Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications (BLP) is a radical London-based publishing company founded by Guyanese activists
Jessica Huntley
Jessica Elleisse Huntley (née Carroll; 23 February 1927 – 13 October 2013) was an African-Guyanese-British woman, a political reformer, prominent race equality campaigner, the pioneering British publisher of black and Asian literature, and a ...
(23 February 1927 – 13 October 2013)
Margaret Busby
Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisherJazzmine Breary"Le ...
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
'', 27 October 2013. and Eric Huntley (born 25 September 1929)Margaret Andrews, ''Doing Nothing is Not An Option: The Radical Lives of Eric & Jessica Huntley'', Middlesex, England: Krik Krak, 2014. . in 1969, when its first title,
Walter Rodney
Walter Anthony Rodney (23 March 1942 – 13 June 1980) was a Guyanese historian, political activist and academic. His notable works include '' How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'', first published in 1972. Rodney was assassinated in Georgeto ...
's ''The Groundings With My Brothers'', was published. Named in honour of two outstanding liberation fighters in Caribbean history,
Toussaint L'Ouverture
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (; also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda; 20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803) was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. During his life, Louverture ...
and Paul Bogle,"Creation for Liberation Parts 1 and 2 (1979 and 1981)" YouTube video. the company began operating during a period in the UK when "books by Black authors or written with a sympathetic view of Black people's history and culture were rare in mainstream bookshops in the UK." Alongside New Beacon Books (founded in 1966) and
Allison & Busby
Allison & Busby (A & B) is a publishing house based in London established by Clive Allison and Margaret Busby in 1967. The company has built up a reputation as a leading independent publisher.
Background
Launching as a publishing company in Ma ...
(founded in 1967), BLP was one of the first black-owned independent publishing companies in the UK. BLP has been described as "a small, unorthodox, self-financing venture that brought a radical perspective to non-fiction, fiction, poetry and children's books."
History
The birth of Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications (BLP) was a direct response to the 1968 banning from
Jamaica
Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of Hispa ...
of historian and scholar
Walter Rodney
Walter Anthony Rodney (23 March 1942 – 13 June 1980) was a Guyanese historian, political activist and academic. His notable works include '' How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'', first published in 1972. Rodney was assassinated in Georgeto ...
, who was then teaching at the
University of the West Indies
The University of the West Indies (UWI), originally University College of the West Indies, is a public university system established to serve the higher education needs of the residents of 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the ...
in Mona and outside the lecture halls had been sharing his knowledge and exchanging ideas with the island's working people, prompting the government's censure. Thousands of Jamaicans took to the streets protesting the ban and in London a group of concerned West Indians – the Huntleys, Richard Small, Ewart Thomas,
Andrew Salkey
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1952 to pursue a job ...
and others – decided to challenge it by publishing and distributing Rodney's speeches and lectures. These were published in 1969 as BLP's first title, ''The Groundings with My Brothers'', financed by friends and community funding, and much reprinted. Speaking in 1979 at an event marking BLP's 10th anniversary, Jessica Huntley recalled: "It was a political position we took.... We barely made the money to pay the printer.... We just gave away a lot of copies to people so people must read it." The company went on also to become the original publisher (jointly with Tanzania Publishing House) in 1972 of Rodney's influential work '' How Europe Underdeveloped Africa''.
Among other notable titles on the BLP list are
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson (born 24 August 1952), also known as LKJ, is a Jamaica-born, British-based dub poet and activist. In 2002 he became the second living poet, and the only black one, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. His p ...
Beryl Gilroy
Beryl Agatha Gilroy (''née'' Answick; 30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a Guyanese educator, novelist, ethno-psychotherapist, and poet. ''The Guardian'' described her as "one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants." She emi ...
's ''Black Teacher'', several books by Andrew Salkey (a director and long-time supporter of BLP), ''Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain'' by
Donald Hinds
Donald Hinds (born in 1934) is a Jamaican-born writer, journalist, historian and teacher. He is best known for his work on the ''West Indian Gazette'' and his fiction and non-fiction books portraying the West Indian community in Britain, parti ...
