One morning in late 1985, Akyaaba Addai-Sebo walked into work and had a casual conversation with a colleague that would change the trajectory of British society. Then 35 years old, he was working at the Greater London Council (GLC) as a coordinator of special projects in the Ethnic Minorities Unit.
“Elizabeth, the secretary of the principal race relations adviser Ansel Wong, came to work looking very downcast,” he recalls. “I asked her: ‘Elizabeth, What’s wrong?’ She said: ‘Last night I was putting my son Marcus to bed and he asked, ‘Why can’t I be white?’ As she told me the story, she was crying. ‘I named my son after Marcus Garvey,’ Elizabeth told me, ‘And here he is, just six years old questioning his identity. I’ve failed my son.’”
Addai-Sebo responded: “No, you haven’t failed your son. The national curriculum, local authorities, churches and the institutions – they have failed your son. Not only your son. They’ve failed all children growing up in this country.”
The conversation stirred something in him. “I spent about a month or two wondering what has to be done as I observed the state of young Black children in this country. When asked about their heritage and background, I saw how they shrank and how embarrassed they were.”
“I decided that every child growing up in the UK must have an appreciation and an understanding of Africa, Africans, people of African descent – their contributions to world civilisations from antiquity to the present, and especially to the growth and development of the UK and Europe.”
With this vision, he approached colleagues at the GLC and together they came up with a series of historical lectures and concerts, in 1985 and 1986, to celebrate Africa’s contribution to world civilisation, led by intellectuals, politicians and musicians from across the diaspora.
In retrospect, the list of attenders is astounding: Angela Davis, Winnie Mandela, Jesse Jackson, Marcus Garvey Jr, Ray Charles, Burning Spear, Hugh Masekela, Max Roach, and dozens more. Some were also dispatched to speak in other cities across the country. “The key thing was getting London filled with people who had been face-to-face with the struggle,” says Addai-Sebo.
During the lectures and concerts, Addai-Sebo realised that there were several anniversaries coming up: the centenary of Marcus Garvey’s birth; the 25th anniversary of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU); the 30th anniversary of Ghana’s independence; the 180th anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. “We decided to celebrate all these occasions together, and declared 1987-88 African jubilee year,” he says. “I drafted a declaration for the GLC and other London authorities, and it was circulated across the country. In the declaration, the month of October was designated as Black History Month.”
It wasn’t just the buzz generated by the concerts and lectures that aided the establishment of Black History Month. The 80s were a pivotal decade for race relations in the UK. The 80s were a pivotal decade for race relations in the UK. Acts of racial violence, the official response to the New Cross fire, riots in Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth, and opposition to apartheid in South Africa provoked conversations and action from across the diaspora.
There was local opposition to Addai-Sebo’s proposal, but he used “quiet diplomacy” to settle any concerns councillors had: “I would find out where they lived, knock on their door and sit with them and explain what we were trying to achieve. Then, at the next council meeting, they would agree!” he says, recalling with satisfaction that his project got all-party support.
He also had the law on his side, in the form of successive race relations acts that had recently passed. “The mere fact that parliament had to debate the passing of these acts showed that they believed there was something wrong with Britain. There are sections in the legislation designed to promote racial harmony.”
“To achieve harmony on an organ, the black and white keys must be in tune and play together. What I saw was that the black key was out of tune. Black History Month was an attempt to tune the key and achieve the harmony many of us wanted.”
Sitting in his sister’s living room in south-east London, his memories of childhood and young adult life are vivid. He is wearing a fitted purple tunic top, as popularised by Ghana’s first prime minister and president Kwame Nkrumah.
Addai-Sebo was born in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region in south-central Ghana, seven years before the country gained independence from the British.
“Growing up in the 50s I saw a lot of warfare and strife between those for and against independence, and between those who wanted a slow approach under the tutelage of the British and those who said: ‘No, we want self-government now, we have to rule ourselves.’”
A formative moment was hearing the news that Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been murdered in January 1961. “I was 10 years old and I’d gone to get a bucket of water to wash before I went to school. I heard over the radio, at dawn, the voice of Kwame Nkrumah speaking to the nation, he was almost crying. He said Patrice Lumumba had been assassinated – it was the first time I had heard such a long word: ‘assassinated’.” Nkrumah’s emotions affected Addai-Sebo deeply: “It shaped my consciousness and my attitude to life, the unfairness of the world, and the powers that be. It opened my mind. I was always on the lookout, always attentive and always aware.”
This consciousness sharpened as he grew up. As a child, he found himself part of the Young Pioneer Movement (YPM) – initiated by Nkrumah as a way of instilling in Ghanaian youth a sense of courage, respect, and pride. “It inculcated in us the idea of being good and responsible citizens. We were told that the future was ours to shape. Nkrumah was preparing us to make Ghana a better place. We witnessed developmental projects going on around the country and saw that it was moving. We were made to feel as if we were part of a developing process, enhancing and building up society.”
However, the YPM faced opposition, primarily from the Anglican and Catholic churches. “They said that the YPM was anti-Christ and anti-God, but these were the same churches that opposed independence until its very eve. The YPM told us that you were an African first, before anything else, before the Europeans came, before the Bible came, which probably upset them.”
