Reap the forgotten Harvest: An Epic Saga of Slavery

In this time of austerity the negative voices against the very notion of a Black History month have become louder and louder. ‘Why this focus? Why should public money be spent promoting Black history? What about white history month?’. And so it goes on.

Black communities, on both sides of the Atlantic, have argued that at the very least this month-long focus allows us in a very small way to redress the Eurocentric dominated view of world history. Within the discourse of slavery for example, we not only learn about the murder and suffering on an unimaginable scale, but of millions of individuals that were not even called people, but rather slaves. Rev Jesse Jackson taught me during a Black history month event, that to us they should not be referred to as slaves, but as our ancestors who were enslaved. They were our family members.

Therefore, until our canonised literature and our education curriculum can catch up with the 21st century, Black history month offers a small space for us to articulate our history, which, in no small measure during the last five hundred years is also bound up in British and global history too. The great change is that we are narrator, often with a very different perspective

This is why I loved the monumental brilliance of Remi Kapo’s novel ‘Reap the forgotten harvest’. It is, if you like, a Black British version of Alex Haley’s Roots. Black British because the multilayer epic story brilliantly weaves its narrative from the shores of Whitby, England to the imaginary Caribbean Island of Pertigua, to the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa.

In Kapo’s world detail is king, and so life aboard a vessel to capture Africans into slavery, becomes a portal to another world of hierarchy, maritime procedure and, of course, inhumanity. We get a glimpse too as to what life might have been like before slavery in an African village: superstitious, brutal, loving and feudal. Kapo does not sugar gloss pre slavery Africa. As the story unfolds our protagonists are captured and there begins a story of human endeavour - which at times comes from unexpected quarters - that is both profoundly moving, whilst simultaneously an ‘Oxbridge’ history lesson.

And that brings me back to the whole point of Black history month. Until books such as Kapo’s epic novel are read and promoted as widely as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, we’ll continue to need this space to tell our people and the wider global audience our story.

Simon Woolley