Good evening, all. And welcome to Big Tent. Live events, part of the humanities cultural programme itself.
One of the founding stones of the new Steven A. Schwarzman centre for the Yoni's is here in Oxford.
I'm Wes Williams. I'm professor of French Literature. And I'm also the director of Torch.
And it's my enormous pleasure to say that we're coming to you live from the Ultimate Picture Palace,
the excellent independent cinema on the Cowley Road here in Oxford.
I'm also delighted to welcome the treasure or the first member of the discussion for tonight's discussion.
Alec Obama is a writer, historian and the critic.
She's professor of world literature at the University of Oxford,
a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
And she was also a former member for a former director of Torch.
Her most recent books are Post-colonial Politics 2008 and just last year to the Volcano.
She's currently on a British Academy senior research fellowship working on a project entitled Southern Imagining.
We're here to discuss the themes, the questions, the issues arising from the book.
Four opinion with the author himself, Johnny Pitch, and in conversation,
both Ellika and Shimako to go to associate professor of African politics here at the university.
I'll hand over to Ellika now and let her introduce the other speakers in the conversation.
Over to you, Elica. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Wes.
And thank you to everyone at home or at work or wherever you are for joining us.
We're all social distancing while safely live streaming this event at the UPC.
And we hope that you are all safe and well and surviving wherever you are in the world.
Tonight is a really exciting opportunity to be with both Johnny and Cemre Kai and to discuss Johnny's amazing and award winning book,
FFP and Notes from Black Europe. As you heard, I'm Atika Burma.
I'm your chair, and I'm also the investigator on the Righteous Make World's Web site project, which is bringing you this event along with Torch.
And the recording will here off to be available through Torch and through the Writers Make World's Web site.
In a moment, I'm going to introduce my fellow panellists.
But before I do so, I want you to give a very quick tour through the next hour so that you will know what to expect after these introductions.
Johnny will. And we're very happy that he agreed to this. It's great.
He will read an excerpt from the book to give a flavour of its narrative of its rhythms.
And this reading will be accompanied by photographs from the text.
The book is illustrated throughout with Johnny's own photographs. And we wanted to give everyone a sense of the images and the text working together.
We're really grateful to Johnny for having prepared this slideshow for us.
After that, we'll turn to the conversation with Samukai and I.
And then after about twenty five minutes of conversation, more or less, we will open for questions from you, the audience out there.
So do send your questions in as as as they come up.
As they bubble up. So it's now my pleasure to introduce first Johnny Pitts.
Johnny is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist and the author of Afra Pian.
It's a beautifully written Debu work, which explores African and European identity.
It's received numerous awards, including the Decibel Penguin Prise,
the Jilek Prise and also the 2000 2020 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.
There is actually an exhibition of some of the photographs in Affer PIN, which is currently in Amsterdam, one of the cities that features in the book.
And Afra Pian is also being translated into a range of major European languages, including French and Spanish.
Johnny Presents on BBC Radio four is Open Book Programme, and he also contributes words and images to outlets like The Guardian and the New Statesman.
Turning now to my colleague, CIMIC Chegutu.
As you heard, he is an associate professor of African politics and a fellow of St Antony's College.
Samukai I is interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa,
and his first book, The Political Life of an Epidemic, came out this year, 2020.
And as you can tell from the word epidemic, it was a timely publication in this strange year that we've spent.
Prior to joining the Academy CIMIC, I was a medical doctor in the UK.
His national health service, the NHS,
and his new projects are about Africa's place in the global politics of outbreak response and a book about nation, exile and belonging.
So, Gianni Samukai, thank you so much for joining us this evening.
And and for this conversation, I'm really looking forward to it.
First of all, as a kind of warm up, I'd like to invite Gianni, please, to read from Afra Pian along with the images.
Thanks, Gianni. Thank you. It's a great pleasure and honour to be here.
Initially I saw Afro Pian as something of a utopian alternative to the doom and gloom that surrounded the black image in Europe in recent years.
And an optimistic group forward. I wanted to work on a project that connected and presented Afro Europeans as lead
actors in our own story and with all this glorious Afro Pian imagery in mind.
I imagine this would result in some kind of coffee table photo book with snippets
of feel good text to accompany a series of trendy photographic portraits.
There would be images of the success stories of black Europe,
young men and women who street style effortlessly and elegantly articulated and empowered black European mood.
It was a visit to the jungle in colour in 2016, the encouragement to reconsider this approach over some fragrant milky Arabic tea.
Hisham, a young man from Sudan who run one of many small, remarkably organised cafes,
has been living in the jungle for 10 months, told me how he'd lost everything.
He had no surviving family members, had painful memories of the past and tremulous visions of the future.
And we're stuck in this limbo land between Africa and Europe home.
A little of which had miraculously fashioned in his cushion covered cafe and then anonymity as I left his creaking plywood premises.
He suggested that I write about his story about life in the jungle, a request.
I was nervous about. This man was intelligent, articulate and literate.
Wouldn't it be better that he write about the jungle himself?
Maybe I could help attract attention to his writing or publish his story on the website I run.
