Journalist at RFI (ex-DW, BBC, CBC, F24...), writer (on art, music, culture...), I work in radio, podcasting, online, on films.
As a writer, I also contributed to the New Arab, Art UK, Byline Times, the i Paper...
Born in Paris, I was based in Prague, Miami, London, Nairobi (covering East Africa), Bangui, and in Bristol, UK. I also reported from Italy, Germany, Haiti, Tunisia, Liberia, Senegal, India, Mexico, Iraq, South Africa...
This blog is to share my work, news and cultural discoveries.
Streaming Thu 25 June at 18:00 on Zoom (Zoom details will be provided very soon). This event is free.
Join creative collective CARGO Movement for a short film screening and panel discussion on the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Bristol.
On Sun 7 June Bristol's connection to the Slave Trade became international news - but its legacy has been shaping the lives of Bristolians for centuries. During this livestreamed event, CARGO Movement will share their short film UPRISING, and a trailer for the upcoming short film 1971, before a panel discussion hosted by CARGO writer, Executive Producer and Pervasive Media Studio resident Lawrence Hoo.
The discussion will look back at the St Pauls uprising of 1980 and discuss the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 before the panellists (to be announced soon) share their thoughts on what the future may hold.
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More information about CARGO
CARGO Movement is a creative collective developing digital heritage resources for schools and the broader public. These include films, immersive exhibition design and the “CARGO Classroom” education tools. Its founders have long been dedicated to broadening Bristol’s understanding of its History in relation to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its living legacy.
CARGO is a producer of films and interactive online content of exceptional quality, which evocatively celebrate the resilience and visionary leadership of black individuals who catalysed change and moved society forward. CARGO puts forward those missing narratives from our past and inspires the public to visualise a future full of pride and possibility. Watershed is one of CARGO Movement's partner organisatons.
I'm not writing here much - not because there is too little to say, but because there is too much to do!
With the recent protests, I had much more work, recorded interviews - more on my YouTube channel very soon, and more writing to complete.
I'm doing research on African artists for my coming book (yes, a new book is on the way!!) - with the Arnolfini. I also interviewed their coming artist: Hassan Hajjaj : video to come in July most probably!
And a lot more.
For now let's share a few images of Hassan's coming show.
We've made so much progress on this conversation in just a week!!
Last summer I was telling a friend: "I want to come back to the UK because most of our global problems started here, and I feel the is where we can start solving them."
Well now is an interesting time.
As readers of this blog know, I've spent years in Africa as a reporter, and a year as a researcher on colonial history for a documentary film company, created by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. The 4 films we worked on are far from ready to be produced but it may be time to share some of the content; I'll dig in my archives...
In the meantime, here are great resources if you want to learn more about colonial history and the mass deportation of forced "human labour" from Africa to the Americas, by the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool:
Enslaved Africans: our truth - follow four Africans on their harrowing journeys into slavery with our interactive feature
Parliament and the British Slave Trade 1600 - 1807 - this complex relationship is explored, with online access to all of the key documents in the archives including the 1807 Act and slave trade petitions. The learning section includes lesson plans and tools for creating interactive resources
The Equiano Project - celebrating the life and times of the 18th century writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, with the Equiano Society and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Mémoire St Barth - dedicated to the history of St Bartholomew, focusing on the slave trade, slavery, abolition and their impact on this island of the Lesser Antilles.
Anti-Slavery International - founded in 1839, Anti-Slavery International is the oldest international human rights organisation in the world and works to eradicate all forms of slavery internationally
Not For Sale Campaign - combines technology, intellectual capital, abolitionist groups and a growing network of individuals, joined together, with the aim of ending slavery in their lifetime
Stop the Traffik - a growing global coalition working together to fight against people trafficking.
Amnesty International - is an organization that campaigns to protect human rights worldwide. Their work involves protecting victims of trafficking in the UK, as part of the campaign to stop violence against women.
“Fall Please” has just been released today, as the first single from Tricky’s 14th studio album: Fall to Pieces.
The album is due out September 4 via his label False Idols.
Tricky said in a statement that he likens 'Fall Please' to Washington D.C.’s Go-go: “It’s my version of pop music, the closest I’ve got to making pop.”
