Belonging in Europe - The African Diaspora and Work

Caroline Bressey,Hakim Adi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317989752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia del lavoro

This publication does not just mark the presence of black people in Europe, but brings research to a new stage by making connections across Europe through the experience of work and labour. The working experience for black peoples in Europe was not just confined to ports and large urban areas – often the place black people are located in the imagination of the European map both today and historically. Work took place in small towns, villages and on country estates. Until the 1800s enslaved Africans would have worked alongside free blacks and their white peers. How were these labour relations realised be it on a country estate or a town house? How did this experience translate into the labour movements of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions the essays in this collection address, contributing to new understandings of European life both historically and today.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Introduction

Belonging in Europe

The European myths about identity and nationalism, citizenship and ownership, are the building blocks for Fortress Europe. While the latest wave of African incomers are found washed upon a Sicilian beach when the tide goes out: bloated, breath-less, anonymous.¹

The aim of this collection is to highlight the possibility of comparative histories of the African diaspora in Europe by assembling research focusing on various European countries that is not usually published in a single volume. The research brought together here owes much to the authors who have confronted the historical myth that there is no history of the African diaspora in Europe before 1945. It also seeks to build on the work of all those who have previously attempted to highlight the history of the African diaspora in Europe such as the pioneering work of Hans Debrunner. Debrunner’s Presence and Prestige: A History of Africans in Europe before 1918 was published over 30 years ago but historians have, for a variety of reasons, found it difficult to follow the path that he charted. Indeed, since its publication there have been few works that have focused on the African diaspora in Europe.² Instead, historians have tended to concentrate on deepening the study of the African diaspora in specific countries, such as Fryer’s Staying Power, on Britain and Ndiaye’s recent work La condition noire, on France.

In addition the research on the representation of black people in European art has proved fruitful. Allison Blakely’s work on Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society and the Image of the Black in Western Art are well-known examples.³ Exhibitions such as ‘Black Victorians’ and ‘Black is Beautiful’ have provided fruitful avenues of research and the exhibitions have acted as successful interventions into European historical narratives.⁴ However, aside from studies focused on the history of art, the majority of historical research remains focused within the confines of European national (and their corresponding imperial) boundaries.⁵ One obvious reason for this trend is the difficulty associated with translation and the fact that historical research is normally only written and published in one language. However, it is also the case that even the study of the African diaspora within individual European countries is marginalised and pursued with difficulty and this has made wider pan-European research and collaboration even more difficult.

The papers in this collection were brought together as the result of a conference, ‘Belonging in Europe: The African Diaspora and Work c1400– 1945’ convened by The Equiano Centre, University College London as part of the events marking the bicentenary of the parliamentary abolition of the British Slave Trade in November 2007. The conference itself was inspired by an event that had taken place at University College Falmouth earlier in the year. ‘Belonging in Britain. New Narratives/Old Stories: “race,” heritage and cultural identity’ was a symposium that focused on debates around ‘race’, cultural heritage and belonging. It sought to explore what belonging in Britain means through case studies of the work of a range of cultural practitioners including the photographer Ingrid Pollard, the curator Carol Tulloch, heritage critic Jo Litter and Caroline Bressey. The intention of the organisers was to ‘confront “old stories,” myths and assumptions and sketch out new narratives and possibilities’.⁶

Borrowing from the title of the Falmouth symposium, ‘Belonging in Europe’ aimed to move the discussion of black Europeans beyond an acceptance of a geographical presence in order to consider an assessment of the extent to which black Europeans shared or experienced a sense of belonging in Europe. The conference sought to gather together those who were investigating the lives of the African diaspora through their experiences of employment and as members of the working population in various European countries. The decision to create this focus was based upon the idea that the everyday experiences of work, unemployment, discrimination, unionisation and the friendships and politicisation that men and women experienced through work might give researchers a sense of the degree to which men and women of the African diaspora experienced a sense of belonging to and in Europe.

The experiences of members of the African diaspora in Europe were made up of ‘complex processes, involving diverse populations, political and cultural motivations and movements, as well as ambiguous individual strategies’.⁷ Many different personal geographies existed and operated at the same time in the same and parallel places, in small spaces and across regions. As highlighted by high-profile Africans that are the focus of Hondius’ research, there were a number of Africans, particularly those who were part of colonial elites, who did not expect, or wish, to remain in Europe. In addition to these more privileged individuals, there were those who were semi-settled including sailors, those who became settlers (including colonial and cultural elites and sailors amongst them), and then those who were born to settlers.

Several themes for further research emerge from this collection. The individuals recovered by Aitken and in many, but not all, of Chater’s examples, come to our attention because they had for various reasons come into contact with operations of the state. Although the men and women in Bressey’s paper are present in the archive for different reasons they too were ‘highlighted’ in the archive for some reason, rather than having the colour of their skin recorded as a matter of course. Thus the numbers of men and women who remain ‘invisible’ in the archives could be legion but is very difficult to estimate. As a consequence estimating the size of the African population in Europe in any period and how it changed over time will be very difficult if not impossible to calculate. The extent to which this will impact upon the ability to recover new historical geographies of the African diaspora will vary across Europe, depending upon the different apparatus the State used to record ideas of difference within populations. Comparing these technologies of States should provide us with interesting insights into the governmentalities of difference in operation across Europe. However, this will provide little support for those researchers who will have to finely sift through public and private archives in countries where differences of ‘colour’ were not systematically recorded. As a result it may be some time before pan-European comparisons can be made effectively.

