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British Nigerians and Politics and Activism

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British Nigerians and Politics and Activism

A piece of research by Irina Costin 

Toyin Agbetu, also known as Oluwatoyin Agbetu (b. Hackney, London, 1969)

Dr Toyin Agbetu is a Lecturer of Social Anthropology at UCL, filmmaker, musician, social rights activist and the founder of the Pan-Africanist, grassroots organisation Ligali. 

As a scholar and an activist, Agbetu combines his practice in the university halls with community education work across his native Hackney in East London. In parallel with his teaching and doctoral research on local and institutional activism, Toyin has worked as an educator at Centerprise co-operative Dalston, a historical Black British cultural centre and independent publishing house. Sadly, the centre closed in 2012 following a one-year-long campaign led by Agbetu and others to prevent eviction amidst rampant gentrification in Hackney.   

Ligali was founded in 2000, initially conceived as a means of combating the negative portrayal of African people in the British media by intensely monitoring all of their output. Since its inception, the organisation has expanded significantly to include divisions focused on historical research, media affairs, campaigns for community issues, and youth development.   

In 2007, on the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, Ligali produced the documentary Maafa: Legacy, which examined the academic perspective that British slavery was merely trade. In a similar vein, the production dubbed the series of state events memorialising the Act as a ‘Wilberfest’. This term refers to the overwhelming focus on celebrating the UK’s role in abolition by punning the name of the English abolitionist William Wilberforce. To bring attention to these realities, Agbetu staged a protest at Westminster Abbey on the 27th of March, intended to disrupt the official services. Slipping past security guards in the Abbey, he walked to the church altar and, standing three metres away from the monarch, addressed the Queen with the words: ‘You should be ashamed!’. He was swiftly removed by the police and arrested, only for the charges to be dropped later. The demonstration caused a stir in the media, with coverage often referring to the protest as the gesture of a crazed man. In an article written shortly after for The Guardian, Agbetu explained that his actions allowed the collective voice of the African-Caribbean community to be heard amidst the state service, ‘a commemorative ritual of appeasement and self-approval.‘ [1] 

Oku Ekpenyon (b. London, UK) 

Oku Ekpenyon MBE is a historian, teacher, cultural activist, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She has been a prominent community campaigner in London since the mid-1990s. Ekpenyon’s commitment to heritage advocacy has been deeply intertwined with her role as the head of history at a London secondary school, which inspired her to challenge and reform the curriculum’s limitations concerning black history. 

One of Ekpenyon’s accomplishments was her 2005 campaign for the Royal Mail to issue commemorative stamps, marking the bicentenary of the Act that abolished the transatlantic trafficking of African people. As an active member of the Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA), she has also effectively lobbied for the installation of a permanent portrait and a blue plaque dedicated to the British-American actor Ira Aldridge at the Old Vic Theatre in Waterloo, renowned for his performances there of Shakespearean characters during the 1820s. 

Oku Ekpenyon is the daughter of actor and teacher Ita Ekpenyon. Ita, a headteacher in Calabar, Nigeria, journeyed to London in 1928 to study law. During the Second World War, Ita volunteered as an air raid warden within the government civil defence organisation Air Raid Precautions (ARP), running shelters, advising his community, radio broadcasting and helping with rescue work. Recently, Oku Ekpenyon edited and re-published her father’s 1943 pamphlet ‘Some Experiences of an African Air-Raid Warden,’ which details some racist incidents he had experienced during air raids. Alongside a collection of his radio programs and diaries, the book includes a supplementary appendix of historical resources and learning exercises designed for children. In Oku’s words, this publishing effort aims to illuminate the repressed history of individuals from former British colonies who have significantly contributed to shaping the nation: ‘People like my father, the contributions they made to the war effort and their willingness to serve, are all too often overlooked and forgotten, neither valued nor appreciated. Their commitment both during the years of conflict and those immediately after the war were vital to Britain.’ The book proved pivotal as source material for Lucy Worsley’s 2021 BBC docudrama “Blitz Spirit,” commemorating Ita’s life alongside the experiences of five other Londoners who lived, worked, and volunteered during the war. 

Ekpenyon’s most enduring campaign, spanning over two decades, is the Memorial2007 project. The project aims to erect Britain’s first permanent memorial honouring enslaved Africans and their descendants, to be placed in Hyde Park. She expressed: ‘The wealth created by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean contributed to putting the ‘Great’ into Great Britain, and yet there is no recognition in this country of their input. That is why they are deserving of a memorial.’ Today a registered charity and an educational resource, Memorial2007 has yet to be unveiled. Without government support, the project relies on community funding to finally materialise.  

