̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Black Cantabs Research Society

Black history is Cambridge history

cg605 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:20:34 +0000

Tyra Amofah-Akardom, Rumbidzai Dube and Surer Mohamed reflect on the Black Cantabs Research Society – a counter-history project, designed to uncover and preserve the legacies of Black Cambridge alumni – and discuss what it means to be a Black student at Cambridge.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� marks Black History Month 2022

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 09:38:38 +0000

Events taking place at Cambridge include:

Throughout October

Downing’s Early Black Cantabs
Downing College, Regent Street, Cambridge

Archive exhibition celebrating Downing College’s early black students, dating back more than 100 years. This exhibition shares research carried out in support of the Black Cantabs Research Society by the College Archivist and new profiles added over the past year. ̽��ֱ��online exhibition is available at www.dow.cam.ac.uk, a document version of the exhibition is available here.

̽��ֱ��exhibition in the Maitland Robinson Library, Regent Street, is still available by appointment. Please contact the College Archivist, Jenny Ulph, for more information or to arrange to see the exhibition.

Saturday 1 October and Monday 31 October

St Catharine’s College, Trumpington Street, Cambridge

St Catharine’s College will again fly the flag of the Bahamas to commemorate its first Black student, Alfred F Adderley CBE.

Flying the flag of the Bahamas to mark Black History Month

Thursday, 13 October

Black Women in Business with Dr Maggie Semple OBE and Jane Oremosu, 6.30pm to 8pm
Combination Room, Wolfson College, Barton Road, Cambridge

Wolfson student Annoa Abekah-Mensah chats with Dr Maggie Semple OBE and Jane Oremosu, two black women with extensive business acumen, about their work and experiences in the corporate space, and their professional services company I-Cubed Group which offers diversity and inclusion training.

Thursday, 13 October

Legal Profession, Public Office and Race – My Personal Journey, with Busola Johnson, 6-7pm
Lucy Cavendish College, Lady Margaret Road, Cambridge

Lucy Cavendish alumna Busola Johnson, a specialist prosecutor in the Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division at the Crown Prosecution Service, will share her journey as a lawyer, discussing the legal professions, public office and race.

̽��ֱ��event is free and open to all and will take place in the Wood-legh Room, in the Strathaird Building. There is no need to register.

Thursday, 20 October

Dreams from my Mother with Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, 6.30-8pm
Wolfson College, online event

Wolfson student Annoa Abekah-Mensah speaks with Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, a nurse, lecturer, professor and author, about her life - as detailed in her new autobiography Dreams from my Mother - discussing her time as a young child in care, her experience in nursing and journey into sickle-cell and thalassemia research, and her work in Black activism.

Saturday, 22 October

Adderley Dinner
St Catharine’s College, Trumpington Street, Cambridge

̽��ֱ��Adderley Dinner, named in memory of St Catharine’s first Black student and supported by the Master’s Fund, will celebrate the achievements of the College’s Black community and foster connections between current students and alumni. Invited guests will be welcomed by Lady Welland (2020) at a reception in the Master’s Lodge Dining Room. This event is primarily for members of the College community who identify as Black and mixed Black.

Sunday, 23 October

Choral Evensong
St Catharine’s College, Trumpington Street, Cambridge

Choral Evensong service live-streamed from the Chapel, with ̽��ֱ��Revd Shana Maloney preaching on the Magnificat and empowerment, and the work of Black composers featured among the musical performances.

Thursday, 27 October

How Can We Educate Children About Anti-Racism? with Laura Henry Allain MBE, 6.30-10pm
Combination Room, Wolfson College, Barton Road, Cambridge

Wolfson student Annoa Abekah-Mensah sits down with Laura Henry Allain MBE to discuss her work in education and race. Laura Henry-Allain MBE is an award-winning international writer, motivational and keynote speaker and consultant. She is the creator of the well-loved CBeebies show JoJo and Gran, of which she is the associate producer.

Wednesday, 2 November

2022 Annual Race Equality Lecture
Beyond Buzzwords: Opening the Anti-Black Box of Technology & Society, Professor Ruha Benjamin, 5.30-6.30pm
Online and In Person

From workplace automation to healthcare algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination and amplify inequities, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era.

In this talk, Professor Ruha Benjamin (African American Studies at Princeton ̽��ֱ��) takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight.

Further information and how to book

Events and activities are being held across Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� and the Colleges to mark Black History Month 2022. Throughout October, lectures, discussions, exhibitions and more will reflect on the experiences of the past, and explore the contribution of individuals and the achievements of communities.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Legacies of enslavement: report and response

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 12:55:00 +0000

Research indicates that Cambridge had connections to the Atlantic slave trade. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is creating a Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Fund which will be put towards research, community engagement and partnership activities.

Black Cantabs: History Makers

sjr81 — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 15:24:35 +0000

Celebrating Black Cantabs

mjg209 — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 11:01:11 +0000

Gloria Claire Carpenter was probably the first black woman at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. A Jamaican, she studied law at Girton College in 1945 and became a prominent social reformer, playing an instrumental role in the foundation of the Law Faculty of the ̽��ֱ�� of West Indies in Jamaica.