But what did I personally know about seeing friends massacred, fleeing war,
hiding from a life in shipping containers or on Ill-Equipped boats in order to arrive penniless?
A bunch of cold wind swept shacks in the hinterlands of northern France, apart from what he was telling me after exchanging contact details.
I left the jungle on my bicycle and slowly realised that I was being watched and
followed through the blustery streets of Calais by the French military police,
the John Donnally.
Attempting to enter the white gates of the port to catch my ferry back to the UK, I was stopped before I could even get to passport control.
Searched asked for my I.D., where I was going, where I'd come from, how long I'd been away and why.
Finally, after more questioning and looks of suspicion, I was allowed to enter an official compound.
I'd seen other brown skinned men of my age look longingly at from a distance.
I was in. They were out on like the people I met in the jungle.
I wasn't so much living in limbo. I was living with Liminality. I was in because I had I.D. I had I.D. because I was born and raised in England.
Had a history connected to Europe. Knew how things run.
And yet within this piece of geography, this idea of Europe, I was frequently reminded that I wasn't all the way in one Remembrance Day a day.
I've come to dread for the way spikes and ugly nationalism, which I sometimes find myself on the receiving end of.
I was hit with the old chestnut and told Go back to where you came from.
By a middle aged man red faced with rage and racism, my skin colour disguised various facts,
such as my grandfather having fought for Britain behind enemy lines in the Second World War and winning a medal for doing so.
My skin had disguised my European. This European was still being used as a synonym for why,
if Afro Pian was something that could attempt to address this issue, I needed to find what lay behind or beyond its brand.
Thanks so much, Tony. And that does really give us a lovely flavour.
I think of the book and that kind of teetering between limbo and liminality that you trace.
And it actually bleeds rather effectively into into my kind of ice breaker question.
My if my open a question, as we've been hearing ever pian traces your journeys through some of the major cities of
Europe and your encounter with black communities and their histories in those cities,
often buried histories, invisible histories, obscure histories.
It's a deeply personal journey, but it also deeply minds collective black history and then draws those threads of personal and political together.
Could you just tell us a bit about your own journey in writing the book?
I mean, you talk about that in the book. You know, you take your Eurail pass, you you go to these different cities and you stay in hostels.
But maybe it just give us a sense of how that narrative came together and how you
then saw that that story related to this much bigger story about African Europe.
Well, this journey happened, you know, mostly in 2011.
You know, it's quite a while ago that took the journey. And before Brexit was on the table.
But I started to notice disjuncture between everything that I felt held me together as it was especially pronounced after the 2008 financial crisis.
I think whenever there are economic problems, you start to notice a rise in racism.
People are looking for scapegoats, you know, anywhere but the financial institutions.
But even before that, I think really this book emerges out of the rubble of New Labour.
And I think that there were certain there was a kind of the near of inclusion under Tony Blair's reign that I think I bought into in the early days,
at least certainly before the Iraq war. And I think we all were quite optimistic as young people saw that entering the world,
leaving school and entering into Tony Blair's Britain, that Cool Britannia moment, Britain felt Forward-Looking and multicultural.
And US gradually saw that dissolve under Tony Blair's leadership, actually.
And and as as this country start creaking, I started to notice language being used by people I would once called friends,
especially my my white working class friends I grew up with. And just in general, I start to know goodwill.
I start to notice goodwill crumbling a little bit. So in some ways, maybe this is a dramatic way to say it.
But I think this journey was a journey of of of survival.
It was feeling like this island I'm living on no longer quite resembled home anymore.
And how could I piece the jigsaw of identity together in a way that would not just make sense for me, but make sense for four other black Europeans.
And then also in a in a certain way, make sense to some of my white friends as well.
This this book is about trying to build bridges and trying to tell stories.
In a nuanced way that will hopefully, after people have read it and change their opinions.
So so I think, yeah, there are a bunch of things that that really contribute to me feeling like I had to just leave this country.
And I wanted to go towards Europe because I found, you know, working as a music journalist.
I was astonished by the obsession, this of Anglophone obsession with America and the states and everybody looking to the states for answers.
Whereas I felt there were other countries dealing with the legacy of colonialism that
might teach black people in Britain how to how to deal with this rise in nationalism.
And also, you know, try and create some kind of narrative of solidarity amongst black communities living in Europe.
On that note of kind of sewing together and music, I'm looking at you some because I know heard you came to ask some questions in that regard.
Absolutely. But I just wanted to begin firstly by congratulating you, Johnny,
on what really is a wonderful book and a book that made for an elegant and poignant companion during locked out to
be able to have imaginative horizons of going on a on a travel on a journey with you while stuck in my living room.
You begin the book by talking about Aphro P.M. as a compelling and powerful word, one that might allow you to feel whole and unhyphenated at you.
Just a moment ago, you were describing this sense and this tension between limbo and liminality, both terms.
Connoting a sense of not quite being there yet, not quite arriving, not yet being whole.
And as I started to read your book with this point of departure, you know, early on in your journey,
as you talk about arriving in Paris, you confront, as you describe it, a kind of disquieting expanse of loneliness and uncertainty.
