October is Black History Month in the UK and to honour the occasion, UBO features 10 African and African-Carbbean individuals who have made a positive contribution to our culutral history. Justin Fashanu, Michelle Cliff, David McAlmont, Skin, Isaac Julien, Rikki Beadle-Blair, Jackie Kay, Labi Siffrie, Femi Otitoju, and Claude McKay.

Justin Fashanu - Son of a Nigerian barrister. When his parents split up he was sent, with his brother John, to a Barnado's home. When he was six he and his brother were fostered by Alf and Betty Jackson and was brought up in Attleborough, Norfolk. Justin Fashanu played in the England Youth and Under 21 team and made his professional football debut at Norwich City in 1979. He became Britain's first one million pound black footballer when he transferred to Nottingham Forest in 1981.


Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and grew up there and in the United States. She was educated in New York City and at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, where she completed a Ph.D. on the Italian Renaissance. She is the author of novels (Abeng, No Telephone To Heaven, and Free Enterprise), short stories (Bodies of Water), 'prose poetry' (The Land of Look Behind and Claiming and Identity They Taught Me to Despise), as well as numerous works of criticism. Her essays have appeared frequently in publications such as Ms. and The Village Voice. She is also the editor of a collection of the writings of the southern American social reformer Lillian Smith entitled The Winner Names the Age. Cliff now lives in Santa Cruz, California.


David McAlmont - London, UK - singer/songwriter. First and foremost Out Black Gay personality in Britain, who has been out since his career began in 1990. Works include: two albums and several successful singles in the UK. He co-wrote the song Surrender sung by k.d. lang on the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies soundtrack and covered Diamonds are Forever from an earlier Bond film. He is a  positive role model to young black gays and lesbians in Britain.


Skin - Born Deborah Anne Dyer, Skin was one quarter of the bank Skunk Anansie. They were named after the Jamaican folk tales of Anansie the spider-man, with "Skunk" added to "make the name nastier.  She is one of the first openly Black Lesbian artists. Skin Music.


Isaac Julien - Born in 1960, in Bow, east London.  British film producer and director. He was the first a new wave of black British independent film makers.

Isaac Julien originally studied painting at St Martin's School of Art in London. In his final year there he studied along with Sandra Lahire.

He had a painting accepted by the Royal Academy Summer Show in 1980.

He was a founder member of the Black Workshop, Sankofa, the pioneering black film and video collective, which led to his first television collaboration with Channel 4, the award-winning drama-documentary, Looking For Langston, (1989). (Inspired by the enigmatic sexuality of the US poet Langston Hughes.)

Julien's first feature film, Young Soul Rebels, (1991), won international critical acclaim.

In 1993, with friends Jimmy Somerville, film-maker Steve McLean and writer/producer Mark Nash, he set up Normal films, a production company specialising in queer documentaries and films. Their productions include The Attendant, (1993), A Darker Side of Black, (1994), and Postcards From America, (1995).


Rikki Beadle-Blair - was brought up by his black single mother, Monica Beadle (born 1944), a counsellor, who was also gay. She was born in Jamaica and moved to Britain when she was 12. She was the first black child in her school in Peckham. When she was pregnant with Rikki at the age of 16 her mother had just died and her sister was throwing her out into the street. Rikki was brought up with a brother, Gary, 4 years younger, and a sister, Carleen, 8 years younger.

The BBC current affairs television programme, Nationwide, made a documentary about him when he was a child performer in Bermondsey, south London, in the 1970s.

When he was 17 he did a capella concerts at the Gay's The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury, London. At this time he was also going to gay pubs and clubs and was involved with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).

He was subsequently a dancer, a cabaret artist, a rock musician, an actor, a choreographer, and a director. He has performed worldwide, and has written plays for BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4 television. He was proud of his performance in the early 1990s in the film Sirens in which he played Blue, a punky Scouse heroin junkie.

In 1994 he wrote the screenplay for Nigel Finch's film Stonewall, about the Stonewall Rebellion. This won him awards at film festivals in London and San Francisco.

His profile was considerably raised in Britain in March 2001 with the Channel 4 television series Metrosexuality which he wrote, produced, and directed, and in which he played a lead role.

In 2001 he adapted Boy George's autobiography Take It Like A Man for a BBC film.

His most recent work, Bashment, was a play that explored the controversy around dancehall reggae music and the consequences of homophobic lyrics.


Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University where she read English.  Biography .



Labi Siffrie - the fourth of five children, at Queen Charlotte's Hospital Hammersmith, London to a Barbadian / Belgian mother and a Nigerian father, Siffre was brought up in Bayswater and Hampstead and educated at a Catholic monastery school, St Benedict's School, in Ealing.

The singer has spent his career breaking down boundaries. The openly gay singer has built a small cult following with works that deal squarely with homophobia and racism. In addition to his nine albums, the multi-talented Siffre has written three books of poetry and has also written for the stage.

Musically, Siffre is known for his soulful, high-pitched voice and thought-provoking lyrics. His single "I Got The" from his 1975 album Remember My Song received a modicum of fame decades after its release when its funky piano hook was sampled in Eminem's 1999 debut smash single "My Name Is." In 1988, Siffre had a hit with his anti-apartheid anthem "(Something Inside) So Strong," a song that embodies his vocal talents and his social conscience. ~ Jon Azpiri, All Music Guide

 

 

Femi Otitoju began training in 1980 when she was involved in management development for a large employment agency.

After further developing her skills at The Observer, Femi was finally able to combine her professional experience with her personal commitment to equality for all when she joined the GLC Women's Committee Support Unit as a Community Development Officer.

After some time in local government as a training officer, Femi founded Challenge and began to offer courses directly to the public, private and voluntary sectors. Femi has been personally involved in the civil rights struggles for race, gender, sexual orientation and disability equality. More.

 

 

Claude MCKay (15 Sept. 1890-22 May 1948), poet, novelist, and journalist, was born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the son of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, farmers.

Claude McKay is considered to be “the first great lyric genius that his race produced”.

He is also regarded as one of the first significant writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He migrated to the United States in 1912 at the age of 21 and had already gained recognition as a poet with his book Songs of Jamaica, published in 1911. He attended Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, then traveled to New York and participated in the literary movements there, both in Harlem and in Greenwich Village. His sonnet, "If We Must Die," is his most popular poem. He earned his living as a porter on the railroad and was a resident of Harlem. His book of poems,  Harlem Shadows, published in 1922, was a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. He also became associate editor of The Liberator, a socialist magazine of art and literature. Working closely with Max Eastman, he traveled to Moscow in 1923 in sympathy with the Bolshevik Revolution and became a sort of national hero there. Other books by Claude McKay include Banjo, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, and his autobiography, A Long Way From Home. Home to Harlem, published in the spring of 1928, became the first novel by a Harlem writer to reach the bestseller list.

The generation of poets who formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Countée Cullen, identified McKay as a leading inspirational force, even though he did not write modern verse. His innovation lay in the directness with which he spoke of racial issues and his choice of the working class, rather than the middle class, as his focus.

The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so that he could be given the best education available. An avid reader, McKay began to write poetry at the age of ten. In 1906 he decided to enter a trade school, but when the school was destroyed by an earthquake he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinetmaker; a brief period in the constabulary followed. In 1907 McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing in Jamaica who became his mentor, encouraging him to write dialect verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay's verse to music. By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had established himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912). Biography and Poems.