BlackHistoryMonth

Geography at York St. John University celebrated the 2021 Black History Month with blog posts every weekday. In the first week, we highlighted the achievements of Black environmentalists who have contributed to how we look after our planet. In the second week, the posts celebrated the month through five landscapes – rural and urban – bringing them visibility and highlighting how they contribute to society. Week 3 drew attention to people, places, and documents that could be easily overlooked when celebrating British black history. The blog posts in the final week highlighted the contributions of some black scholars to the field of Geography.

Wangari Maatthi. Credit: Oregon State University

Overall, we wanted to not only recognise black people, but highlight the complexity and celebrate the breadth and depth of Black culture and history while highlighting how they have and are contributing to Geography, society and the environment. It is also about raising awareness of the contribution of Black people to our subject, culture and society. Through these posts, we are able to articulate some of the areas Black History is integrated and plays a prominent role in our research and teaching in Geography at YSJ. Black History Month only happens once a year, but for us we work to integrate it into our teaching all year round.

Wangari Mathai and George Washington Carver are two names that feature on our Sustainability: Global Environmental Challenges module (led by Olalekan Adekola) when looking at building our understanding of the history of environmental movements. In this module, there is a case study on the Niger Delta wetlands and the activism of Ken-Saro Wiwa as part of our discussion on the complexity of managing resource-rich globally significant ecosystems. Students will also come across some of the writings of Robert Bullard when we discuss Environmental Justice especially in discussing Consumption and Waste (specifically the problems associated with electronic waste in the Global South).

The blogs in Week 2 are relevant to some of our staff research and modules we teach at YSJ. For example, Joseph Bailey research how cultural heritage, geodiversity, and biodiversity interact to shape ecosystems. These are important concepts that are discussed in the Year 1, Ecosystem and Biogeography module, and Year 3, Habitat management module. Discussions around sacred forests and animals feature prominently on our Nature/Culture module. For example, we discuss their values and how they can challenge representations that separate humans and nature. Our blog also features a post on rivers and Yoruba people in Nigeria.

Looking over Tanguieta. Rudi Verspoor, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.

Discussions around how processes such as gentrification have erased spaces for minority groups such as Blacks and LGBTQ would be a topic on our Urban Geography and Cities in Transition modules – these are areas of research interest to Su Fitzpatrick and Jude Parks. We have discussed urban landscapes in our blog. The week 2 posts also emphasise areas we work on such as giving communities voices in the management of landscapes (we discuss the scared landscape of Tigray in our blog) and the question of synergy between traditional belief systems and development pressures.

The blog posts in week 3 are relevant to modules where we explore ideas, political power, and empire in Britain. For example, in our Fieldwork module, we consider the role of empire in Geography. This could include highlighting the contributions and roles played by former slaves such as Ignatius Sancho as well as slave owners mentioned in our post on Glasgow streets. And don’t miss our posts on Freetown, Black musicians, and the Slave Compensation Act 1837.

The works of black scholars we celebrated in week 4 feature on a variety of our modules. The contributions of Akin Mabogunje to the discipline are discussed in our Year 1 Fieldwork Studies module. The year 2 Geographical Thought module incorporates the work of black scholars such as Stuart McPhail Hall, Milton Almeida dos Santos,  and Katherine McKittrick. This module examines how knowledge is created within Geography, and so considers the nature of the discipline. As staff teaching Geography at university, questions of what Geography is, what it does, how, and why – questions addressed by scholars such as Richard Tabulawa – are central to our practice now and into the future.

Glasgow streetnames, showing Buchanan Street & Nelson Mandela Place. Credit Steven Collis. Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevencollis/47615014732/

Katherine McKittrick is a Professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. Her research spans black studies and cultural geography, anti-colonial studies and critical-creative methodologies. She had all her formal education in Canada.

Katherine McKittrick. Photo credit: Pauline Couper.

She first graduated with a BA in History and English Literature from the University of Ottawa before doing a second BAH in Women’s Studies at York University and then continued to MA and Ph.D. in the same field there.

Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories, is a powerful exploration of black and anti-colonial methodologies. She is also the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle which explores how black women’s geographies (focus on black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade) are meaningful sites of political opposition.