And this phrase, you know, hit me in the chest as I felt it mirrored my own sense of arriving in Europe as a black teenager coming from Africa.
And as you go on your journey, encountering different iterations of what it means to be black in Europe,
you start to fill this empty expanse with the vastness of this category of Afro Pian,
which is at once very enriching, but really invites me to ask you, where do you land?
At the end of it. How do you wrestle with your own sense of what it means to be a black man in Europe today?
Oh, well, that's that's a great question. Thank you, sir. Okay.
I think Christopher Hitchens, of all people, once said that the end of every book is a departure.
And so for me and I'm not sure I really landed anywhere.
And in the end, I realised that Afro Pian was was less a destination and more of a departure point.
It was it was not a place that I kind of almost began this journey feeling overconfident about what it meant to be black,
what Europe was and what Afro Pian could be.
And that very quickly began to fall apart. I've got to stop saying this because it's not very good selling point from a book.
I often describe my book as a happy failure. And what I mean by that, I suppose, is the you know, the destination wasn't Afro Peire or Afro Pian.
It was more that Afro pin was a kind of portal into into a different way of experience in Europe,
one that contradicted the kind of homogenised travel narratives that you might read from people like,
you know, Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson or John Morris.
John Morris for me is actually quite interesting because she wrote a trilogy called Pax Britannica, which is all about the British Empire.
And as I was reading, it's such an apologist account of empire. But as I was reading it, the one thing I couldn't deny was that it was compelling.
It was an astonishing way to think about or to experience empire.
And I thought, well, if this is an apologist account, one that sort of depicts the empire as it may,
maybe a little bit problematic, but really just a jaunty old uncle trying to do its best.
I thought maybe I could write the shadow side of that narrative, but in equally as compelling a way, you know,
try to try to really enjoy the beauty of language and the beauty of narrative and try to pull people along
with me where even if they didn't agree with what I was saying or or or or completely hated the idea of Afro,
Pian couldn't not keep turning over and and join in.
You know, I want to join in with this journey. So yeah. Afro Pian lessons a place of arrival more as a place of departure.
Yeah. I mean so that comes across very convincingly in the book.
And something that struck me, you know, I have often thought,
well at least I fought for many years after arriving in the UK that Europe with the UK would always be a point of transit before returning to Africa.
It wasn't somewhere that I could ever belong and legitimately claim a black identity.
And I've been revisiting and reworking that idea in the last few years as I begin to build my home here.
And reading your foray into black Europe, I.
Spans this multiplicity around the meanings of blackness and blackness in Europe in a way that I found both recognisable,
but also that, you know, pulled way beyond my own experience of black identity in Europe.
And that was really enriching and encouraging. That's what that's really great to hear,
because I think one thing that I wanted the book to achieve was for four members of the black
community living in Europe who may be alone to just offer a kind of sense of foundation,
you know, to say that there are others. And this is what they're dealing with.
And, you know, I keep thinking about our our relationship to blackness and how we from very different parts of the world,
but we're held together by this sort of notion of blackness. And so I wanted to try and be imaginative and create a word.
You know, it's fluid. It's not monolithic. It's not you know, it is.
But it resonates with you. Then I'm happy. It won't resonate with anybody.
I think there are people in this country, maybe especially with with, let's say,
Jamaican heritage, who my you know, their their sense of identity isn't such a conundrum.
They might feel very attached to the notion of what it means to be from Jamaica.
For me, I wanted to create as a space that that so can sort of slightly wider narrative.
And the other thing we share in common is our mutual love of hip hop, which I greatly appreciated.
The reference is scattered throughout the book.
I mean, you know, very early on, I think it's just an on page six.
You quote the mighty Mos Def, who was a really apt quotation because it ties into what you're just talking about now,
about how in the US, as most deftest commenting, our blackness is often treated in these high and low superlatives.
You know, we are kings or we are paupers. We are queens or we are something quite derogatory.
And as I was thinking about hip hop and the role that hip hop has played in my life,
it's been this tremendous source of communing with black thinkers,
black storytelling and black modes of self-expression, especially when I'm in white spaces.
And now, you know, teaching at Oxford for all that there is to commend this institution.
It's not a place in which hip hop culture particularly thrives.
So it made me think a bit about the kind of intellectual journey that you've been on, how you weave together popular culture,
but you also weave together literature and aspects of social theory neatly tucked away behind the narrative.
And so maybe you could tell us a bit more about how you came to have such an
expansive intellectual repertoire for being able to write a book like this.
I mean, there's an awful lot of learning that's gone into writing this.
Just how did you do it? Thank you.
Ha! I guess I began.
I didn't really begin here. But let's start here. I keep thinking of some of the Harlem Renaissance writers and what was beautiful
about the Harlem Renaissance was how it was a complete scene that was scored.
There was a music. There was a polished political backbone. There was there was art.
There was dance, you know. So it's a complete movement.
And, um. And I think of writers like Langston Hughes, you know, embedded in their words, in their poetry is the sense of jazz.
For me, I'm very much a part of the hip hop generation.
