Meet Varaidzo, the woman using Instagram to teach Black British history

Meet Varaidzo, the woman using Instagram to teach Black British history:
https://metro.co.uk/2018/10/31..../meet-varaidzo-the-w

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 Our lessons of Black History Month at school featured Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman and sometimes Mary Seacole if we were lucky.  A lot was left out, especially when it comes to Black British history. 24-year-old Varaidzo has taken matters into her own hands.  Across the month of October, the writer and editor has been sharing her illustrations of relatively unknown Black people alongside their histories and contributions to British society.  ‘I started this series because I had been researching the 1930s for something I was writing and I was surprised to find enter networks of Black people who had been living, working, and studying in Britain,’ Varaidzo tells Metro.co.uk.  ‘They didn’t seem to be living these harsh, miserable lives totally defined by racism, which is sometimes the impression I get when I think of Black people from British history.’  She was struck by the fact that these Black people were club owners, restaurant owners, activists, musicians, entertainers and more – a side of Black British history that we’re rarely shown. Advertisement Advertisement  Varaidzo says: ‘Most of Black British history focuses on the Windrush era, their descendants, and the Black communities that migrated after.  ‘But Black people have always been here. We’re not a new demographic on this island.  ‘Considering the British empire was built off the slave labour of Black people, you can’t actually separate British history from Black people.’  Varaidzo concluded that if she had never heard about these communities who had existed before Windrush, chances were that not a lot of other people had either.  She decided to try to find out about as many pre-Windrush Black people as possible and document the notable mark they had on this country.  ‘The illustrations are quick doodles so they take between 10-30 minutes, however, the research is the difficult bit,’ she says.  ‘Most of the people I’ve focused on haven’t had their lives of achievements well-recorded and they haven’t been written into our modern digital history. It just contributes to their erasure.’  She sifts through online resources as well as books and public archives to find out what she can about these people, but information is hard to come by.  ‘I think I spent about six hours trying to research Kathleen Wrasama, a founder of the Stepney Coloured People’s Society – there is just nothing about her on the internet,’ says Varaidzo.  ‘I ended up reading a biography of a white socialist priest she’d been neighbours with just in the hope that her name would come up so I could add more context.’ Advertisement Advertisement  The response to Varaidzo’s series has been overwhelmingly positive. She didn’t expect that so many people would share her work.  ‘I think people have been receptive to this series because they’re actually learning something new, or having it affirmed that the Black figures they have heard of are just as important as Black figures from recent history too,’ she te
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