OK here are my additions (below, added in green) which are mainly to bring in the Asian diaspora (and I’m sure others can improve on what I’ve attempted).
Once all suggestions are in we’ll need to think hard about how to frame this. My feeling is that we shouldn’t be echoing Gove and just coming up with yet more bullet points.
We’ll also need to consider (maybe in tomorrow’s meeting) what we see as our objective both in our submissions to the government and in this alternative we’re developing.
Do we want (a) to tinker with Gove’s list, removing some things and adding others? (b) demand that he go back to the drawing board, scrap his proposals and start a proper consultation? (c) to build up information and resources for teachers, whatever happens to the curriculum?
My view is that it has to be (b) and (c).
Pupils should be taught about:
1. Ancient Egypt and other great African civilizations: e.g. Kingdom of Ghana, est. c.400; Kingdom of Kanem-Bornu (modern-day Chad) est. c.784; Zimbabwe est. c. 1100; Kongo, est. c.1350, etc. The empire of Mali (not today’s Mali) is very important as the emperor wanted to explore what ‘lay over the ocean’ and also went on the Hajj – and appears in contemporary European maps of the time.
2. Africans in Roman Britain
- The numerous Maurorum Aurelianorum (c.100-c.400), Hadrian’s wall;
- Emperor Septimus Severus (145 – 211), Quintus Lollius Urbicus and other African-born Romans. We now have the record of the burial of a wealthy African woman. And of Africans married to local women who stayed here on being discharged. And of artefacts from Nth Africa.
3. Medieval images of Africa: Mandeville’s Travels, Maps, etc.
4. Africans in Early Modern Britain
i) Africans at the Scottish court of James IV, 1501-1513.
ii) Africans in Tudor England
iii) African characters in early modern literature
5. The Mughal Empire – especially Akbar
6. The Imperial project: colonization and empire.
a) Exploration, early trading and first colonies under Elizabeth I and James I. The East India Company.
b) This has to include the outline of the histories, etc of the areas being colonised, ie Africa and the Americas and India
c) the effects of the ‘national’ boundaries in Africa created by Europeans in Berlin in 1885
7. The trade in enslaved Africans
Which countries were trading, how were slaves acquired, how shipped, sold; working conditions in the Americas. Who financed, who profited? It is very important to distinguish between ‘slavery’ in Africa and that introduced by Europeans in the Americas. That in Africa was more akin to the conditions of the peasantry in much of Europe.
What were the effects on Africa and the Americas and Britain?
8. Resistance
i) Small-scale daily resistance,
ii) Haitian Revolution
iii) Maroons
iv) in Africa
v) on board ships
9. Slavery and the Law
to include the Somerset case, Joseph Knight vs. Wedderburn, the Zong. 8. Africans in 18th Century Britain: Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Ottobah Cugoano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, William Ansah Sessarakoo, Francis Barber. Laws on the Caribbean plantations
10. Abolition: the struggle
The 1807 and its almost non-enforcement for c. 35 years. Export of the enslaved increases. Who continued to profit? The abolition of slavery; data from compensation records of the £20 million then distributed – to whom? Did it finance the industrial revolution?
11. The Ayahs, Lascars and early Asian settlers in Britain
12. Indentured labour and the transportation of Asians to East Africa and the Caribbean
13. Resistance in India
The First War of Independence 1857
14. The rise of pseudo-“scientific” racism
a) 1919 ‘Race riots’
b) how this idea was spread
15. Africans and Asians in 19th century Britain
William Cuffay
Robert Wedderburn
William Davidson
Mary Seacole
Ira Aldride
Samuel Coleridge Taylor
Sake Deen Mahomed, Dadabhai Naoroji, Sophia Duleep Singh
16. Africans and Asians in 20th century Britain
a) Pan-Africanism; the ‘Black’ press
b) Henry Sylvester Williams, Saklatvala, Dusé Mohammed Ali, Harold Moody, Ladipo Solanke, George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Claudia Jones. Ras T. Makonnen, Dr Peter Milliard, et al others also who returned to play pivotal roles in national independence struggles in Africa and Asia- Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Hastings Banda - Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru
c) Key organisations: League of Coloured Peoples, WASU, International African Service Bureau, Pan-African Federation; Negro Workers Association, Indian Workers Association et al – include local organistions, eg in Cardiff, Liverpool, South Shields, Manchester
d) African, Caribbean and Black British servicemen and women in the World Wars
e) The Windrush generation – who were they, why did they come here?
17. African, Caribbean and Asian servicemen and women in the armed forces in the world wars.
18. Asian women’s role in key industrial disputes especially Grunwick.
19. The Civil Rights Movement in the UK
a) The Campaign for Racial Equality,
b) ‘Black Power’
c) West Indian Development Council (WDI) Bristol Bus Boycott, in response to racial discrimination by the Bristol Omnibus Company (BOC)
Sources:
D. Dabydeen, J. Gilmore, and C. Jones, eds.,The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford, 2005).
Some of this was written by students so has to be checked
P. Fryer, Staying power: the history of black people in Britain (1984).
Visram, R, Asians in Britain, 400 years of History (2002)