And so it just seemed very obvious to me that that my work should I don't know how much actually comes across,
but even even in the sentence structure, the way I mean, I sometimes use alliterate a little bit too much.
But the sense of of of musicality in my rights, a hope.
Well, it really does come from the sense of from what the Hip-Hop artists were doing.
But even before that, I think one one line that made me want to be a writer.
I mean, one album, really, it was an album by Blackstar.
Most Def and Talib Kweli, which I caught from in the book, which is just an astonishing I mean, it's quite interesting.
I think The Talib Kweli, his brother, teaches law or is a graduate of law at Stanford.
And I think in Talib Kweli we have like a street lawyer. He's sick.
He's got that kind of attention to detail that perhaps his brother took in a different direction.
And then. And you have most death.
And in the album, you know, you have a song like Thieves in the Night, which is about Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
What an amazing way to introduce young. Talib Kweli has this quote where he says, I speak at schools a lot because they say I'm intelligent.
No, it's some dope. If I was, what could be irrelevant? And I just think that's what hip hop did its best, because it can also go the other way, too.
It can encourage a kind of ignorance, but it's best hip hop can open up the worlds of literature,
can open up the world of politics to people who might not otherwise be engaged in the
same way that the Black Panthers tried to do that with somebody like Emory Douglas,
who would depict in visual forms third world world politics to people who might not, although wise, engage with it.
But yeah, there was one line again to go back to Talib Kweli that he says on the album, which is a look in the skies for God.
What you see besides the smog of broken dreams flying away on the wings of the obscene.
And I think this this book is just me trying to do that over and over.
That one line is trying to invoke that in my sentences.
So it's absolutely hip hop was crucial to my life growing up when school was failing me.
Hip hop was there taking me by the hand seen saying you could be a man of letters in a way that my teachers, you know, never did.
I remember in to go on a little bit, but I remember like being upset.
I've always been obsessed with words from a young age, but I remember how my primary school was put in to the lowest set,
even though up my white friend was put into the highest set.
And we both knew that I was the the writer, you know, or the one that was the reader, the the one that was interested in words.
And I remember getting told off at once. I remember the teachers.
She was talking about oxygen. Something no air. No, she talked about air.
I remember saying, oh, miss is is a ubiquitous I just learnt about this word ubiquitous.
And I went to try out as seven or eight year old and she told me to stop showing off for.
And there was that constant sort of sense of of of of, you know, don't get above your station.
You know, James Baldwin talks about this, you know, talks about how, you know, as soon as he was born, the world seemed to take well, look him.
And once upon a broomstick in his hand. And he had to say, I know what you're seeing and I know what you're thinking, but I'm not that person.
For me, hip hop was a place that said, you know, you're not that person.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Can I just come in there on mentioning one of my favourite writers, Toni Morrison, and what you've been saying about words and word craft, Johnny,
and also narrative and people joining you on your journey, readers joining you on your journey is something I often explore with students.
This idea of narrative as I'm writing writing story or writing narrative as a mode of self understanding.
And that thought came to me again and again and reading this book, because, you know,
your journey of your journey through Europe is also a journey of self discovery at first
and the kind of the first half you are kind of wondering and seeking and then the.
Pace really accelerates as you discover MRSA discovered these rich black histories on the Mediterranean and in Lisbon.
And it's really buzzy and music comes back in the end.
The words have this really musical feel to them.
So could you just talk a little bit about narrative and self understanding and that process of of writing as as as as as as.
I mean, sorry to sound naff, but as as kind of discovery, as self discovery and discovery of your community and your context.
Yeah, I think it was I think was Toni Morrison actually, who said I stood at the periphery and claimed a centre.
And and I think the more I travelled on my journey, it was a very tentative start to the journey and I wasn't sure about what I would find.
Somehow you mentioned that that disquiet and expands that lay before me.
And though I mentioned before the Afro Pian wasn't really a place of arrival,
I start to get more confident in my sense of of of where I could find blackness in Europe and and the actually.
The periphery. Yeah. Yeah. Having confidence in claim in the periphery.
A centre, you know. And so by, by the end of the journey I've gone through all these places.
I begin somewhere like Clichy sous Bois which does not feel at all like home, and I feel very much like a foreigner.
But by the end I start to be able to piece together commonalities.
And I think that's one of the virtues of of writing a book, you know, throw from a book of many different points of disjunction, you know, like a map.
You know, Tunisians who had an issue with Somalians I met and Golan's want a problem with cup of Indians, you know.
But if these communities when necessarily always talking to each other in reality through constructs in this book,
I can make them talk to each other through through this through this journey and experience the commonalities.
And so, yeah, I think that in terms of it being a journey discovery, which, you know,
it really was I think it was just empowering to to come face to face with many areas across Europe that were just like the one I grew up in,
you know, and that and an almost like I got the sense of something trans local.
By the end of it, you know, I grew up in Firth Park Multicultural area on the outskirts of Sheffield with these sort of,
you know, convenience stores that sold ingredients that could be put in Ghana and stews.
You know that the kind of geography of my area, I kind of found that all over Europe and that felt very empowering.
