“The Roman Empire became a bank; the British Empire became a church”. This viral aphorism pops up on my feed in video meme format for the millionth time on the morning of my conversation with Ghanaian, Pan-Africanist, cultural thinker and founder of Black History Month UK, Akyaaba Addai-Sebo. We’re speaking ahead of the release of Have Faith In Self, a short film focused on him, directed by fellow Ghanaian Curtis Essel. When deconstructed, the statement points towards a truth which rears its head in various forms across our conversation that day: an understanding of faith as amorphous, shape-shifting to accommodate circumstance.

 

As a young boy, Addai-Sebo had a brush with death. His mother, out of options for her ill son, took him to a traditional herbalist. Over the course of this encounter, she was questioned about his diet and familial lineage. The herbalist, listening closely, identified certain foods the child should avoid. Addai-Sebo would later come to understand these restrictions as lineage-specific dietary taboos or what in the West could be referred to as hereditary allergies.

 

Beyond the restrictive constraints of Western technocracy, a system which privileges rationality, reason and measurable outcomes as key sources of truth, exists another world. One bursting with a particular kind of knowledge that exceeds Eurocentric frameworks of ‘objective truth’. Knowledge carried in the hands of herbalists, the minds of griots, the rhythm of drums. Knowledge that manifests in indigenous methodologies of plant cultivation, in gestures, rituals, processions and prayers. Knowledge that has been passed between generations, defined by relationality, generated from proximity, stored in living archives, transmitted through oral traditions, and guided by an ethic of harmony.

 

Addai-Sebo has championed this way of being across his life. After moving to Britain in 1984, he became involved in Black community activism and worked as Special Projects Coordinator within the Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minorities Unit. His reflections offer a way of thinking which frames balance as a state we must embody. “We venerate what is around us,” he says in conversation. “It's that consciousness that defines us as African people. That [understanding that] if you destroy your environment, you are eventually destroying yourself.” 

 

For many Africans, the arrival of the colonial forces brought with it a shift in worldview. One which disrupted our relationships to the land and forced pre-colonial systems of living to the fringes. Now, both on and off the African continent, when measured against the standards of Western science, these older cosmologies are dismissed as rudimentary or superstitious. 

 

Reclaiming these ways of knowing is inseparable from the wider work of reclaiming African identity. This is what informed Addai-Sebo's decision to establish Black History Month UK in October. The month carried a spiritual significance, offering an opportunity to return to the rhythms of reflection and communal celebration that have long structured African life. “October is designed for us to review our life,” he explains. “We chose October for a purpose, for a spiritual purpose. October demands that we follow our traditions. It is during this period that we have the festivals, the Ogra Festival, the Yam Festivals, and all that.”

 

This often-overlooked node in the wider structure of Black History Month UK reflects a longstanding tradition of coding and concealment by Afro-diasporians. We see this tradition in the blending of Yoruba, Fon and Bantu practices with Catholicism in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, as well as in Capoeira, a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians who veiled fighting techniques within dance movements. Here, with Black History Month, this tradition of coding is deployed to conceal our traditions under the banner of a secular commemorative observation.

 

“We speak to each other in code,” says Addai-Sebo. “We interpret our lives in codes. You have to be able to decode every day. Even the way our women tie their headgear, tie their clothes, everything has a meaning, has a spiritual essence”. 

 

From our conversation, it’s evident that Addai-Sebo is one of those aforementioned living archives. We jump from the interracial couple he was friends with, whose relationship, he suggests, served as the inspiration for the iconic film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), to Jessica and Eric Huntley, the founders of the publishing house Bogle-L’Ouverture, which published Walter Rodney, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Valerie Bloom. Their home served as a literary salon for Addai-Sebo and his peers during that period. Then to former MP Ken Livingstone, a close friend of Addai-Sebo, whose work and support were of utmost importance to him.

 

For someone who has lived such a rich life, it was only right that Essel turned his camera on Addai-Sebo for his latest project. Addai-Sebo writes poetry of his own, penning I Am James Somerset, a poem read and gifted to the English Heritage Trust to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Somerset v Stewart, a landmark case in the fight for the abolition of slavery in the UK. However, his reading of the godfather of Pan-africanism, Marcus Garvey’s poem Have Faith in Self, serves as the voice-over for this film.

 

In the poem, Garvey, by way of Addai-Sebo, urges us to ‘Go down and search yourself awhile’, later suggesting, ‘it is the Soul that longs for you to know’. Read through the framework of Addai-Sebo's career, these lines become a call to action for me. We are witnessing the collapse of contextual meaning and the flattening of our histories into one-dimensional constructions. What becomes of our culture, our practices rests in our hands. The creation of avenues to both protect and make accessible the obfuscated and, in many cases, purposefully erased histories of people of African descent is pertinent. If the Roman Empire really did become a church and the British a Bank, what then will we become?