The rapper turned producer Adrian Thaws, more commonly known as Tricky, is considered one of the pioneers of “the Bristol sound”, a mix of hip-hop, soul vocals, punk ethos and electronic arrangements, pioneered in the city by Massive Attack. Tricky was an early collaborator of the band, and appeared on their debut album Blue Lines (1991); known for his fiery temperament, however, he soon decided to work solo. His first album Maxinquaye(1995) peaked at number three in the charts and launched a busy career.
In his autobiography Hell is Round the Corner – written with the music journalist Andrew Perry – Tricky tells stories of touring with PJ Harvey, of meeting with the likes of the reggae producer Chris Blackwell and David Bowie, and he writes candidly about his romantic and musical relationship with Björk. However, the focus of the book is his difficult childhood, and in general he shies away from discussing the trappings of fame. “I see artists who are chasing their dream”, he writes, “and obviously you have to work hard to get anywhere with music, but in all honesty, I never chased it … It just happened for me, so I almost feel a bit too lucky.”
At the age of four, after the suicide of his mixed-race mother, Maxine Quaye, he grew up with his aunt and grandmother and was separated from his Jamaican father, Roy, whom they unfairly blamed for Maxine’s death. Tricky was surrounded by uncles who spent time in prison for petty crimes and violence, and at seventeen he briefly went to prison himself. He realized it wasn’t for him. Music was his first passion, and it helped him escape what he called the “white ghetto” of home: Knowle West in south Bristol. He remembers the first notes of Billie Holiday he heard as a child, and writes of his love for the Specials, a multicultural, working-class, self-made band who represented to him for the first time a positive mixed-race Britain. “When I’d seen [them]”, he writes, “I was like, ‘Fuck, I could be a musician, because they are all like me’”. He is proud, he writes, that many black and working-class young people are now inspired by him in the same way.
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Fall to Pieces' track-list:
01 Thinking Of 02 Close Now 03 Running Off 04 I’m in the Doorway 05 Hate This Pain 06 Chills Me to the Bone 07 Fall Please 08 Take Me Shopping 09 Like a Stone 10 Throws Me Around
I studied in France, for two masters, studied history for years, then worked in the UK/Africa for years... but I had to teach myself colonial history, while it had directly impacted my family for decades!
I worked for years as a reporter in North America; East, central and North Africa; travelled to West and Southern Africa, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Mexico, Belgium and another dozen of European countries, covering these issues. And worked as a researcher for a few documentary films currently in the making. First and foremost one biopic on anti-colonialist thinker and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, but also projects about Malcolm X, American Indigenous history and history of genocides.
Let's give the next generation a better chance to understand!! And not only in the UK... In the USA, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy at least, all nations that participated in colonising the Americas & Caribbean islands, Africa, Asia, Australia & Australasia, and the Middle East.
Teach British children about the realities of British Imperialism and Colonialism
"The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils: Know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world."
Despite this, there is still much omitted from Britain’s colonial history. By excluding the evils of British Imperialism, along with how members of the African Diaspora contributed to the British nation-state, British children are robbed of understanding how colonialist ideology was implemented. This stunts the growth of racial equality in the UK and hinders the racial esteem of Black British children.
Frederick Douglass said that “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Similarly, we recognise that better education for our children is the most effective tool for constructing an anti-racist society.
This week, I wanted to address the issue of resilience - after very intense days...
So I interviewed resilience coach and Nacoa ambassador Josh Connolly - from Josh Connolly - Freedom From Within - on how to take care of your mental health in this difficult period.
In the last of our first series, we're delighted this week to be talking to Josh Connolly about how to manage difficult emotions which may be surfacing during lockdown.
Josh is a resilience coach and NACOA ambassador, National Association for Children of Alcoholics (Free helpline: 0800 358 3456).
We also have music from Lady Nade and our usual round up from Bristol, UK, and around the world.
"Here’s an idea that caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t. We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size bronze statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down. Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated."
As a historian of Bristol’s culture, I took part in this weekend’s Black Lives Matter march. When the slave trader’s statue finally fell, screams of joy exploded through the multicultural crowd.
Bristol’s Black Lives Matter protests this Sunday concluded with the toppling of the public statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston, celebrated for decades by the city as a mere “philanthropist”. I was among the protesters gathered, and when the statue came down we felt our fight against the oppression of people of colour had finally hit a new, important level.