One of the encounters that you go into in quite a bit of detail that is written and conveyed with in a riveting manner,
in part because of the urgency of the circumstances that unfolded.
Was your experience with Antifa in Germany and being engaged in protest and thinking seriously about a kind of radical left wing politics,
but also trying to wrestle with the place of black identity on the left?
Now, this is an especially charged political question that we find ourselves wrestling with in 2020,
where to the extent that we take a lead, for instance, from the US, blackness has solidified in many ways as a political identity.
Yet we find in Europe a little bit more disparate or dispersed.
We also find a beleaguered left in many parts of many parts of the Western world trying
to accommodate its commitments to old trade union movement and to the working class,
while at the same time trying to honour the challenges posed in multicultural society and about identity.
So I wonder, just from your experience, you know, in travel and in writing,
how you thought about some of these issues and how you thought about this this politics,
both of identity and of more traditional kind of left wing politics sort of unfolding on the European continent?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
There's a really great conversation between Paul Gilroy and Gary Young where they were talking about political moments that they could.
Anchor themselves to, you know, an eye for Paul Gilroy, it was the Cold War and it was the threat of of nuclear destruction.
And he was and that that mobilised him. You know, he was scared about that and politicised him.
And he wanted to try and work things out. And with Gary Young, he was saying that it was more.
Well, what was going on in South Africa in the 80s and then also the miners strike.
You know, by the time my generation comes around, which were kind of a similar age, as am I.
I feel like the left had been swallowed up a little bit by by the of New Labour.
And I remember to go back to Pogo. He writes he wrote something that was really interesting.
He was talking about how he's old in the mid 90s. He left to go on teaching in the United States.
And when he returned, his old comrades on the left and now suddenly management consultants.
And I just think that the interesting idea of people on the left being management consultants,
you know, and that's kind of what happened with New Labour.
And I think my generation I mean, I'm speaking specifically, I think you probably had a different experience being from Zimbabwe.
But for my generation in Britain, I think we were kind of apolitical.
You know, there was that notion that Francis Fukuyama put to the world about the end of history,
the fall of communism, no alternative vision for the future other than neo liberal capitalism, you know.
And so in my as I came of age,
words like ghetto fabulous were being used was a popular place in London called for Vellis Chic or an awful name for four for a club.
And people were playing at being left.
You know, what did been left wing really mean?
You know, maybe wearing a Che Guevara shirt or, you know, got commodified and there was really there was really no way to be left wing.
And it's interesting for me now to sort of see some of the issues that have emerged during and after Brexit, the financial crisis.
Donald Trump, George Floyd. Black Lives Matter.
You know, there are things that young people can connect to.
It's very obvious that that things aren't right.
I don't know if you remember this, but during the sort of heyday of the noughties to try and call somebody racist,
people would just I mean, there was that notion of always playing the race card. You couldn't call anybody racist full of no money.
They just weren't having it. And you were thought to be some kind of extremist.
Now, I think as the system sort of is unfurled and revealed itself through through through these really charged moments,
it no longer seems an overreaction to say that there is a huge amount of systemic racism in this country.
And so I'm so I'm seeing young people politically engaged in a way that my generation wasn't really on.
And I don't know if that really answers your question, but for me, it's quite it's quite exciting time.
That maybe is comparable with with with the 1980s where where I'm seeing people
organise around these these specific movements in order to create some kind of.
To think, I mean, you know, in America, you know, the word socialism is being used.
That's amazing. For all the things that are going wrong in the world,
that kind of socialism is kind of entering the mainstream is kind of incredible that people even talking about it is incredible.
So that gives me you know, that gives a little bit of room for hope, I think.
I think you're right. And I would say that one of the beautiful things recapturing your book is that in documenting the
diversity of lives of the Africans and other black people that you encounter on your journey,
you know, the when you situate that within a wider political frame,
it becomes very clear that there are these powerful links between history and histories of imperialism,
between various forms of class based on labour exploitation. And, of course, between racial identity.
So I think that this serves, again, as a powerful feeder into a more engaged and progressive politics for a younger generation.
Yeah. I mean, as well as it was for me was it was you know, I'm not a historian, but it was a really interesting way in for me.
To think about history, because I was trying to provide a very contemporary portrait of Europe and of blackness,
and of course I was be naive because to provide a contemporary portrait, you have to you know,
every individual story from the people that I met would you could place that in history.
It didn't just emerge from nowhere. It came with the baggage of history.
And so, you know, the book really could have been initially maybe a third of the size.
Then each story, each individual lost everything that I seen on the ground.
I started to see the shadows and the energies behind it.
And for me, it was a way to make history breathe. I caught a scholar, Michelle Wright, who says, you know, history is not behind us.
It's all around those in changed form, which I think is really interesting.
It ties him, though. Physicists say when they talk, they talk about time as as kind of well,
people don't really actually know what time is, but how it's just different configurations of the same ingredients.
And I think that's a really interesting way to look at history and the history of blackness when trying to portray something that's contemporary.
Absolutely. Trying to draw out that emphasis on what is around us, the history that's around us.