In recognition of her tireless dedication, she was awarded an MBE in 2010 for voluntary service in preserving the history of Black British people. 

  Bibliography: 

Martha Osamor, Baroness Osamor (b. Delta State, Nigeria, 1940) 

A Labour politician, community leader and MP, Martha Osamor’s work spans five decades of activism for working-class welfare, civil rights campaigner and community organising. Believing that one must get involved and participate, she had always joined a union wherever she worked. For example, through her career in the Labour Party (joined in 1980), Baroness Osamor has been active within Unions as part of the NUT, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, in positions such as Chair, Equalities Officer and Race Committee member. She was elected to the Haringey Council in 1986/87 and started campaigning for the United Black Women’s Action Group’s causes to be brought up in the Party. In 2020, she was elected to the House of Lords, serving as an MP ever since. 

The beginnings of UBWAG 

In 1963, Baroness Osamor left her teaching career in Nigeria to join her husband in the UK, who was studying to regain the law qualifications he had achieved in colonial Nigeria. With limited resources as a student, the couple lived in a small council estate room in Tottenham, with one little kitchen and no bath. Following his sudden death in 1972 in a car accident, Osamor – suddenly a single working mother of 4 – started organising with other women in Campsbourne Estate, Tottenham, around issues such as childcare and social politics of living in a council estate (overcrowding, the tenant’s room, the after-school club). Gaining support and interest, the group became the United Black Women’s Action Group – UBWAG (which, by the end of the 1970s, became part of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent). 

The UBWAG met every third Sunday in the local community centre and discussed ways to campaign for issues such as children’s education, racism in schools, issues around Residents’ Associations, etc. In Osamor’s words, UBAWG mainly used a ‘basic political approach, which is a mixture of creating alliances/ agreements whilst still pushing for one’s cause.’ She underlines the importance of unity within any movement and, at an individual level, the importance of being involved in one’s community to have a say (be it a trade union, tenant’s association, a real community, etc.).[1] 

First steps in the Labour Party 

The UBWAG’s activities and involvement in the local council led Osamor to party politics. In 1977, she was hired as a community activist at the Tottenham Law Centre (in an effort to reach out to black tenants in the area). She joined the Socialist Worker’s Party since the Labour Party was not interested in taking up the kind of issues she was campaigning for. Even though her work remained rooted around her locality, the UBWAG was steadily building up into a prominent activist group, eventually to become an international solidarity movement – much to the dislike of the Labour Party: ‘leadership wasn’t happy with us particularly over the international connections we were making by inviting Martin McGuinness and Bernadette Devlin from Ireland, the Black Consciousness Movement from South Africa, over Mandela linking up with Palestine […] So, we weren’t just an ordinary tenants’ association, we were building it as an international solidarity movement.’ [2] Scepticism culminated in 1989 when the Baroness was denied the nomination for a parliamentary by-election in Vauxhall – despite her eight party nominations (for comparison, Kate Hoey, who won the candidacy, had only one nomination). 

The Broadwater Farm Defense Campaign 

Osamor started unionising the community at Broadwater Farm around 1981, way before the name became national news following the death of Cynthia Jarrett, the riot in 1985 and the harassment and miscarriages of justice after PC Blakelock was killed. Leading the local tenant’s movement together with Dolly Kiffin, Osamor set up the Youth Association, a woman’s centre, a community laundrette, and a day nursery and converged a boarded-up pub into a centre for enterprising workshops. Following the events of 1985, Kiffin and Osamor organised the Broadwater Farm Defense Campaign. 

  

Martha Osamor’s work and activism have left an indelible mark on society and serve as an excellent example of what can be accomplished through active participation and involvement in one’s community. 

Bibliography: 

Obi B. Egbuna (b. Ozubulu, Nigeria, 1938 – d. Washington DC, USA, 2014)

Playwright, political and social activist, and essayist, Obi Egbuna moved to London to study law in 1961 and was involved politically from early on. Around the same time, he became a member of the Committee of African Organisations (CAO), which included, amongst others, WASU, the group that had organised Malcolm X’s visit to Britain in 1965. In 1966, Egbuna went on an extended ‘grand tour’ to the United States, where he ‘tramped the Black ghettos of America and delved into the soul of the grassroots’ and visited, amongst others, the headquarters of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta, Georgia, encountering young militants and grassroots movements for the first time.[1] These events will eventually lead to the founding of the Universal Coloured People’s Association (UCPA) to fight for the racial equality (political and social) of British people of Afro-Caribbean and South-Asian descent. A total of 85 members (3 women and 82 men) were part of its founding on the 5th of June 1967 in Notting Hill, electing a 12-members committee with Egbuna as the President and Roy Sawh – Guyanese orator – as second in command. 

