This year The Department of International History welcomes Prof Hakim Adi to deliver our Annual Lecture.
In 2023 Hakim Adi’s African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History was shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize. In the same year, and despite developing and supervising probably the largest cohort of Black postgraduate history students in the country, his ground-breaking MRes in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora was terminated and he was dismissed from his post at the University of Chichester.
It is now over 60 years since a professor of history at the University of Oxford infamously declared ‘Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, only the history of Europeans in Africa.’ It might be hoped that such Eurocentrism had long been dead, but too often it appears to be alive, if not well, and still a major problem in the study and teaching of history in this country.
In this lecture Hakim Adi reflects on how affirming the history of African and Caribbean people enhances the study of the history of Britain and why a struggle against Eurocentrism in all its forms is still so important in HE and beyond.
Prof. Hakim Adi is an award-winning historian. He was the first historian of African heritage to become a professor of history in Britain when he was appointed Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester in 2015. In 2018 he launched the world’s first online MRes in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora which trained many students including six currently engaged in PhD research. In August 2023 the University of Chichester suspended all recruitment to the MRes and terminated Hakim’s employment.
Hakim was instrumental in the founding of the History Matters initiative in 2014 and is also the founder and consultant historian of the Young Historians Project.
He has appeared in many documentary films, on TV and on radio and has written widely on the history of Africa and the African Diaspora, including three history books for children. His publications have been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese and include: West Africans in Britain 1900-60: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (Lawrence and Wishart, 1998); (with M. Sherwood) The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (New Beacon, 1995) and Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (Routledge, 2003).
His most recent books are Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (Africa World Press, 2013), Pan-Africanism: A History (Bloomsbury Press, 2018), and, as editor Black British History: New Perspectives (Zed, 2019), Black Voices on Britain (Macmillan, 2022) and Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain (Pluto, 2023). His latest publication is Africa and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (Allen Lane, 2023) which was shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize in Britain in September 2023.