A book she co-edited, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place is a collection of essays addressing the racialized production of space. She has worked with and has been influenced by the works of the Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter.

Richard Tabulawa is a Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Botswana. He received his BA (Humanities) in 1985 from the University of Botswana. He then proceeded to the University of Manchester where he graduated with a Master in Education (Med, Curriculum Development) in 1989. He studied for his Ph.D. between 1992 and 1995 at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Botswana school children. Credit: USAID/Southern Africa. Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/usaidsouthernafrica/.

His career began as a teacher of English and Geography at a school in Botswana. He then moved into teacher education at the University of Botswana and led the redevelopment of Botswana’s secondary school Geography curriculum in 1999.

His research now focuses on pedagogy, curriculum, education policy, and the intersection of globalization and education. His work challenges the imposition of educational ideas from the global North on the global South, highlighting the role of international agencies (including aid agencies) in this process, and situating this as part of an agenda to produce capitalist consumers in the global South.

He explains that often such educational reforms fail because they are incompatible with local socio-cultural contexts, and so resisted by both teaching staff and pupils.

Akinlawon (Akin) Mabogunje is a renowned Nigerian geographer who made notable contributions to urban geography through his works on urban development principles and practices, especially in Africa.

Akin Mabojungwe. Credit: Ji-Elle. Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

His university education began in 1949 at the then University College, Ibadan (now University of Ibadan) where he earned a BA in Geography in 1953. He was part of the second intake of geography undergraduates at Ibadan.

He later proceeded to the University of London where he earned a BA (Hons.) degree in 1956; a Master’s and a PhD degree in Geography in 1958 and 1961 respectively. He began his professional career as the first Nigerian lecturer in the department at the University of Ibadan in 1958. He became a professor within seven years of joining the university.

He has had a strong influence on generations of Nigerian geographers. Professor Akin Mabogunje has served as a Visiting Professor to some top-rated Universities all over the world. Among these are the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London; Universities of Durham, Goteborg and Lund; Northwestern University in the USA; McGill University in Canada and as a Visiting Scholar to the Chinese University of Hongkong. He was an Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General for the Second Conference on Human Settlements (1994-1999).

He is the first African to be President of the International Geographical Union and in 2017, he was awarded the ‘Nobel Prize for Geography’, the Vautrin Lud Prize.

Milton Almeida dos Santos (1926-2001) was an influential Brazilian geographer who made important contributions to geography scholarship through his critical engagement and writings on urban development in Global South.

Milton Santos Nature of Space. Photo credit: Pauline Couper.

Although he graduated with a Law degree, he decided not to practice, becoming instead a high-school geography teacher. By 1964, the military government in Brazil considered Santos as “subversive”, he was arrested and spent three months in jail. After his release, he spent thirteen (13) years in exile working as an academic in different countries in Europe, North America and Africa.

This experience underpins his intellectual network, which involved scholars from France, the United States, and Latin America. In 1977, Santos returned to Brazil and from 1983 onwards was affiliated with the University of São Paulo, which hosted him until his death in 2001. Although, most of his writings were in Portuguese (responsible for his work being overlooked by the English-speaking community of geographers), these are increasingly being translated into English.

In 1994, Santos received the Vautrin Lud Prize, the so-called “Nobel Prize for Geography. He is also a posthumous recipient of the Prêmio Anísio Teixeira – one of the most important awards in the field of education in Brazil.

Welcome to the fourth week of York St John University Geography’s Black History Month blog posts, celebrating black landscapes, people, and histories in geography and the environment! This week, we are spotlighting scholars who have contributed to geography, starting with Stuart McPhail Hall.

Stuart Hall. Credit: The Open University. Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/the-open-university/15587677477/

Stuart McPhail Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-British scholar whose pioneering cultural studies works is a great influence on contemporary cultural geography.

At the age of 11, he won a scholarship to Jamaica College, a top secondary school in Jamaica. In 1951, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, the University of Oxford where he obtained a MA in English. Influenced by observed class disparity in Jamaica, the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he moved away from the study of literature to explore social theories. In about 1957, he founded the Universities and Left Review, a journal centred on a rejection of the dominant ‘revisionist’ orthodoxy in British politics.