However, there are also those individuals who stand out in the archives, and in this collection, because they held highly visible positions in society. Amongst them are men like Olaudah Equiano who settled in Britain, unlike the subjects of Hondius’ research who were in Europe during a similar period, but returned to Africa. Whether more Africans decided to settle in Britain (or were able to settle in Britain) compared to other European countries, during the eighteenth century, is a potential avenue for further research. Their potential differences in experience also highlights another question for researchers –the extent to which common time periods for the history of the African diaspora in Europe, even Western Europe, can be established, or if it is even desirable to do so. Most historical research has focused on the consequences of European intervention in Africa, such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism in the making of a modern African diaspora in Europe. In the future research might focus on the period before 1500 in order to establish the extent of the earlier African diaspora, and in particular the significance for Europe of the African presence in the Iberian peninsular.

A group of men and women who attracted inconsistent and often conflicting forms of attention were those who found themselves fighting in Europe during the two World Wars, the second of which is the focus of Schaffer’s paper, as well as those who were caught up in the political events which redefined Europe between the Wars. Here Adi and Aitken illustrate that the decade directly following the end of the First World War is critical for our understandings of the political and cultural transformations that took place amongst the African diaspora. All three papers also highlight the need for greater research to be undertaken on hardening racist attitudes that appear to have developed in Europe after the first world.

Work undertaken by Adi and Creighton suggests that members of the European African diaspora met at international events such as Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association convention held in New York in 1924, and the pan-African congresses organised by Du Bois and at meetings held under the auspices of the Communist International during this period. Some of these activists stayed in touch when they returned to their respective countries in Europe but more research needs to be undertaken to establish how such meetings contributed to the development of pan-Africanist politics and culture.

Furthermore, how did the geographies of print cultures attached to these movements impact upon the circulation of ideas? To what extent were journals such as Continents (the journal of The Ligue Universelle de Défense de la Race Noire, France⁸), the Negro Worker (a Communist journal published in English and French from several European cities), the bilingual Review of the Black World (Paris) or Wasu (journal of the West African Students’ Union published in London) read by a pan-European readership? How important were the experiences and criticisms of racism published within these papers and others, yet to be recovered or fully interpreted, in the development of national and diasporic ideas of human rights, pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism? To what extent did European governments exchange information on activist men and women such as Garan Kouyaté, Jomo Kenyatta and the Nardal sisters who contributed to these debates? How can the (un)successful experiences of using state/national archives be shared by historians, since it is sometimes the case that archives in one country shed light on the history of the African diaspora elsewhere in Europe?

Not all members of the African diaspora had access to such high levels of self-controlled mobility employed by early twentieth-century pan-Africanists, but those with more ordinary experiences of life were also mobile individuals. In this volume Bressey illustrates that ordinary Victorian men and women were employed as nurses and valets who travelled between English-speaking parts of the British Empire. They also found work as entertainers in the pleasure gardens and circuses of nineteenth-century Europe. Amongst the most mobile of the African diaspora were those who worked on the sea. This was a significant form of employment for many black men present in Europe from Equiano and his peers up to (and beyond) the Second World War. The important role of sailors and seamen in the circulation of political ideas is an increasing focus of historians.⁹ An important link between Europe and its colonies, seafarers played an important part in several of the political organisations established in the early twentieth century, as Adi highlights in his contribution to this volume.

European Enlightenment debates on race, published by theorists like Immanuel Kant, give a sense that discussions of racial hierarchy shared common origins within Europe. However, the differing historical developments of racism within Europe are reflected in this collection. The difficulties in defining the ambiguity of race is replicated in the diverse use of the term ‘black’ amongst the authors of this collection. Is this uncertainty a particularly European flexibility? How have different European countries understood ‘Blackness’? Researchers working on archives in Britain, including Chater and Bressey in this collection, have found that many ‘people of colour’ were described as black during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This diversity includes people born in India labelled as Negroes. Certainly, the existence of ‘Bombay Africans’ means that these people might have been Africans (i.e., ‘Negroes’) from India, but the records seem to suggest that there was a very imprecise application of racial categorisations by civil servants. A man from Bombay could be described as a Negro because this perhaps reflected an understanding of otherness rather than a particularly racial identity. ¹⁰ These complex, and as yet little understood, webs of identity are coupled to the fact that many people appear to have had the colour of their skin recorded as an exceptional intervention by a recorder of information, rather than a matter of course. Does this malleable idea of blackness apply to all European countries? If so, how long did it last? How and when did the alignment of blackness with members of the African diaspora become tied?

As BEST stated in 2005:

the history of Black Europeans, whose current number is estimated at eighteen million, still remains mostly unknown. This is a consequence both of the reluctance of many European nations to deal with their colonial history and of the widespread notion that Europe indeed consists of many different ethnicities who however all belong to the same “white race.” Black Europeans are thus often consigned to the role of “foreigner” instead of...