Akyaaba Addai-Sebo
Black History Month is a celebration of our diversity. The UK's first Black History Month took place in 1987. The initiative was rallied for by Ghanaian analyst Akyaaba Addai-Sebo who moved to the UK to seek refuge from political persecution in Ghana in 1984. Raised in Ghana, Addai-Sebo was among the many young people who benefited from the country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah’s Young Pioneers Movement, a body that grew a generation of young leaders for Africa.
Addai-Sebo’s education would take him to America in the 1970s, where he would get abreast with the celebration of Black History Month, then a national holiday that had achieved heights in renewing a sense of pride among black children.
He would later move to London after being declared a wanted man in Ghana during the rule of former military leader, Jerry John Rawlings.
“A death squad had been sent after me, but I escaped their detection and was declared a WANTED MAN. The People’s and Workers’ Defence Committees at that time protected me and prepared my escape after three weeks of hide and seek with the security agencies. I settled in London with my wife, Nana Akua Owusu, who had arrived before me. We lived in the company of Pan-African intellectual giant, CLR James and his nephew, Darcus Howe, black activist who run the Race Today collective. I was therefore absorbed in community activism right on my arrival,”.
He soon began work as coordinator of special projects at the Greater London Council and Chairman of the African Refugees Housing Action Group within a year of his arrival and later Operations Manager of the Notting Hill Carnival.
“I had lectured about African traditions in the United States, and children and their parents told me it had given them a new sense of self. Despite all its grand
institutions of higher education, the UK was still a touchstone for colonialism, imperialism and racism.”
"Our original goal was to first create an enabling cultural space in the UK celebratory calendar and after public acceptance and recognition extend the observance of October as a month to a Black History Season. To make Black History Season a celebration of the magnificence of cultural diversity and the enriching value in peaceful co-existence.”
Akyaaba felt that young black children in the UK were suffering from what he described as an “identity crisis” and speaks of countless encounters with young black boys and girls being ashamed of their heritage.
Addai-Sebo and his team were leading the campaigns against institutional racism in the UK and the apartheid regimes in southern Africa, but a chilling conversation he had with a colleague while working in London would spark his vision of a Black History Month for the UK.
“I was stirred up in the mid-1980s by the identity crisis that Black children faced as some brazenly would not identify with Africa and shrank when called an African. A colleague came to work one morning broken-hearted and in probing her, she revealed to me in confidence that her seven-year-old son, who she had proudly and purposefully named Marcus, after Marcus Mosiah Garvey (a foremost Black nationalist leader), before going to bed, had asked her: “Mom, why can’t I be white?”
From this conversation, Addai-Sebo said he realised that a crisis of identity was facing many people in spite of the race awareness campaigns of his collectives, the Greater London Council (GLC) and the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).
He considered an annual celebration of the contributions of Africa, Africans, and the people of African descent to world civilization from the ancient times to present, and in the process, he got plenty of support from the GLC including leading members such as Mr. Ansel Wong, Head of the Ethnic Minorities Unit and the leader of GLC, Mr. Ken Livingstone.
Thirty-four years after the initial event, Black History Month is celebrated each October in the UK with a number of special events and celebrations taking place to mark the occasion.
Further information:
In 2014, he was executive producer of "One Humanity," a documentary on the 1988 and 1990 Wembley concerts for Nelson Mandela.
Video - One Humanity Trailer - YouTube
Articles & Link to interview https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/interviews/akyaaba-addai-sebo/