In 1960, the journal was merged with New Reasoner to form the influential New Left Review with Stuart Hall as the founding editor. He joined the University of Birmingham in 1964 and in 1979 he became a professor of sociology at the Open University. From 1995-1997, he was the president of the British Sociological Association. In 2005, he was elected fellow of the British Academy and in 2008, he received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture. Stuart Hall is regarded as one of Britain’s leading cultural theorists.

The sculpture Gilt of Cain, which stands in Fen Court, London, is by artist Michael Visocchi and poet Lemn Sissay. It commemorates the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and was unveiled by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu in 2008. Credit: diamond geezer. Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/51170948124/.

The Slave Compensation Act 1837: There have been many calls for the British government to compensate all African & Caribbean descendants. So, if one hears about a “slave compensation” it might be assumed that this has gone to the freed slaves to redress the injustices they suffered. Only that the money was paid to owners of slaves, who were being compensated for the loss of what had, until then, been considered their property.

The Act was not aimed at a more equal society, rather it was meant to further benefit the slave owners who were already enriched through buying and selling slaves. Slave owners were paid approximately £20 million in compensation in over 40,000 awards for freed enslaved people. Payments of the bonds to the descendants of creditors were finalised in 2015.

The sculpture Gilt of Cain, which stands in Fen Court, London, is by artist Michael Visocchi and poet Lemn Sissay. It commemorates the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and was unveiled by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu in 2008.
Credit: George Rex. CC Attribution Share Alike Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/14266377756/

Black musicians have through their music influenced British society and culture. John Blanke represents the long existence of black musicians and their influence at British royal courts. John was a royal trumpeter in the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII and remains the only black Tudor for whom there is an identifiable image. There are other accounts of black musicians in Britain in 1504.

Credit: Bradford Timeline. Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/bradford_timeline/31015092591/.

There are also records of black musicians in Bristol in the eighteenth century. Thus, long before the current generation of black British musicians such as Stormzy, there have been many black musicians that have played a significant part in the music industry in the UK.

Aldwyn Roberts (Lord Kitchener) was a regular performer on BBC radio. Winifred Atwell is the first black musician – male or female – to have a UK No.1. She’s also thought to be the first black artist in Britain to sell a million records.

Ignatius Sancho. Credit: National Gallery of Canada. Public domain (from commons.wikimedia.org).

Voting in British elections has not been restricted by race, but rather gender, age, income and property ownership. With such conditions that left voting rights in the hands of the aristocracy and the middle classes, one might think that no Black voter existed until the late 19th century or beyond. However, Ignatius Sancho,  a writer, composer, shopkeeper, and abolitionist, is the first known Black Briton to have voted in Britain, a right he exercised in 1774 and 1780.

Credit: Luke McKernan. CC Attribution Share Alike Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/33718942@N07/21707199406/

He owned a grocery shop where he sold merchandise such as tobacco, sugar and tea in Mayfair, Westminster. Sancho blazed a trail for blacks in Britain. It is estimated that blacks make up a third of the 4.8 million ethnic minority voters in the UK. The ‘Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African’, edited and published two years after his death in 1870, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English from a first-hand experience.

Glasgow Streets. One of the most important clues to the history of an area comes from street names. Some of the popular street names in and around Glasgow city centre include Glassford Street (named after John Glassford); Ingram Street (named after Archibald Ingram); Buchanan Street (named after Andrew Buchanan); Dunlop Street (named after Colin Dunlop).

Glasgow streetnames, showing Buchanan Street & Nelson Mandela Place. Credit Steven Collis. Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevencollis/47615014732/

These streets are named after people who were major slave owners. During the 18th century, Glasgow was home to many slave owners who bought Africans to work on plantations and profited from it. As such, much of Glasgow’s wealth comes from the tobacco, the sugar, the cotton that was created and sustained by enslaved black people.

While Glasgow, like other British cities, is urged to do more in recognising the contributions of black people in their development, Glasgow has taken some steps. Notably is changing the name of St George’s Place in the city centre to Nelson Mandela Place. This was done in 1986, at a time when many others regarded Mandela as a terrorist. By this singular action, Glasgow brought a lot of attention to his unjust imprisonment and fight against white minority rule in South Africa.