 

Many of the UCPA’s founding members have been meeting weekly, on Sunday nights, at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner (a historical public oratory site for figures like Marcus Garvey and Karl Marx). Regular speakers included Egbuna himself, Roy Sawh, Dominican activist Eddie LeCointe, and the infamous Trinidadian revolutionary Michael X; their speeches on Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism pulled a big crowd.[2] Reflecting on his father’s life and legacy, Obi Egbuna Jr. remarked: “My father’s political activity was shaped by the social climate. Walter Rodney and his brother Eddie were there [London in the 1960s], Fela Kuti was there studying music, Tony Martin the Garveyite was there, and Maurice Bishop was there studying law.” [3]  

*** 

Back in the summer of 1967, the newly formed UCPA will be radically changed by a visit of the SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) to London. During that trip, Carmichael spoke at the Dialectics of Liberation conference at the Roundhouse but also took the stand at Speaker’s Corner to address UCPA members. Many future Black Panthers (such as Darcus Howe, Farrukh Dhondy, Tony Soares, and Sam Sagay) remembered listening to Carmichael’s speeches in London. Egbuna, as well, was inspired by them and sought to align his movement’s aims and strategy with that of Black Power urban resistance in the US. At about the same time, the arrest of four UCPA members at Speaker’s Corner (together with the Home Office issuing a travel ban on Carmichael) will finally prompt Egbuna to initiate the first Panther organisation outside the US officially.[5] As such, the Association soon launched a new manifesto titled Black Power in Britain: A Special Statement. It laid out how Black Power might look in Britain, particularly drawing its connections to global African anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism struggles.[6] 

In April 1968, immediately after Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Egbuna resigned from UCPA over concerns about its political and ideological weakness, arguing that the stronger wave of racism in Britain necessitated a more organised response. Together with a UCPA faction, he immediately started the British Black Panther Movement (soon to become the Black Panther Party – BPP). Egbuna adopted the American Panthers’ symbols (military jackets, berets and raised fists) and vanguardist strategies. They fired radical pamphlets, newsletters and zines, addressing head-on Met’s violence against Black citizens and institutional racism in Britain while delineating a call-to-arms message and organising public demonstrations. The Panthers’ day-to-day activities included street patrolling and fieldwork around London, going door-to-door, talking to people, distributing materials, and selling their manifesto.  

  *** 

The Panthers’ actions caught the eye of the police and entered the surveillance range of The Special Branch (the Met’s intelligence arm); in an effort to curtail their activism, Egbuna became the scapegoat. In July 1968, the writer and two other Panthers, Peter Martin and Gideon Dolo, were arrested at the Speaker’s Corner under the phoney charge of orchestrating a murder plot against officers. As evidence, the BPP pamphlet What to Do If Cops Lay Their Hands On A Black Man At The Speaker’s Corner was cited, alleged to have been turned in by an ally printer-turned-traitor. Encouraging collective self-defence against the police force, the publication read: “The moment the cops lay their hands on a Black brother, it is the duty of [the] Black crowd [to] surge forward like one big Black steam roller to catch up with the cop … till the brother is rescued, freed and made to flee at once.” [9] The incident increased police stop-and-searches of Black activists in Hyde Park and across London. The exaggerated response of the Metropolitan to the Panthers’ activity was sparked by fear and suspicion, muses BBP member Sam Sagay: “They were afraid of us”. 

While Egbuna’s role in the BPP was short-lived, his actions ignited others to organise in the fight against police brutality and racial equality in Britain. After Egbuna’s bogus trial and incarceration, the Party evolved autonomously and relocated from Notting Hill to Brixton. Leadership was assumed in 1970 by Althea Jones, a Trinidad-born doctoral student at UCL, and the Panthers Movement’s terms were re-shaped towards grassroots organising – a mass-solidarity movement that agitated for global revolution by confronting imperialism. The new BPP published ‘Statement on Obi Benedict Egbuna’, in which they distanced themselves from Egbuna’s ideology and issued their grievances with the former leader (particularly regarding his perceived preference for media spotlight over involvement with the day-to-day struggles of the community). Still, Egbuna’s vision of appropriating and adapting Black Power and the Black Panther Model in Britain with Pan-Africanism was foundational for the BPP moving forward. Egbuna’s, Dolo’s and Martin’s trial was used to draw attention to police and judicial racial mistreatment, and the Panthers generated public opposition to their arrests. Despite the Party’s efforts to rally support for Egbuna’s, Dolo’s and Martin’s cases, the three men were held without bail for six months. Ultimately, Dolo and Martin were acquitted, and Egbuna received a 3-year suspended sentence. While awaiting trial, he released his account of the history of the Black Power Movement in the UK: Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (1971), a collection of short stories, novellas and non-fiction essays. 