I came to Bristol in 2015 as a foreign journalist to write about the city’s culture and tradition of protests, based on the journey of its most famous artists. Once I started researching my book, I never stopped hearing about Colston. I chose to move back here again recently because I felt, as I explained to a friend earlier this year, that most of the problems of the 21st century started in England, and this is one place where we’re going to start to solve them.
The Bristol protests started, like so many others, as a response to the killing of George Floyd, with a few speeches on social justice and coming together to kneel, in silence, for eight minutes. Then the march started, peacefully, towards the centre of the city and the infamous statue of Colston. When the Black Lives Matter protesters finally pulled it down — at about 2.30pm, just an hour and a half after the march began — screams of joy exploded through the multicultural, multigenerational crowd.
Protester John McAllister declared: “It says ‘erected by the citizens of Bristol, as a memorial to one of the most virtuous and wise sons of this city’. The man was a slave trader. He was generous to Bristol, but it was off the back of slavery and it’s absolutely despicable. It’s an insult to the people of Bristol.”
A group then dragged the remains of the statue towards the city’s river, and threw it in the water in a location facing Pero’s Bridge, named after a Caribbean man known to have been a slave of the merchant John Pinney.
What happened in Bristol this Sunday shows that the debate on Britain’s colonial legacy has been postponed for far too long. If up until the 19th century it was considered politically correct to celebrate this sort of “philanthropy” based on slavery, change had been long overdue. Colston’s company alone is reported to have transported more than 100,000 slaves from west Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas between 1672 and 1689.
For me, as my own family has been deeply affected by colonialism elsewhere in the world, it is puzzling to hear some English people still defending the statue based on the understanding of our shared history. France wouldn’t erect statues of Petain, or Germany of Hitler, just for the sake of remembrance of our criminal pasts.
Change is upon us. In France, slavery has been recognised as a crime against humanity since 2001. Yet it took until a few days ago for the statue of Victor Schoelcher to be taken down in Martinique.
The fall of Colston’s statue in Bristol is a bellwether of attitudes — a sign that the UK will now have to deal with its past differently. British-Nigerian historian David Olusoga wrote last night that the statue might “be fished out at some point” and “put in the city museum, where it has long belonged”.
A few artists born in the city had been voicing this message for years, including the band Massive Attack. They were among the marchers, and tweeted: “The elevation of a slave trader clashed badly with our civic identity. A philanthropy derived from crimes against humanity is as hollow as the statue itself.”
This weekend, history has been made in the UK. And it started in Bristol.
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Melissa Chemam is freelance journalist, associate lecturer in journalism at UWE Bristol and author of ‘Massive Attack — Out of the Comfort Zone’ (2019). She has reported on migration issues in east and central Africa and western Europe for the BBC World Service and other international broadcasters
And finally protesters threw the statue into the city's river, after pulling it down earlier around 2:30pm.
The bronze memorial statue had stood in the centre of Bristol since 1895 but had sparked controversy for years. And in recent days, more than 10,000 people signed a petition calling on Bristol City Council to have it removed. Before it was pulled down, protestor John McAllister, 71, declared: "It says 'erected by the citizens of Bristol, as a memorial to one of the most virtuous and wise sons of this city'. The man was a slave trader. He was generous to Bristol but it was off the back of slavery and it's absolutely despicable. It's an insult to the people of Bristol." NB. Edward Colston was involved in slave trading through the Royal African Company, which then had a monopoly over slave trading, and was later elected as the Tory MP for Bristol. He still has a large representation in the city where he was born, through many schools, buildings, streets and charities named after him.
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About my book on Bristol's music, art, activism:
This book is dedicated to the history of the band Massive Attack and to their relationship with their home town of Bristol, a city built on the wealth generated by the slave trade.
As a port Bristol was also an arrival point for immigrants to the UK, most notably the Windrush generation from the Caribbean in the 1950s. Author Melissa Chemam's in-depth study of the influences that led to the formation of the Wild Bunch and then Massive Attack looks into Bristol's past to explore how the city helped shape one of the most successful and innovative musical movements of the last 30 years.
Based on interviews with Robert Del Naja (aka 3D), Tricky, street artists, musicians, historians and many others, the book examines the inner tensions between the founding members of Massive Attack - 3D, Daddy G and Mushroom - but mainly their influences, collaborations and politics, the way in which they opened the door for other Bristol musicians and artists including Banksy, and how they changed the city for good.
