The African and Caribbean diaspora community and cultural organisations have a long-standing history and breadth of activity in the North East. Their founders and members represented here are past and present, and span across the generations. Some organisations presented here, Becon and NEEACA, plus a sampling of the others, emerged from earlier ‘in house’ gatherings and parent organisation The Ghana Union and SCAFRO (Standing Conference of African Union).
Witnessing & Engaging
Over the years, members of all of these organisations have been witness to and active engagers in the changing face of local and global events around race, representation, identities and inequalities like Stephen Lawrence and the MacPherson report of the mid- nineties, the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000); the death of multiculturalism and Equality Act (2010), the Black Lives Matter era of the 2010’s and MeToo. The world-changing upheaval after the murder of George Floyd in the US and the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced for these organisations that ‘the personal is political’.
For these organisations, culture and heritage are interwoven with community experiences and survival mechanisms from struggle to celebrations. A variety of artforms, creative expressions and dialogue has been used to communicate oral traditions, part and parcel to build and strengthen the lack of equity around community provision and services and wider societal needs such as citizenship by challenging the status quo around institutional and systemic structures via political protest and lobbying.
The elders in the vanguard, some of whom are no longer with us today, have paved the way for the range and plethora of organisations, groups and projects which followed, from voluntary-led charities to the large-scale regional infrastructure-capacity building like BECON to smaller, ‘every project has a different life span’ projects such as Freedom Think Tank.
Some of the groups and individuals in this archive are represented here in photos, oral histories and archive documents – the story of African and Caribbean people in the North East is huge and needs to be added to – come talk to HERE North East! Take a look as well at some of their websites at www.africanlivesnortheast.co.uk and www.neeaca.org.