After being freed in late 1972, Egbuna returned to Nigeria and became director for state television and the Writer’s Workshop. Many ex-BBP members followed a similar path, returning to their home countries after finishing their studies in Britain: ultimately, their predominant concern was African politics. [10] The BBP provided extensive resources to support anti-colonial movements throughout Asia and Africa. Its primary focus was to liberate remaining colonies while engaging in activism concerning the ‘secondary decolonisation’ of numerous ex-colonies’ political, economic, and cultural domains. These concepts of internationalism and anti-colonialism played a central role in shaping a distinct Black British political identity.  

[1] Obi Egbuna, “Letter from Brixton Prison,” Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain, (London: MacGibbon & Kee), p.79 

[2] As recounted by former Panther Sam Sagay in a 2020 interview with Bryan Knight for Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/7/they-were-afraid-of-us-the-legacy-of-britains-black 

(accessed 02/07/2023). 

[3] Quoted in the San Francisco Bay View, ‘Interview with Obi Egbuna Jr: Looking at the life of freedom fighter Obi Egbuna Sr.’ (March 2014):  https://sfbayview.com/2014/03/looking-at-the-life-of-freedom-fighter-obi-egbuna-sr/ (accessed 12/07/2023). 

[4]https://qmhistoryjournal.wixsite.com/qmhj/post/understanding-the-achievements-of-the-black-power-movement-in-the-uk (accessed 13/07/2023) 

[6] UCPA special pamphlet written by Obi Egbuna, Black Power in Britain: A Special Statement (10 September 1967) 

[9] Obi Egbuna, What to Do If Cops Lay Their Hands On A Black Man At The Speaker’s Corner (1968) 

[10] See the interview with former Panther Sam Sagay in 2020 by Bryan Knight for Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/7/they-were-afraid-of-us-the-legacy-of-britains-black  (accessed 02/07/2023). 

Bibliography: 

Dr Adeshola Mos-Shogbamimu (b. London, England, 1975) 

Shola Mos-Shogbamimu is a British-Nigerian lawyer, writer, journalist and activist living and working in London. Her work is concerned with teaching intersectional feminism, resistance and critique of government policy (particularly regarding gender and diversity). She has also organised several social campaigns; for example, she has been particularly involved in the Women’s March London).   

Dr Mos-Shogbamimu is recognised for her willingness to engage in public discourse on important topics. She has been a prominent voice in discussions about feminism, racism, and other forms of inequality. As such, she has contributed articles to mainstream publications such as The Guardian, The Independent and Huffington Post, to name a few, in conjunction with writing for her periodical, Woman in Leadership (founded in 2016). Her recently published debut book, This is Why I Resist: Don’t Define My Black Identity, was a success, and explores the roots of racism in the UK and the US while demanding change and action against all forms of white supremacy. She believes everyone is an activist and has the power to impact and change within their sphere of influence.[1]  

In February 2023, Mos-Shogbaminu made public several death threats against herself and her family, received in a chilling letter from the neo-Nazi organisation National Action (established in 2013 and proscribed across the UK since 2016). Viciously titled ‘We are watching you,’ the letter accused her of making a ‘shabby living’ out of criticising and ‘race grifting’ against white Europeans.[2] The threats came after Dr Mos-Shogbaminu had spoken publicly on the death of American Tyre Nichols, explaining on Sky News how white supremacism shapes the policing and judicial systems in the UK and the United States.    

[1]The letter’s frightening and violent title read: ‘This is National Action London Cell – We are watching you’. Quoted in https://www.complex.com/life/a/sanj-patel/dr-shola-mos-shogbamin-neo-nazi-letter-threat – Sanj Patel, ‘British-Nigerian Activist Threatened By Neo-Nazi Group In ‘Chilling’ Letter’, Complex UK (21 February 2023) (accessed 26/06/2023). 

[2]  ‘In conversation with Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu’, LSE Black History Month programe (27th of October 2020) https://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=e3c775c8-ab3b-4607-bec6-49e309f83e9c (accessed 25/06/2023) 

Bibliography: 

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