Hakim Adi: Writing Black People into the History of Britain

Hakim Adi’s interest in history began with Robin Hood. Growing up near Canterbury, he watched the television adventures of a man who took from the rich and gave to the poor, and his mother bought him history books. Years later, he recalled that early fascination in an interview with a young historian. It is an engaging beginning for a scholar whose work repeatedly returns to people challenging the terms on which they are expected to live. [1]

Adi has spent his career researching Africa and its diaspora, making connections across countries and generations. His subjects include students organising against colonial rule, political movements seeking African unity and the long presence of African and Caribbean people in Britain. He has also worked to make historical research possible for others, including young people who have found little encouragement to see themselves as historians. [2][9]

Finding the history he wanted to learn

As a teenager, Adi began looking for books that could help him understand the racism and negative accounts of Africa he encountered. He read widely: history, novels, music, politics and poetry. One reference could lead to another purchase at the bookshop. By his mid-teens he wanted to become a teacher, hoping to give younger people access to knowledge he felt his own schooling had withheld. He later studied African history and social anthropology at SOAS. [1]

In an interview for LSE’s Hub for African Thought, Adi explained that studying Africa at university did not remove his concerns about the viewpoint from which history was taught. He wanted to challenge approaches that made Europe the organising centre of the story. He also wanted to connect the history of the African continent with the history of its diaspora, subjects that could be separated within academic institutions. [2]

That approach changes the questions a historian asks. A person arriving in Britain brings political commitments, relationships and knowledge formed elsewhere. A campaign in London may have consequences in Accra or Lagos. A family story can cross several national archives. Following those connections requires patience with evidence that refuses to stay inside a single country’s history.

Students, organising and the struggle against colonial rule

West Africans in Britain 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism made such connections central to its account. Adi examined the West African Students’ Union and the work of students confronting racism in Britain while developing opposition to colonial rule in Africa. Their alliances included political organisations in Britain and groups on the African continent. [3]

These students belonged to a history that cannot be contained within a story of newcomers adapting to British life. They were making arguments about the future of countries under colonial government. Their struggles against the colour bar and their efforts to organise collectively helped shape that political education. Adi’s research made them visible as participants in international change, with ambitions reaching well beyond their immediate surroundings. [3]

The book also offers a way of thinking about student history more generally. A hostel, meeting room or small publication can become a place where ideas travel. The significance of such a setting may be easier to see decades later, once the students’ subsequent work is known. Historical research can recover the uncertain beginnings as well as the eventual achievements.

A history that crosses oceans

Pan-Africanism is another continuing subject in Adi’s writing. Broadly, it concerns connections, solidarity and collective freedom among people of African descent. In Pan-Africanism: A History, he follows the people and organisations that gave those ideas different forms over time. The book’s range includes the congresses associated with W. E. B. Du Bois, cultural movements such as Négritude, the music of Bob Marley and the African Union. [4]

That breadth matters. Political thought can circulate through a conference declaration, but it can also travel through a song or a work of literature. Different generations inherit the language of unity and give it new meanings. Reading this history encourages a reader to ask where agreement existed, where interests diverged and what people hoped an international connection would allow them to accomplish. [4]

In Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939, Adi examined a more specific set of relationships. His research used material from the Communist International’s archives and explored the role of figures including George Padmore. The subject brings African and Caribbean activism into contact with international communist organising during the years between the world wars. [5]

Such a study calls for attention to the people involved and the choices available to them. Political alliances have purposes, tensions and limits; an organisation’s declaration does not automatically describe everyone’s experience within it. The historical task is to establish what participants did, how they explained it and what followed. Readers interested in these wider intellectual connections can also explore our feature on C. L. R. James.

Britain’s history, with African and Caribbean people in it

African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History brings decades of scholarship to a broad readership. Adi explained that the commission offered an opportunity to draw together work accumulated over many years, including research published since Peter Fryer’s Staying Power. The ambition was to make that knowledge accessible in an extensive account for general readers. [2]

The book reaches far beyond the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. It follows African and Caribbean presence across different periods and gives particular attention to people acting to change their circumstances. Campaigning, work and political organisation belong within the national story, alongside the institutions against which people sometimes had to struggle. [6]

This is a useful distinction for readers brought up on a handful of commemorative dates. A date can provide an entry point, but it cannot carry the whole history. Nor can a small collection of exceptional individuals explain how communities lived. Adi’s broad account allows events usually encountered separately to be read in relation to one another.

The book was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2023. That recognition brought it into a wider conversation about history written for the public. [7] It is also an invitation to keep reading: a large survey inevitably introduces people, movements and places that deserve closer investigation.

