At 14, he is working legally. And he himself is an illegal, stateless and what is interesting about about this is the fact that he, none the less, is convinced that there's more to life than this. He had no education yo, barely, could barely read and write. But he's going to learn all this throughout his life. Become starts work for ok, so after i'm forgetting stuff. Suffer from bad health but towards the end, even goes back to cameroon, where he realized that this is really not my country either. So he comes back to germany, and he's determined to to foster what he sees as a community of people like him
The history of Africans in Europe may seem recent – a result of migration in the 20th and 21st centuries – but in her new book, African Europeans, historian Olivette Otele tells a very different story – a story of African presence in Europe that stretches back centuries.
Otele writes of African Europeans through the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary. She has uncovered a forgotten past, one that features the Libya-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a Medici duke believed to have been born to a free African woman and enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance. By exploring a history that has long been overlooked, she sheds light on questions very much alive today: What can movements like Black Lives Matter learn from the long history of Black activism in the UK and Europe? Why are Black Britons such as the Windrush generation often treated as if they aren’t full British citizens? And how can remembering the silenced narratives of our past help us understand the present and lead to a better future?
On November 23 2020, Otele will came to Intelligence Squared to reveal this untold story of European and African history. She was in conversation with author and BBC Radio 4 presenter Kavita Puri.
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