I'd also like to think about the audience all around us listening and enjoying.
And I've got a bunch of questions that are kind of, you know, coming through here on on on my phone.
So is it. Is it okay? John, it's so the way we kind of open arms to questions from the audience.
So so there's one which has a kind of like a bridge question here that that I've picked to just to start us off on this phase.
It's from someone called Chris. And and they say the way you captured, must say, was one of the most striking and beautiful things I've read.
No one has captured the city, the soul of the city, better than that.
Can you tell us a bit about what Marseilles means to you?
Oh, yeah. I'm so glad somebody asked the question about Marseilles. I get really romantic about my in the book.
I probably allow myself to be a little bit too romantic about my.
It is a city with a lot of issues, a lot of corruption, human trafficking, drug trafficking, very pronounced right wing presence as well.
Some that I found quite interesting, though, is that the locals of a spokesman for the National Front in Marseilles,
I don't if it's a little scene, but was it was a black guy. And so I'll say, you know.
I mentioned I'm from a place called First Park in Sheffield, which is very multicultural.
A huge Yemeni community, big Jamaican community, Somali community, white working class community.
When I visited Marseilles, it struck me as an I jokingly refer to it as such, sometimes as first park on the sea.
You know, it's a it's a city where despite all the inequality that is there,
it's a city where working class culture is lived in the centre of the city.
It's so much a part of the city's mythology. In a way that you can't safer cities.
Any other city in France. But really across Europe,
there's nowhere like Marseilles where you're confronted with with multiculturalism and with working working class multiculturalism.
There's nowhere, I don't think, in and you're maybe even including London,
where you can find a working class life lived in the centre of the city in such a way.
So I felt immediately at home there. It's really one of this that is kind of a birthplace of friendship.
Pop, one of the biggest friendship groups. I am from Marseilles and encoded in arms.
Music is a lot of Egyptian mythology. And initially, when I hear that music, I heard that music before going to Marseilles.
I thought they were trying to do what the Wu Tang Clan did, which was kind of like a ticker, a culture like like they use Chinese culture.
I just claim as their own, as a way of escaping the reality in front of them.
Whereas in actually what I am were doing were were honouring the culture that was right on the doorstep,
which was a Mediterranean culture, which was a North African culture.
And actually, I think of Paul Gilroy's concepts of the black Atlantic and often say this.
If you were to take Paris and Cairo, you're never gonna confuse those two cities with each other.
You know, you'll never say, oh, that looks like Paris when it's Cairo and vice versa.
But if you take the cities from France and Egypt that are on the Mediterranean coast from those two countries,
Alexandria and Marseilles, there's the shared culture.
So it's a way of thinking about an identity that can be rooted in a place, but it can also be fluid and look beyond nationalism.
So that's what Marseilles is for me. It's a black Atlantic City. It's a it's a city that is is connected to Africa.
The same in Marseilles that it turns its back on France to stare out lovingly, you know, the Mediterranean, the Maghreb on on the nation.
Here's a here's a perhaps more more difficult question.
Challenging question from Katherine. Your honesty about shifts in the idea of affer pian is really compelling.
How do you feel about it now?
Looking back and dare I say this word, the B word, has Brexit shifted your sense of the availability of F.P. an identity to us at all or not?
It hasn't, actually. If anything, it's made me want to double down on the notion of Aphro Pian because as you know,
these individual European countries kind of start to think in a more insular, nationalistic way.
For me, it's more important ever that the black communities that maybe feel marooned in each country build something larger than that nation.
So for me, it's as important as ever to think about about about Europe and about what it means to be black and European
and to try and build kind of networks of solidarity in the face of this rise of Right-Wing Racism.
In terms of the word Afro, Pian again, it was something that I just I just wanted to sort of move through,
you know, and it was like I say, I said before it really wasn't a destination.
I don't walk around, say, you know, I'm Afro P and I'm enough ropin.
It was more just like a almost a you ristic, you know, a way, a way of stepping into a world that could,
you know, evoke my by explaining my experience of sort of plurality, you know, so.
So for me Afro pain is just a useful term. And also like a term that is built on like a built an online community around.
I mean, what's great? There are so many gaps, though.
The worst thing anybody could do with Afro Pian is look at it as some definitive account of the history of black Europe.
It's not that it's a personal account that hopefully arrives at something that is universal.
But what's been amazing about it is that people have noticed gaps in the work.
People said you didn't go to anywhere near enough of Eastern European countries.
You know, there are huge countries in the south of Europe.
I mean, you know, Spain just breezed through Spain, Greece to Italy,
which is two places which are particularly interesting when you're looking at what's happening
with with with refugees trying to escape Libya and Sudan and going to these countries.
And what's been amazing is that like this book emerges from this online community, which is after opinion, Common initially was a Facebook page.
And people would guide me, you know, from the community to say, oh, if you're going to Lisbon, you need to meet my friend here who will take you here.
And then what I want the book to do now is to go back into that community.
And so there are people who are now writing from the past.
But, you know, we had somebody who was writing about growing up black in Slovakia.
You know, we had somebody who wrote about growing up gay mixed race in the Isle of Wight.
