"There's still this hangover that has to be seen through everything the prism of enslavement"

HAKIM ADI speaks to Rhiannon Davies about his wide-ranging study of the experiences of African and Caribbean people in Britain, from the height of the Roman empire to the modern day

- HAKIM ADI

Rhiannon Davies: Your new book covers African and Caribbean people in Britain from Roman times right up to the 21st century. Why did you decide to focus on such a long period?

Hakim Adi: The aim is obviously to create something that is going to be useful to readers, so you do need to present the entire history. And I also wanted to showcase the latest research. The key book in the recent period is Peter Fryer’s Staying Power, which was published nearly 40 years ago, and while lots of work has been done by various people since that came out, the history hasn’t been presented in its entirety. So I wanted to sum up that research and try and build on it, while also giving recognition to what others had done. Sometimes, people write histories and it appears almost as though they discovered everything. That’s never the case.

Thinking about the wider history, because of the kind of society we live in, all of it is related. Technically speaking, you could say Cheddar Man – the skeleton of a man who lived in Britain about 10,000 years ago – isn’t part of this history in the sense that he came neither from Africa or from the Caribbean, at least not directly. But he still fits into this history, because he gives us a new way of looking at how black people are perceived, and the relationship, if you like, between Britishness and blackness.