, and poetry collections by
Valerie Bloom
Valerie Bloom MBE (born 1956)Jeffrey Wainwright''Poetry: The Basics''(2004), 2nd edition, Routledge, 2011, p. 21. is a Jamaican-born poet and a novelist based in the UK.Sam Greenlee
Samuel Eldred Greenlee, Jr. (July 13, 1930 – May 19, 2014)Margaret Busby"Sam Greenlee obituary" ''The Guardian'', June 2, 2014. was an American writer of fiction and poetry. He is best known for his novel '' The Spook Who Sat by the Door'', firs ...
,
Lemn Sissay
Lemn Sissay FRSL (born 21 May 1967) is a British author and broadcaster. Sissay was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics, has been chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2015, and joined the Foundling Museum's board of trus ...
,
Lucinda Roy
Lucinda Roy (born December 19, 1955) is an American-based British novelist, educator and poet.
Biography
She was born in Battersea, South London, England, to Jamaican writer and artist Namba Roy and Yvonne Roy (''née'' Shelley), an English actor ...
BLP initially functioned from the living-room of the Huntley home in West London, which additionally served as a bookshop where teachers could come to browse and buy, and became a meeting place that hosted "book launches and readings, political and social debates, with contributors from the Caribbean, Africa, US and Asia." (Early discussions out of which the
Caribbean Artists Movement The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) was an influential cultural initiative, begun in London, England, in 1966 and active until about 1972,West Ealing
West Ealing is a district in the London Borough of Ealing, in West London. The district is about west of Ealing Broadway. Although there is a long history of settlement in the area, West Ealing in its present form is less than one hundred years ...
; it "served the valuable function of stocking books about the Caribbean, Africa and the Third World, especially from publishers in the Caribbean",Peter Fraser "Jessica Huntley 1927–2013 An appreciation" ''
Stabroek News
The ''Stabroek News'' is a privately owned newspaper published in Guyana. It takes its name from ''Stabroek'' , the former name of Georgetown, Guyana.
It was first published in November 1986, first as a weekly but it later changed to a daily prin ...
'', 21 October 2013. and was a cultural hub for the community: "Bogle-L'Ouverture also became a 'drop in centre' for parents, school students and teachers who came for guidance, for counselling and for direction with respect to issues concerning their studies, essays or theses they had to write, their job applications, employment, career prospects and/or their experience of racist institutional cultures or/and racist managers." Bogle regularly organised meetings, talks and readings at the bookshop with the participation of such eminent writers as Ntozake Shange,
Louise Bennett
Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou (7 September 1919 – 26 July 2006), was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of p ...
,
Farrukh Dhondy
Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944) is an Indian-born British writer, playwright, screenwriter and left-wing activist who resides in the United Kingdom.
Education
Dhondy was born in 1944 in Poona, India, where he attended The Bishop's School, and obta ...
Kamau Brathwaite
The Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB (; 11 May 1930 – 4 February 2020), was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon.Staff (2011)"Kamau Brathwaite." New York University, D ...
,
Merle Hodge
Merle Hodge (born 1944) is a Trinidadian novelist and literary critic. Her 1970 novel '' Crick Crack, Monkey'' is a classic of West Indian literature, and Hodge is acknowledged as the first black Caribbean woman to have published a major work of f ...
,
Petronella Breinburg
Petronella Breinburg (1927 – 5 November 2019) was a Surinamese British author, playwright and professor and one of the first black British authors to write picture books about black children. ''My Brother Sean'', illustrated by Errol Lloyd and ...
,
Cecil Rajendra
Cecil Rajendra (born 1941) is a Malaysian poet and lawyer. His poems have been published in more than 50 countries and translated into several languages.New Beacon Books, Grassroots and Headstart in London, as well as enterprises in
Nottingham
Nottingham ( , locally ) is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located north-west of London, south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robi ...
, Manchester and
Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...
— with abusive graffiti repeated daubed on the windows and doors, National Front literature and excrement pushed through the letterbox. Jessica Huntley recalled: "The National Front used to break windows. Then we got threatening calls. They gave us seven days to move, and if we didn't get out, what's going to happen. We got calls from the
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Cat ...