His studies eventually took Addai-Sebo to the US. “I got to New York in August 1975 and took a coach to Washington. Behind me sat a lady and her two-year-old son. I overheard them talking and when I turned around the boy pointed at me and said: ‘Nigger! Nigger!’ The whole bus looked shocked, many gasped, and his mother looked so embarrassed. I asked what his name was and his mother said Christopher. I said: ‘Oh, Christopher Columbus has welcomed me to America!’” He laughs as he recalls the moment. “That’s how America welcomed me!”
His welcome into Black America was more accepting. It was “buzzing with activity.” he says. “I arrived when the campaign to turn Negro History Week into Black History Month was well under way. The US was preparing to celebrate its bicentenary. I’d joined Stokely Carmichael’s All-African People’s Revolutionary party which was heavily involved in the Pan-African liberation movement. We travelled across the country organising and rallying those around us.”
Carmichael, who had changed his name to Kwame Ture, would join their work-study discussion groups. “He would say: ‘Be ready for the revolution. Place yourself in a state of intellectual preparedness and readiness, because the revolution comes like a thief in the night.’ He was an incredible human being. I was so humbled to be in the presence of someone like him.”
Addai-Sebo was also fortunate to have CLR James, the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist, historian and journalist, as a mentor. His most powerful memory of James is associated with loss: the assassination of James’s colleague and friend, Walter Rodney, in Guyana in 1980, when a bomb was placed in his car. Addai-Sebo recalls that, “James cried like a baby. ‘Oh my goodness, they’ve killed him, what a loss!’ James kept saying. As he recounts this, his voice shakes, a pained expression falls over his face and he pauses for a moment. The loss of his comrades from the liberation struggle still moves him.
In 1982, Addai-Sebo returned to Ghana. News of successive coups – including by Jerry Rawlings, who would rule the country until 2001 – had prompted him to learn what life was like in the country. “What I found was civil agitation, internal problems and power struggles caused by the coup. There was fighting about whether Rawlings’ coup was doing enough for the country. I was fascinated by the establishment of people’s and workers’ rights committees across the country to protect the communities and places of work.”
Addai-Sebo and others were critical of Rawlings’ handling of the country, citing backdoor dealings with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the very forces who had undermined the Nkrumah regime. “It got to a point where the regime did not feel comfortable with my presence in the country. I was an outspoken critic of the direction that Ghana’s political economy was taking. We demanded that Ghana utilise its resources – such as gold – and generate the needed capital.”
In January 1984, Addai-Sebo was forced to flee Ghana. “My colleagues had thrown a party celebrating my return from a trip to Liberia. Once the party died down, I heard jeeps gathering outside and saw armed soldiers with AK-47s. I heard one say: ‘We don’t know this guy. How do we even recognise him?’”
He knew instantly that the death squads had come for him. As he relays the story he pauses – still surprised that he was a target. “I knew they were brutal. A lot of my colleagues and those who opposed the regime had been killed or disappeared. They surrounded the house and banged on the door. I managed to escape by hiding in the slats of the ceiling.” He spent the next three weeks in hiding helped by colleagues and sympathisers. “The death squads knew my name, but not my face, and that saved me.”
The day he narrowly escaped the death squad, was also the birthday of his mentor James. “I said to myself, there was no way that I was going to be arrested on his birthday!” He laughs heartily at this.
After his escape, a police notice was published declaring him a wanted man. “There was a big manhunt, for me,” he says. The defence committees and workers’ unions came to his rescue and organised his eventual escape via Ivory Coast.
Torn between fleeing to the US or the UK, Addai-Sebo eventually chose the latter. “Strategically, London was the best place for me. CLR James had moved to London by this time, and the Ghanaian population was bigger in London, making it easier to organise resistance to the regime back home. I went to Brixton, to the embrace of James and activists such as Darcus Howe who were based there. Fortuitously I got a job with the GLC which led to the eventual setting up of Black History Month.”
After establishing Black History Month, Addai-Sebo did what any activist does – he kept on going. From 1989 to 1993, he was operations manager for the Notting Hill carnival committee. He was a special envoy of International Alert, which brokered peace between warring factions in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He also acted as special adviser to the OAU in their transition into becoming the African Union in 2002. More recently, Addai-Sebo helped set up a forestry company in Ghana that has successfully reforested more than 6,000 hectares of the degraded Boumfoum Forest Reserve. However, as time goes on, he has increasingly made space for family. “As a family elder, I split my time between the UK and Ghana overseeing the welfare, growth, and development of my grandchildren, children, nephews, nieces, and other members of the extended family,” he says.
Because of what Addai-Sebo fought to establish, Black Britons are no longer ashamed of their skin colour or their heritage, and far more young white Britons are accepting of their Black compatriots. In the search to solve the problem presented to him in the form of a confused six-year-old and his distraught mother, Addai-Sebo’s fight to establish Black History Month has changed the country for the better, though he deflects any personal credit for the achievement: “It was young Marcus who triggered this whole thing. We owe it to him and his mother, Elizabeth.”
• This article was amended on 29 September 2023. An earlier version referred to the New Cross fire itself as an act of racial violence, rather than the official response and reaction. This has been clarified.
