rooms, and her youngest child bounces in and out a couple of times during our conversation. She talks with the zeal of a historian and the warmth of someone who feels connected to the next generation of African Europeans. She tells me that she wrote the book for personal reasons.
“In France, you are either French, which basically means white, or French ‘of so and so origin’.” The latter was emphatically second class, but Otele sees no reason for the separation. “For me they are completely intermingled.” As well as France, her family has connections in Germany, where her relations have lived for three generations. These Africans in Europe feel as if they have multiple identities, none of which negates their European one. But according to Otele, “society didn’t see her that way”.
The book is many things. A scholarly work that reveals detail and colour about African Europeans; a study in how race waxes and wanes in its significance within social structures; and a claiming of black history as European history. But more than anything it is a rebuke – a rejection of the simplistic accounts of race and the history of black people in Europe.
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Read more at: The Guardian
Source: The Guardian
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