Book Review: ACWA, New Shoots Old Roots
History is not what happened it is what we remember happened. There are significant gaps in our understanding of Scotland’s history. To borrow the opening quotation from New Shoots Old Roots:
“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Chinua Achebe
This simple publication contains photographs and interview transcripts. It brings to life the stories of eight African and Caribbean women who came to Scotland between 1958 and 1996. It places value on their experience as migrants to this country where they were welcomed for their skilled labour but often left feeling socially isolated because of racism.
The book is dedicated to Edith Meheux. There is a Polaroid photograph of her as a young woman on the front cover of the book. She is a vision in pastel shades: a light green coat over a pink dress and yellow leggings. But she also wears thick gloves and dark boots and scarf because the earth is covered in blue white snow. She faces the camera on a cold but bright winter’s morning with a tentative smile. The sun was so low in the sky that the shadow of her legs fills half the picture frame. Fifty metres behind her is a copse of leafless oak trees and in the distance the tiny frame of white metal goal posts anchor the picture in Scotland. Edith came here from Sierra Leone in 1970. She is pictured standing in Queen’s Park, Glasgow.
Harriet Campbell tells of her experiences in the early seventies waiting for her fellow nurses to finish their shift so they could negotiate together the bus journey back to their accommodation in the East End of Glasgow. They found strength and security in numbers against the teenagers who insulted them and sometimes threw stones. Mukami McCrum from Kenya explains that it’s not just the racism she found difficult in Scotland but also the loss of status and identity, “an 8-hour flight completely obliterated everything about me. I became nothing!” Her own family doctor assumed repeatedly she was a nurse simply because she was a black woman in spite of her repeatedly reminding him she was a teacher. There is a recent photograph of Mukami standing in her garden with her teenage grand daughter. They look happy and healthy together. Mukami’s garden is modestly sized but brimming over with life and hope for the future.
The hope these women carry comes from a lifetime of struggle. They came together and formed ACWA, the African and Caribbean Woman’s association, in 1988 to support one another. Individually they became activists supporting important causes in the fields of human rights, health care and politics. At the book launch for New Shoots Old Roots held in Glasgow Woman’s Library during Black History Month, Dr Ima Jackson spoke about the relative invisibility of the achievements of black women in Scottish history and how these gaps in our understanding fail everyone. It enables a landscape of intolerance to persist. One way of challenging dominant historical narratives that leave marginalized communities out of sight and out of mind is to write histories from the bottom up. People’s real lived experiences connect across different generations and demonstrate a shared history that refuses to be erased.
New Shoots Old Roots is a book that fills a gap in Scottish history. It tells stories of resilience and persistence. It tells of small but important victories. When Patricia Iredia first arrived in Stornaway in 1996 she thought, “Oh my God, this is the end of the earth!” In time her family became the first black family to own their own house there. Such achievements came through hard work and determination not to be overcome by the barriers put up by the prejudice of others. If Scotland is to progress and prosper in the twenty first century it must deal honestly with its past history. That is why it is so important that these stories are seen through photographs and heard through the voices of the women who lived through these times. Edith Meheux is gone now but her story and her photograph, along with those of her friends, live on in the pages of New Shoots Old Roots.
Photo credits:
1. Edith Meheux, Queens Park © Meheux family
2. Mukami McCrumb and her granddaughter © Iseult Timmermans
3. The late Dr Iredia welcoming family, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis © Patricia Iredia
New Shoots Old Roots is a result of ongoing creative collaboration between Street Level Photoworks and ACWA that began in 2013 and will result in a second publication next year involving another 20 women, funded by Heritage Lottery Funds.
A short documentary of New Shoots Old Roots interviews can be viewed here:
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