What it means to be a black African in London

Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of those travellers who came to London in the 1950s from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia and other African countries, seeking education and prosperity, and found a new home. They now not only hold prominent positions in British culture – from Bafta and Emmy award-winning Michaela Coel to the rap artist and publishing imprint founder Stormzy – but have reached those heights by using their experiences and heritage to explore what it means to be black British.

Settlers is the first book of Jimi Famuwera, a British-Nigerian journalist and broadcaster. In it he seeks to ‘carve out a distinct space for the African experience amid a black Britishness that can often default to a Windrush-adjacent West Indian story’. In doing so, he embarks on a personal exploration of what it entails to be a black African in London, what it means to settle, to assimilate, to be a custodian of tradition in a modern world, and what that costs. He takes the reader into London’s African communities, its churches and restaurants, tutor groups and nightclubs, markets and homes, and unpicks their history, complexity and future.

If the book is sometimes uncomfortable reading for a white Briton, it should be. Settlers is not an invective, or even really an admonishment, but it is plain in its criticism of empire:

TM African Foods is a whirl of colour and dazzling brightness, and brusque, warm interaction

Diaspora is a word we use to denote an immigrant population away from its traditional homeland. But that it also suggests dispersal, displacement and exile is instructive. There is no untainted and uncolonised version of the mother country to return to. I am here because they were there.