Listening to earlier voices

Adi’s editorial work offers another route into the subject. Black Voices on Britain, published in 2022, gathers writing by people who lived, travelled, worked and campaigned in Britain from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Its contributors include James Gronniosaw, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. [8]

The collection brings readers close to the ways those writers described the world around them. Their circumstances and expectations differed. Some were seeking security or assistance; others were travelling and speaking to public audiences. An anthology makes it possible to move between their perspectives while remembering that no single account can stand for everyone. [8]

For teachers and reading groups, this creates a productive relationship between an overview and a source. A history book supplies context; a letter, memoir or travel account raises further questions about audience, purpose and personal experience. Our article on Olaudah Equiano explores another life in which writing became part of a public struggle.

Helping the next historians begin

Adi’s concern with who writes history has led to practical organising. He helped establish the Black and Asian Studies Association in 1991 and the History Matters initiative in 2014. Both created ways to address gaps in research and participation. His work at Middlesex University included research supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship into the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. [12]

In 2015, Adi and Cheryl Phillips founded the Young Historians Project following a History Matters conference at the Institute of Historical Research. The project developed as a collective, offering young people of African and Caribbean heritage opportunities to practise historical research and share it publicly. Its methods include archival work, oral history, exhibitions, film and schools outreach. Adi serves as its consultant historian. [9]

One substantial project, A Hidden History: African Women and the British Health Service, 1930–2000, interviewed 35 women and produced an eight-part documentary series. It covered experiences across medicine, nursing, midwifery and psychiatry, alongside an ebook, learning resources and hospital murals. The work widened an account of Black participation in healthcare that can focus too narrowly on the Caribbean and the post-war years. [10]

The credit belongs to the project’s researchers, interviewees and collaborators as well as its historical adviser. That is part of its significance. A young researcher learning to conduct an interview is also learning how to listen, how to check a recollection and how to preserve material for someone else. The result is both new history and a group of people better equipped to produce the next piece of work.

Making room for further research

The edited collection Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain grew out of a History Matters conference held online in 2021. Published in 2023, it brought together emerging historians researching subjects across several centuries. Chapters include Montaz Marché’s study of Anne Sancho in eighteenth-century London and Annabelle Gilmore’s work on Black people in eighteenth-century Warwickshire. [11]

These examples show what can happen when the range of questions expands. Attention moves towards a woman whose life has often appeared beside her husband’s, or towards rural places that receive less notice than major cities. The book’s emphasis on local histories, women, gender and activism makes room for work that changes the scale at which a familiar national story is told. [11]

Adi became Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester in 2015, the first historian of African heritage to become a history professor in Britain. In 2018 he launched an online Master of Research programme in the subject. His employment ended in August 2023 after the university suspended recruitment to the programme. He is now listed by LSE as a Visiting Research Fellow in International History. [13]

His response to being a first has been characteristic. In his interview with the Young Historians Project, Adi described the appointment as an opportunity to encourage others and press for further change. A personal achievement also revealed how much room remained to be made. [14] In 2024, the African Studies Association UK recognised his scholarship and wider contribution with its Outstanding African Studies Award. [12]

For readers beginning with Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain provides the broadest introduction to his work on this country. It is included in our bookshop. His other books allow the enquiry to move towards a particular organisation, a political tradition or the words of an earlier generation.

There is a continuity between the teenager ordering books to answer his own questions and the historian helping younger people formulate theirs. A good history can make a reader look again at a place, a family recollection or a familiar explanation. Adi has devoted his working life to making those second looks possible, and to helping more people acquire the skills to follow them through.

Sources

1. Young Historians Project: Ayo Oluyemi’s interview with Hakim Adi, part one (2019)
2. LSE Hub for African Thought: interview with Hakim Adi
3. Lawrence & Wishart: West Africans in Britain 1900–1960
4. 1804 Books: Pan-Africanism: A History
5. 1804 Books: Pan-Africanism and Communism
6. Penguin: African and Caribbean People in Britain
7. Wolfson History Prize: 2023 shortlist
8. Pan Macmillan: Black Voices on Britain
9. Young Historians Project: about and origins
10. Young Historians Project: African Women and the British Health Service, 1930–2000
11. Pluto Press / JSTOR: Many Struggles (2023)
12. African Studies Association UK: Outstanding African Studies Award (2024)
13. LSE: Professor Hakim Adi, Visiting Research Fellow
14. Young Historians Project: interview with Hakim Adi, part two (2019)