Talking African Writing In London

Africa Writes, the Royal African Society’s annual literature festival, dwelt on the future of black British artists in the new aesthetic.

- Alastair Hagger

June fries itself to an end; London is sticky with the combustible residue of unseasonable heat, lager, and irrational, tabloid-whipped World Cup optimism. It’s too absurd to be an African summer; temperatures above 30 degrees are tearfully embraced, red-raw and half-naked, by the English, with a stunned but gleeful alacrity at the entrance of a jolly, party-starting relative believed long-dead.

A hundred and fourteen years earlier, the Sierra Leonean writer A B C Merriman-Labor, astonished to discover the religious void in the heart of the greatest metropolis on earth, sends a letter home from London in which he decides, with horror and affection, that “the Britons are barbarians and heathens”.

This motif of seeing – by Africans of the British and of British Africans of themselves – is one of the more urgent themes of 2018’s Africa Writes event, the Royal African Society’s annual literature festival. Merriman-Labor’s biographer for An African in Imperial London, Danell Jones, is discussing ‘African Literary Figures in Georgian & Edwardian London’ at the British Library with Ade Solanke, author of the play Phillis in London (about the visit to London in 1773 of the “prodigy, poet, celebrity and slave” Phillis Wheatley), and the writer S I Martin, who “works with museums, archives and the education sector to bring diverse histories to wider audiences”.

It’s a crackling and challenging panel, with evocative and haunting subjects as its focus. “Forgotten voices have important things to teach us,” says Jones, echoing Solanke’s entreaty for writers to “exhume these stories” and Martin’s to “not enshrine, but internalize”.