. They were everywhere. And, of course, we had a campaign against that and our poster was, 'We Will Not Be Terrorised out of Existence'." The Huntleys with fellow bookshop owners formed a "Bookshop Joint Action" group to raise awareness of the attacks through producing leaflets, holding public meetings and picketing the Home Office, which eventually resulted in national media coverage that forced the police to take action.
Bogle-L'Ouverture met regularly with New Beacon Books and the ''
Race Today
''Race Today'' was a monthly (later bimonthly) British political magazine. Launched in 1969 by the Institute of Race Relations, it was from 1973 published by the ''Race Today'' Collective, which included figures such as Darcus Howe, Farrukh Dh ...
'' collective as part of an ongoing alliance that was determined "to send a strong message to the racists: 'that they were not going to be intimidated and they would continue to publish and sell their books'. The final event would be a gala to celebrate Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications' 10th Anniversary." A "cultural extravaganza" was held at the
Commonwealth Institute
The Commonwealth Education Trust is a registered charity established in 2007 as the successor trust to the Commonwealth Institute. The trust focuses on primary and secondary education and the training of teachers and invests on educational pro ...
, compered by Carmen Munroe and featuring a variety of performers, poets, drummers, dancers and musicians including Misty in Roots,
Keith Waithe
Keith Waithe is a Guyana-born musician, composer and teacher who has been based in the United Kingdom since 1977.Mark McGowan"Keith Waithe: making the flute talk" ''Stabroek News'', 6 September 2008. He is best known as a flautist and founder of ...
, Cecil Rajendra, Linton Kwesi Johnson and others. Its success demonstrated "the potential for an event on this scale taking place in different parts of London and the UK on a regular basis. They discussed the idea of an annual book fair, which was later developed and eventually implemented as the
International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books
The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, often referred to as The Black Book Fair, was inaugurated in London, England, in April 1982 and continued until 1995, bringing together a number of Black publishers, intellectuals ...
, held between 1982 and 1995, of which Jessica Huntley was joint director with John La Rose until 1984.
Change of name
After Walter Rodney was assassinated in Guyana in 1980, the bookshop was renamed to honour him. Following changes in the publishing industry in the 1980s, when small independent publishers and booksellers faced often insurmountable competition from large multinational conglomerates, the Bookshop was forced to close in 1990. Beset by financial difficulties, caused partly by overseas clients defaulting on payment, Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications could no longer publish using the original company imprint; however, the efforts of "Friends of Bogle", a loyal group of supporters, contributed to the Huntleys' ability to resume publishing as Bogle-L'Ouverture Press, once again operating from their own home.
Legacy
An interactive installation by
Michael McMillan
Michael McMillan (born 1962) is a British playwright, artist, curator and educator, born in England to parents who were migrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG).Heritage Lottery Fund
The National Lottery Heritage Fund, formerly the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), distributes a share of National Lottery funding, supporting a wide range of heritage projects across the United Kingdom.
History
The fund's predecessor bodies were ...
Guildhall Art Gallery
The Guildhall Art Gallery houses the art collection of the City of London, England. The museum is located in the Moorgate area of the City of London. It is a stone building in a semi-Gothic style intended to be sympathetic to the historic Guil ...
(July 2015 – January 2016), drawing inspiration from Bogle-L'Ouverture's output and the Huntley Archives held at the
London Metropolitan Archives
The London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is the principal local government archive repository for the Greater London area, including the City of London: it is the largest county record office in the United Kingdom. It was established under its pr ...
Colin Prescod
Colin Prescod (born 1944) is a British sociologist and cultural activist, originally from Trinidad, who in a career spanning five decades has worked as an academic, documentary filmmaker, theatre maker, and BBC Television commissioning editor, as ...
(chair of the Institute of Race Relations) as an "exposition of startling and radical imaginative works, addressing grand British cultural and historical matters, and touching on themes of existential and social restlessness" — include those on whose talents Bogle-L'Ouverture drew for its book jackets or for the posters, greetings cards and other artwork sold in the bookshop, such as
and George "Fowokan" Kelly.
A blue plaque unveiled in October 2018 outside the Ealing home of Jessica Huntley and Eric Huntley commemorates their work in the founding of Bogle-L'Ouverture.