We're starting to see people get in touch. Who said you didn't write about this place?
But I. I'm from here. Can I contribute? And that's what Aphro pian should should be.
It should be the book especially should be just a tool to encourage people to share their stories.
That's a really positive charge in that I've I've picked this question because it takes us back to the photographs with which we began.
It comes from Phil. How did you choose the photographs you've chosen to include in the book?
I'm really curious about this, too. Presumably, the ones that made it in are parts of a much broader project, much broader whole.
Do you have any particular organising principles or elements that you were
looking for when you were choosing their photographs for the different pages?
That's a great question. I use the photographs strategically throughout the book to give people a break.
You know, it's like I always appreciate when authors write shorter chapters or just give, just give, give you the chance to sort of ponder something.
And so for me, it's like I always try to place the images throughout.
So when when it's going you when you've read something that might be heavy or or or tricky or even you disagree with,
you can just take time out with a photograph. And it kind of allows me to quietly trying to dictate kind of mood as well.
But much like I started out wanting to tell success stories of black Europe at the beginning of the book,
and then it became more complicated and hopefully more nuanced that that happened with the images as well.
Initially, I was taking photographs with a very shallow depth of field portraits, almost like there's a book called The Sartorialist,
which is sort of these beautiful photographs of people with great street style and the sort of they look amazing and almost like them.
There's a strong tradition in African photography of of people were in their Sunday best, you know, of people posing.
So I started out in that tradition as I was going along. And I started to do this as I was travelling.
But actually, really after after the troubles were over and I had this collection of photographs that I was looking at and trying to edit.
I don't want to reject that a little bit. And there was less interested in posturing.
More interested in posterity.
You know, I wanted to show what an everyday black life look like now, you know, and and what I found was that it was a lot of other time.
It was the mistakes. The photographs that weren't decisive, you know, on Cartier-Bresson talks about the decisive moment.
And I was trying to capture the decisive moment, almost like a hunter.
And those images, I had to reject that kind of way of shooting that emerges from colonialism.
He developed the idea of hunting wild game in French Africa, you know.
You know, he developed that whole idea when when it was out in the Ivory Coast, I believe.
So I start to reject that and look at the images on the periphery of the collection of
mistakes and images that I didn't I didn't get any sense that they were good photographs.
And suddenly, because I spent a lot, you know, years with this collection, they start to have meaning for me.
I started to talk about an everydayness that was so important for my book.
And I should say that if anyone's in Amsterdam, they should go and try and see the show full gallery, because it is is a really great representation.
We call it a brick elhaj of blackness. Instead of showing individual images, we put all the images of together in this kind of mosaic.
And so you look at it from a distance and it's kind of this huge mosaic.
But when you tune in, you see all these different fragments of blackness you seen.
You see sometimes the success stories you see in everydayness. You see sometimes people struggling.
And that for me to get that kind of broad notion of what it means to be black in the images was really important.
So it's I'm really proud of that exhibition.
I feel like it's a much truer actually representation of the photographs than you can even find in my book,
in the photographs, out of that sense of music that you that you talk about in the book.
You know, it's words and images that come together in a mosaic mosaic of A4.
Pian. I mean, think, you know, there's a question here that relates directly to that metaphor you just used about hunting and colonial hunting.
And it's it's from Lucier and it is this is the question.
You talk about museums in the book, especially in Belgium, the really bizarre museum atmosphere.
And how could museums develop displays that are not about colonial triumphalism that avoid that?
How indeed can they better reflect a free European?
That's not a question that I feel equipped to answer, really. You know the truth.
Very fraught moment. Yeah, I you know, I don't know.
One thing I will say is that I remember seeing an artist, Cherie Sumba, who's a Congolese artist, was invited to create some.
Are that critiqued the museum. And so for me, I think it's about inviting in.
I don't know how I feel about to. And you know that the way they've changed it because it was a museum of a museum, you know,
it was dark and there was no way you could enter that museum and actually come out with a good idea or come out,
come out with the idea that the Congo Free State was something that was benevolent enough.
There's no way. It's very dark, even though it's trying to show this this triumphant notion that there that the
King Leopold and the Belgians were in the Congo to try and civilise the savages.
You know, when you go there, it's written all over, all over that museum.
But it was a it was it was a dark venture.
And what I think sometimes should happen is that artists and curators who are representative of the of the people who were subjugated by such places,
I think they should be invited into reimagine and reinterpret these spaces rather than just glossing over the spaces in general.
But but there are there are people who who are better position to answer that question than I am.
You know,
because I have the whole ethos of my book really is to look at black Europe from the street level and to to not to not think of it in institutions,
but more look at it as a lived experience out on the streets.
There've been some very interesting, for example, indigenous Australian artists who've engaged with the Pitt Rivers collection here here in Oxford,
which is one example of what you were telling you about. If anybody's you to the person who ask that question.
So I forgot the name, but you should cheque out a movement that's upon by somebody called on you.
Catchy one, Wambo. And he's got a movement called Return of the Icons, which is all about returning objects to Africa.
