Latest news with #WeWereThere
NZ Herald
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Bay News: Waitangi exhibition honours Operation Grapple veterans
Tere Tahi, one of the survivors of Operation Grapple. The story of the veterans who witnessed the nuclear tests is told in a photographic and story exhibition at Waitangi Museum. New exhibition for Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi The Waitangi Treaty Grounds has announced its latest exhibition. It is called Operation Grapple – We Were There, which opened on April 18 and will run until July 6, 2025. Photographer Denise Baynham has created an exhibition highlighting the stories of 19
Channel 4
25-04-2025
- General
- Channel 4
Lanre Bakare on the forgotten voices of Black Britain
When people think about Black British history, London is often seen as its cultural heart. 'We Were There' seeks to change that perception by examining the lost history of Black Britain's rich history outside of London. From northern soul in Wigan to political activism in Cardiff during the Thatcher years, the book seeks to reshape a narrative of black life. We meet its author, Lanre Bakare, in his hometown of Bradford – this year's city of culture – which is rediscovering its own forgotten black history.
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Five things you didn't know about Black British cultural history
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I'm Lanre Bakare and I usually cover arts and culture for the Guardian, but I'm taking over the newsletter this week to tell you about my new book, We Were There, a cultural history of Black Britain. It's set between 1979 and 1990, covering the rise and premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the UK's first female prime minister, whose divisive but transformative remodelling of Britain is still felt today – and within that political upheaval, race dominated the headlines. But it was also a time when modern Black British culture was forged. I'll talk you through five things I learned from my research. Three years ago, in the early stages of my book research, I wrote about Black British people who attended northern soul nights in the 1970s. Clubs hosted 'all-nighters' when fans would dance to often discarded soul tracks from a decade earlier. I was always told that northern soul, despite being a scene built on African American music, was a white movement and that Black British kids weren't really interested in it. But when I went back and watched Tony Palmer's amazing documentary Wigan Casino, which took film cameras inside an all-nighter at the famous club night, I spotted half a dozen Black faces in the crowd. As soon as I saw them, I wanted to know their stories and how they had become part of this scene. What I discovered was teenagers who were obsessed with mod culture, football and soul music; young migrants who, for various reasons, had left places such as St Kitts, Jamaica and Ghana and settled in northern towns and cities. They were young people searching for a sense of belonging and northern soul gave that to them. The lesson I learned is that whenever someone presents an assumption about Black Britain and the subcultures we've belonged to, you'll almost always find a counter-narrative of lives that have long been obscured. TV reflected Black life beyond the capital In the 1980s, when Black Britain was portrayed on television there was an understanding that Black life extended beyond the capital. Programmes such as Black Bag and Ebony on the Road made a concerted effort to tell true stories about Black communities in Chapeltown in Leeds and Butetown in Cardiff. The late 70s soap opera Empire Road, written by Michael Abbensetts, was shot on location on the streets of Handsworth in Birmingham. It's hard to imagine Black television set in the Midlands or Wales today, as commissioners look to London for a supposedly more 'authentic' representation of Black Britain. Think of the recent Black dramas and comedies that have had success – I May Destroy You, Queenie, Dreaming Whilst Black, Supacell, Riches – they are all set in the capital. The BBC drama This Town, released last year, was a welcome exception – yet it's clear we've lost the ability, or the interest, to look across the UK for stories about our culture. As the most recent census reveals, for the first time since at least 1991, the majority of Black people live outside London. To explore the true nature of Black Britain, we must document all of it. Thatcher and Powell gave Labour a pass Thatcher's stance on race and immigration was hostile. In 1978, as leader of the opposition, she claimed that areas of Britain were being 'swamped' by foreigners. Her comments after the Liverpool unrest in 1981, when she claimed the rioting was by young men 'whose high animal spirits' had 'wreak[ed] havoc' on the city, were clear dog whistles. But during this period the Labour party, typically viewed as more progressive than the Conservatives, was also incredibly hostile to immigrants and often benefited from more outrageous comments by the Tories. Enoch Powell's racist 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968 came two months after the Labour home secretary, Jim Callaghan, claimed that the 'increased flow' of south Asian migrants from east Africa to the UK was 'continuing and might become a flood'. The influx, he argued, was 'more than we could absorb'. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act followed – and for the first time denied British citizens entry to the country on racial grounds. Callaghan's biographer Kenneth Morgan points out that 'from Callaghan's perspective, Powell's antics were a valuable distraction. They enabled the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced.' In reality, Callaghan (who would become prime minister and was the MP for Butetown) laid the groundwork for the legislation that led to the Windrush scandal. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Urban renewal was one of Black Britain's biggest foes Urban renewal programmes intended to rebuild postwar Britain were, in fact, quite destructive to Black British communities. It's clear why renewal was necessary and desirable to remodel Britain: old, often dangerous housing would be replaced by new homes designed to modernist principles. Yet poor construction meant many of these new properties – for example, Hulme Crescents in Manchester – were not fit for purpose. A knock-on effect was felt by home-owning Black Britons whose properties were bought, often for tiny sums, and who were then relocated in new council accommodation. This significantly weakened the economic potential of Black Britons who could, for example, have used their homes as collateral in order to start a business. This pattern was repeated across the UK where Black communities were often on the frontline of the mass redevelopment phases that were introduced during the 1960s and reappeared in the 80s, first in London Docklands, then in Liverpool and Cardiff. Uncles and aunties had beef One thing that shocked me while writing the book was the amount of beef people from this era had with one another. Some people still don't talk because of things that happened in the 80s. It makes sense. Often they were in campaign groups or activist circles where one, usually male figure, would dominate. That led to some people being marginalised. Other times there were personality clashes, which isn't uncommon in an environment where outspoken, politically driven people come together for a cause. The final chapter is about Black rugby league players, who I assumed would all be friends, united by their position as outsiders in this ultra macho sport. But they often kept intense professional rivalries, in some cases to keep an edge over a competitor, in others because they genuinely despised each other. We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- The Guardian
We Were There by Lanre Bakare review
Lanre Bakare's first book is not just a work of history – it is a necessary and urgent recalibration of the way we think about Black Britain. Too often, mainstream accounts flatten the story, centring it on London, reducing the complexities of life beyond the capital to footnotes. Bakare, a Guardian arts and culture correspondent, challenges this myopia head-on, presenting an expansive, deeply researched work that insists on a broader, richer understanding of Black life. He travels to Bradford, Cardiff, Birmingham and Edinburgh, pulling together art, politics and social movements, with a vision of community life in the 70s and 80s that feels both urgent and long overdue. Bakare opens with northern soul, an unexpected starting point, since it's mostly associated with working-class white youth. But in tracing its rise and the spaces where it flourished – clubs, underground venues, dance halls – and giving voice to its Black devotees, he paints a deft portrait of the social tensions of the time. It's an approach he deploys throughout the book, using cultural moments to explore deeper historical currents. The story of George Lindo, for example, framed for robbery in 1978, is more than an individual tragedy – it is a devastating indictment of Britain's racialised criminal justice system. Readers may know Lindo's name from Linton Kwesi Johnson's poetry ('Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town / But de Bradford blaks dem a rally round'); Bakare reintroduces him in full detail, making his wrongful imprisonment a stark reminder of historical continuities in abusive policing. In a chapter on Scotland, Bakare dismantles the fiction that racism was always an 'English disease', focusing on the 1989 murder of Axmed Abuukar Sheekh in Edinburgh by far-right football hooligans. The subsequent activism of the Lothian Black Forum, which pressured authorities to recognise the racial nature of the attack, becomes a pivot point in the country's anti-racist history. From Handsworth, Birmingham, we get a compelling account of how Rastafarians were demonised in Thatcher's Britain. Bakare traces the genealogy of these arguments to the 1950s, demonstrating the complicity of both the state and the press in shaping public fear. One of the book's strengths is that it reads less like a conventional history and more like a documentary, moving fluidly between historical events, cultural movements and personal narratives. The effect is pleasantly cinematic, as if each chapter is an episode in a larger series about resilience and resistance. The discussion of the first National Black Art Convention – featuring figures such as Marlene Smith, Donald Rodney, Claudette Johnson and Keith Piper – is a case in point. Bakare