In 1991, Channel 4 launched a documentary series called The Black Bag. It started with an investigation into racist policing, and featured episodes such as Racebusters, which documented everyday racial harassment in Britain. The show was groundbreaking, and stands as a magnificent record not only of recent multicultural life in Britain, but also of the emergent discourses around race that have now entered mainstream consciousness.
But here’s the question: if you wanted to watch an episode of The Black Bag today, where would you go?
I faced this problem when I was researching my book, Revolutionary Acts, which is a social history of Black gay men in Britain. I was trying to find an episode called Blackout, which looked at the experience of Dennis Carney, a Black gay man living in Brixton, south London, and examined the discrimination Black homosexuals faced from the Black community, and their refusal to be excised from it.
Carney had told me about the existence of the documentary, though for months he was unable to locate his VHS copy of it. This, in itself, should not have caused delays; an early-90s documentary on an important social topic – surely that’s just kicking about on YouTube somewhere? But there were no results. Even after searches of Channel 4’s own digital archive and the BFI’s free Black Britain on Film collection, the documentary eluded me. There is another online archive of more than 2m broadcasts from British TV, which goes back years – it’s not there either, though there is one Black Bag episode concerning the Cardiff Three, who were wrongfully convicted of murder in 1990.
The saving grace was that Carney eventually located his tape. Getting to watch it was another task: I had to have it burned to DVD and then transferred to a USB stick so I could play it on my laptop. That cost me about £100. If I decided to share my joy and upload this forgotten documentary to YouTube, I’d have to pore over guidelines around copyright and fair use.
These kinds of obstacles often confront young Black researchers in search of material to satisfy their curiosity about the past. A new exhibition at the British Library, Beyond the Bassline, which looks back at 500 years of Black British musical history, emphasises what’s at stake. As the exhibition’s lead curator, Dr Aleema Gray, said in an interview: “On a community level, there needs to be more of an awareness about preservation and archiving our stories.” Gray spoke of how the British Library is filled with collections documenting Black culture – I know that well, having meticulously scanned through pages upon pages of the Voice newspaper for my book. That said, even an archive as lauded and enormous as the British Library does not, and cannot, have it all. Evidently there is no one-stop shop or institution that can be relied on for an encyclopaedic preservation of materials related to Black British history.
What exists of our archives is certainly abundant, but through the disappointments I have experienced as an amateur researcher, I have learned some key lessons around the task of preserving Black British history.
First of all, community participation in recording our history requires people to see the value in their lives – to not count themselves out of posterity. I say this because when researching and meeting older Black gay men for this book, there was a difference in what each man was capable of offering me: there were those who had kept possession of their life’s work – some carrying dossiers of every pamphlet, flyer and poster they’d created – and those who only had their memories. Dennis had kept hold of his videotapes because he was proud of his life’s work, and saw it as important. I’ve since made an effort to get a physical copy of every magazine or newspaper I write for – I don’t know which nosy twentysomethings might come knocking with questions for me in 40 years’ time, just like I did.
That said, preserving your own physical collections is so dependent on space. My bedroom is bursting at the seams with magazines and newspapers, so callouts for people to submit their possessions to valuable public archives is one solution; and a greater effort from museums, libraries and universities to build trust and reach people is essential. In 2000, the Black gay photographer Ajamu X and film-maker Topher Campbell co-founded the rukus! archive at the London Metropolitan Archives to house materials relating to the social, cultural and political lives of Black LGBTQ+ people in Britain. Their view was that a minority community could only depend on itself to ensure the longevity of its historical moments, people and materials. I hope to submit some of the materials I have collected to rukus! in due course.
We are told that we live in an age of digital plenty, when everything is effortlessly accessible, but this just isn’t true. There are some necessary and valuable mass-digitisation projects aiming to preserve Black British archives online, such as Getty Images’ free-to-use Black History and Culture Collection. But there’s also a false security to putting things on the internet: as we’ve witnessed from the shuttering of so many websites and online magazines over the years, so much valuable data can be lost in an instant. And besides, viewing material digitally cannot compare to the archival pleasure (a term I take from Ajamu X) of encountering a physical material: its smell, its size, how it feels, how aged it is. While I immediately had Dennis Carney’s VHS tape transferred to digital, the tape itself is a bit of history beyond the film that lies on it.
Perhaps there is an arrogance to wanting the moments that matter most to us individually to survive for ever. But humility only leads to disappearance – the proud man who collects and displays all his treasures writes himself into history with his own pen. We can’t control how long our stories and presence last on this planet, but we can set precedent, and leave instructions.
• This article was amended on 13 May 2024. An editing error led an earlier version to suggest the writer had spoken to Aleema Gray; her quote came from an interview with the Guardian in April.
Jason Okundaye is the author of Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain
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