And he's a brilliant person, actually. He he created a series which can try and get those produced by Pebble Mill in 1992 called Black on Europe,
which is an amazing six part series, looking at the black lives, just as you know, right around the moment of the EEC, you know.
And so, yeah, look up on you, cut you Anbu and return of the icons.
You'll find some some some better answers there than I can give. We're moving close to the end now, sadly.
But I do have. May we have time for one, maybe two questions.
So here's a question from Christopher. Thank you so much for your time, your comments.
How has affer PIN shaped your understanding of multiculturalism today?
And during Blairism? It's quite a complicated question. So take it as you as you will.
Yeah, I'll leave it at that. How how has ever pian shaped your understanding of multiculturalism today and Blairism?
I think what happened with New Labour is the kind of corporate multiculturalism emerged where
you had I mean politicians in general seem to stop talking about their big dreams for society,
more about what was good for business. And so you start see, I've been thinking about this a lot.
You know, you might have somebody from Delhi with me up with somebody from Lagos in a business lounge at Narita Airport and and think, oh,
multiculturalism in a bottle is there's a kind of elite ism attached to the idea of multiculturalism,
where where it's all about the about global capital, you know.
And what happened with something quite interesting with New Labour is that,
on the one hand, seem to sort of promote a kind of notion of multicultural Britain.
And on the other hand, you know, the MP for my local constituency where group, which was bright side,
was David Blunkett, who famously went on record to say that Britain was being swamped by asylum seekers, you know.
So for me. Well, what I'm interested in is trying to put together a kind of multikulti culturally in 2.0,
which tries to attach it to working class culture again and and tries to ask,
you know, white working class people to broaden their sense of what it means to be working
class for a start and to look at how some Solidarity's might be forged there.
That could. But it's amazing to me how so many Working-Class people I know from Sheffield White with us, you see Boris Johnson as an ally.
And it's the same in the States that they see somebody like Donald Trump as an ally.
You know, Abbott is fun on a night out kind of thing. And for me, I think what I wanted to do.
I want to I want to insert multiculturalism back into that identity of the working class
that actually these people are the enemies of the working class rather than people who.
Who are your friends? They're not you. Donald Trump's not your friend.
If you pull on class, there is actually a question that relates to the previous one.
And then I'm just going to turn to to try to squeeze in before we close.
Sarah asks that affer opinion is a is a word to create a black European identity.
But do you think that the word means the unification of very different classes of black people living in Europe?
And, you know, is it is it a kind of like an umbrella term in a way.
But bringing different class fractions, different classes together?
I think she's I I'm interpreting here, but, you know, she's worrying about those different classes coming together under that one heading.
Yeah. I mean, I hope so. You know, this is not a term I think there's there's a place for.
Various configurations of blackness. You know, I don't want to critique even something like Afropolitan ism, you know,
pull for me Afro Pian can't be about sort of the success stories of people who
can afford to move to big cities and and working in the media industry or,
you know, it has to involve working class people.
And so that's I think that was the beginning of my journey really is, you know,
the word emerged from when when David Byrne signed Zap Mama and together they coined this term Afro peon and emerged from music and.
But what I realised is that what was happening with Afro Pian within the realm
of music is they always involved stylists and and and fashion photographers.
And for me, I mean, not only did not include my own story, that notion of this really successful lateral pian identity,
but it had you know, it had to take into account black men and women who work as cleaners,
security guards, street sweepers, as you know, as as mothers, as far as you know,
had to go beyond this sort of notion of this almost quite so capitalist notion of the success story.
So I hope that Afro Pian is something that the working class people feel, you know, resonates with their experience.
It was certainly built from those ingredients because with where I grew up.
Thanks, Jenny. With regret. It's been fantastic.
We're going to have to move to close. I'm just going to say a few closing words and then.
And then thank you very much. This brings us to the end of another fantastic evening here at the UPDF Ultimate Picture Palace.
Part of the big tent live events. And thanks so much for hosting us.
A huge thank you to Johnny Pitts and to Samukai Chegutu for your inspiring conversation.
Thoughts. And for everything that you have told us about FFP and Johnny, I mean, you took us on it.
I think across this past hour,
you've taken us on a journey through the book and you've taken us as surrogates on your journey through through black Europe.
And that's been a great privilege and a great pleasure. I can really recommend this book to everyone who hasn't yet discovered it.
I'd like to thank everyone out there, to all the viewers at home for watching for your amazing comments and questions.
Really sorry that they were literally just kind of pouring into my phone a moment ago.
So I'm really sorry if we didn't manage to get round to picking all the questions.
There were loads. And then I just like to invite everyone to join us for the next big tent live event.
On Thursday, the 5th of November.
And remember, remember the 5th of November at five p.m., live from another Oxford venue, which will be the Hollowell,
a music room when we'll be hosting a live performance from opera soprano Dean Benjamin and pianist Nicole Panitz.
And I also, for those of you perhaps missed some of this or want to see it again.
The recording will be up on Writers Make Worlds. Thanks so much, Sunny.
Thanks, Samukai. And thank you, everyone, for joining us.
And hope to see you again soon. Bye.