does not simply recount the event; he embeds it in the broader political and artistic scene, making clear its impact on modern art. What makes We Were There particularly relevant is the way it draws attention to the past's ongoing reverberations. A chapter on the Reno, Manchester's legendary nightclub, leads to a discussion of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, an event that remains crucial in global Black history but is barely acknowledged in Britain's national memory. Elsewhere, he draws a direct line from the Black Environmental Network – founded nearly 40 years ago by Julian Agyeman, a British-Ghanaian secondary school teacher from Hull who took his students on field trips to the Lake District – to today's Black-led environmental justice movements. This is history not as something distant and concluded, but still unfolding. Bakare's achievement has been to fill in at least some of the gaps and silences in the historical record, to put Black Britons back where they have always been. They were indeed there: in the countryside, in the nations and regions, in towns and cities, makers of culture and community – even if the popular imagination has tended to edit them out. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
We Were There by Lanre Bakare review – the forgotten voices of black Britain
'It's so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,' the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country. But what if the contributions of black Britons were not carelessly neglected, but rather, as Lanre Bakare identifies in his estimable first book, We Were There, a history that has been more purposely obscured? The roots of the current Black Lives Matter-fuelled renaissance of black artistic practice in Britain were established decades ago in the relatively under-reported past. Bakare focuses on the Thatcher era of the late 1970s and 80s, 'the most restive period in postwar history', when, he argues, modern black Britishness was forged. The Bradford-born author complicates and deepens this story by shifting attention away from London, writing with quiet enthusiasm and sharp intelligence about black communities, including those in Bradford, Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh. He unearths forgotten stories of black participation in cultural movements such as northern soul, whose popularity coincided with the emergence of reggae sound systems in the 1970s. One such story is that of Steve Caesar, a Leeds-based teenage migrant from St Kitts and winner of the inaugural northern soul dance competition at Wigan Casino in 1974. 'Northern soul helped me find a sort of way of belonging,' says Caesar, and yet his story was excluded from the narratives of a movement historically cast as a white working-class phenomenon by music journalists. Building on the work of cultural historians such as Stuart Hall, Bakare champions advances made by social activists. These include grassroots campaigners who in 1979 overturned the miscarriage of justice suffered by Bakare's fellow Bradfordian George Lindo, imprisoned after he was framed by racist police for a robbery he did not commit. The toppling of the statue of the transatlantic enslaver Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020 was a very public reckoning with the city's toxic past. Bakare shows that this direct action had been rehearsed in Liverpool three decades earlier. In 1982, protesters tied a rope to the statue of the former Liverpool MP William Huskisson, who had links to the Atlantic slave trade, and dragged it to the ground. Bakare puts that toppling into the context of the riots in Liverpool 8 (Toxteth) the previous year. The violence was sparked by police brutality, neglect and the kind of prejudicial thinking expressed by Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of the riots, which she characterised as the unlawfulness of young men 'whose high animal spirits' had 'wreak[ed] havoc' on the city. Bakare ably demonstrates the key disadvantage faced by black people – a lack of information about their predecessors. In my experience, the interventions and successes of our forebears have been cynically obscured, creating the impression that nothing had come before. This discontinuation has often followed short-term initiatives by white cultural gatekeepers who pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment, which only lasts until the novelty wears off and the next worthy group emerges to attract their attention. We Were There acknowledges the true tapestry of British culture by shining a light on committed activists/artists, such as the documentarian Bea Freeman, the producer of They Haven't Done Nothing, a film about the aftermath of the 1981 riots. But the publication of books about the forgotten cultural history of black Britons can only come about if commissioning editors recognise previous blind spots. We Were There bridges the gaps to missing links and admirably achieves what it sets out to provide: further evidence of 'Black people's influence on the UK'. If these stories are only shown in isolation, 'they can be dismissed as curiosities', writes Bakare, 'that don't alter our sense of what constitutes British culture'. We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain by Lanre Bakare is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