Archives
In 2005, papers relating to the business of Bogle-L'Ouverture, together with documents concerning the personal, campaigning and educational initiatives of Eric and Jessica Huntley from 1952 to 2011, were the first major deposit of records from the
African-Caribbean
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the modern African-Caribbeans descend from Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the ...
community in London presented to LMA, where they are available for research as part of the
City of London
The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London f ...
's Black Community Archives.
Annual Huntley Conference
Since 2006, the Huntley Archives at LMA have inspired an annual conference on themes reflecting different elements of the content of the collection. The themes and keynote speakers to date have been:
* 2006 (1st) — "The Groundings with Bogle-L’Ouverture: A Story of Black Publishing". Keynote Speaker: Moira Stuart, OBE."Huntley Conference" HuntleysOnline.
* 2007 (2nd) — "Writing the Wrongs: Fifty Years of Black Radical Publishing in Britain". Keynote Speaker:
Margaret Busby
Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisherJazzmine Breary"Le ...
, OBE.
* 2008 (3rd) — "Looking to Africa: Garvey, Rasta and Rodney". Keynote Speaker: Kwame Kwei-Armah, OBE.
* 2009 (4th) — "Remembering Walter Rodney, Revolutionary Pan-Africanist". Keynote Speaker: Dr Kimani Nehusi.
* 2010 (5th) — "Young, Black & British: Identity and Community through the generations". Keynote Speaker: Professor Aggrey Burke.
* 2011 (6th) — "Get Up! Stand Up! Campaigning for Rights, Respect and Self-Reliance". Keynote Speaker: Marc Wadsworth.
* 2012 (7th) — "Arts & Activism: Culture & Resistance". Keynote Speaker:
Beverley Bryan
Beverley Bryan (born 18 August 1949) is a Jamaican educationist and retired academic who was a professor of language education at the University of the West Indies in Mona. Settling in Britain with her parents in the late 1950s, she went on to ...
, lecturer at the
University of the West Indies
The University of the West Indies (UWI), originally University College of the West Indies, is a public university system established to serve the higher education needs of the residents of 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the ...
,
Mona, Jamaica
Mona is a neighbourhood in southeastern Saint Andrew Parish, approximately eight kilometres from Kingston, Jamaica. A former sugarcane plantation, it is the site of a reservoir serving the city of Kingston and the main campus of the Univers ...
.
* 2014 (9th) — "When They Were Young: Re-Searching Our Archives".
* 2015 (10th) — "Mountain High: Archive Deep".
* 2016 (11th) — "Animating Black Archives – the Next Ten Years".
* 2017 (12th) — "What's the New Radical? Deep Roots and New Shoots in Black Publishing"
* 2018 (13th) — "Art, Blackness, Identity and Activism , Rebooting the Legacy: No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960 – 1990". This was billed as being an "unconference" – in which participants were actively invited to contribute throughout the day.
* 2019 (14th) — "More than Words: 50 years of Bogle-L'Ouverture Publishing". Keynote Speaker: Carolyn Cooper, Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica."More than Words: 50 years of Bogle-L'Ouverture Publishing" 23 February 2019.
Friends of the Huntley Archives at London Metropolitan Archives (FHALMA)
Friends of the Huntley Archives at London Metropolitan Archives (FHALMA) is a non-profit charitable foundation, run by volunteers, founded in 2013 with the aim of "bringing to life the narratives, histories and knowledge discovered in the archive materials found in the Huntley Collections" and promoting the heritage of the Caribbean and African Diaspora through education and community projects.Friends of the Huntley Archives at LMA website.
International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books
The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, often referred to as The Black Book Fair, was inaugurated in London, England, in April 1982 and continued until 1995, bringing together a number of Black publishers, intellectuals ...
*
Margaret Busby
Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisherJazzmine Breary"Le ...
– UK's first black female book publisher
References
Further reading
* Margaret Andrews, ''Doing Nothing is Not An Option: The Radical Lives of Eric & Jessica Huntley'', Middlesex, England: Krik Krak, 2014. {{ISBN, 978-1-908415-02-8.