Efua Sutherland, from Ghana, studied at Homerton College, Cambridge, in 1947, a year before women were admitted as full members of the university. A playwright and filmmaker, she contributed to the development of theatre in Ghana.

Professor Thomas Odhiambo became the first black Kenyan to matriculate at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1959. He went on to found the renowned International Centre for Insects Physiology which has helped farmers across the world to protect their crops through biological pest control methods, contributing to food security in Africa in the process.

Until recently, their stories were little known within the ̽��ֱ��.

However, a pioneering student-led society has decided that the achievements of early black students at the university needed to be documented to fill a gap in the university’s history and influence present-day attempts to forge a more inclusive culture.

̽��ֱ��Black Cantabs Research Society was formed after Njoki Wamai, a Gates Cambridge Scholar who recently completed a PhD in Politics, met Godfrey Sang, a visiting scholar who was in Cambridge researching the life of Jean Marie Seroney, a Kenyan politician and human rights activist who had visited his friends at Cambridge in the 1950s. Njoki, who is also Kenyan, says: "Godfrey unearthed interesting stories about East Africans Seroney met in Cambridge and I got interested in finding out about the earliest African scholars at Queens' College.”

Initially the research was limited to early black African alumni at Queens' College, Njoki’s college, but she then joined forces with classics student Nnenda Chinda from Downing College and alumna Siana Bangura from Peterhouse to form the Black Cantabs Research Society. Their aim was to unearth rich histories of black Cambridge alumni. Siana and Nnenda were inspired by the election of Priscilla Mensah, the first black female student to Cambridge's student governing body CUSU. Eva Namusoke from Caius College later joined the team as a historian. Other Black Cantabs like Flora Tasse, a Cameroonian computer science graduate from Hughes Hall, designed the society’s website and database. The society has also had the active support of two university academics, Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History, and Dr Monica Moreno Figueroa, a senior lecturer in Sociology.

Other alumni highlighted by the Society include:

- Alexander Crummell [pictured] who matriculated in 1849 and is the first Black Cantab to matriculate and graduate from the ̽��ֱ��. He was an African American priest who later became an important activist and educator in Liberia and was one of the first professors at Liberia College, now the ̽��ֱ�� of Liberia. His contributions to education, the field of moral philosophy and the intellectual life of Liberia are huge. ̽��ֱ��Black Cantabs' Research Society is working with the president of Queens’ College to get a portrait of Alexander Crummell hung in a prominent location to celebrate him.as one of the first professors at Liberia College, now the ̽��ֱ�� of Liberia.

- Professor James Ezeilo who, with Chike Obi and Adegoke Olubummo, was one of a trio of black mathematicians who pioneered modern mathematics research in Nigeria. Sometimes called the "father of mathematics" in Nigeria, he started his studies at Cambridge in 1953, becoming only the second Nigerian at Queens' College. He was Vice-Chancellor of both the ̽��ֱ�� of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Bayero ̽��ֱ��, Kano, as well as Chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and the founding Director of the National Mathematical Centre, in Abuja.

̽��ֱ��Black Cantabs Research Society officially launched in 2015 and has won support from a number of colleges, including Queens'. Its new website was launched at Queens' last week and includes an online database which anyone can update.

̽��ֱ��process of recovering the information has been fairly arduous. Most university records are based in Cambridge’s colleges and access to recent information is barred for privacy reasons. Most of the old records do not record the country of origin of students. That means checking matriculation photos, looking in the university records for students’ names and then Googling for more information. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s alumni department provides a useful guide which the Society has been using.

“It’s a daunting task," says Njoki, adding that she hopes the university can help to continue the work. She feels it is very much needed and says: “Cambridge can be an overwhelming place for black students. You feel you carry so much weight and that you have so much to prove.”

Njoki’s background is in human rights activism and she says it was not until she came to Cambridge that she ‘became black’, rather than simply African, and part of that was to do with the lack of black academics and the lack of black representation among well-known alumni. As an activist who has focused on, for example, women’s inclusion, she wanted to tackle that sense of exclusion which, she says, influences many aspects of black students’ experience of the university.

Njoki is confident that the new president of the Black Cantabs Research Society, Nafisa Waziri, another PhD student from Hughes Hall College, will continue to build on what has been achieved so far. “I would like to see the colleges invest in this kind of research as it plays an important role in creating a more inclusive culture,” says Njoki.

̽��ֱ��organising committee plan to put together periodic exhibitions to celebrate the diversity in Cambridge's past and also to normalise it. This will include a Black Cantabs Speaker Series which invites distinguished Black Cantabs to share their experiences of their time in Cambridge and the paths they have taken since graduating. Eventually the Society would like to publish a book of black scholars and to form a community of Black Cantabs which connects alumni from the distant past to the present.

̽��ֱ��Black Cantabs Research Society has just launched a new platform which will help further its aims of connecting early Black alumni from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge with present-day students.

Credit: New York Public Library

Alexander Crummell 1866

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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