In the early 1980s there were very few people researching and writing about the histories of African, Caribbean and south Asian people in Britain, and fewer still, if any, who were studying this history at school or university. The historian and campaigner Marika Sherwood, who has died aged 87, played a significant part in changing this situation, although she would protest that much more still needs to be done.
It was while teaching in London schools in the 60s that Marika, shocked by the racism many of her pupils were dealing with, first became interested in learning about the history relating to the children of Caribbean heritage in her classroom. When she found that Black children were being bullied because it was alleged that their families had not contributed to the second world war effort, she decided she must discover more.
One of her early books on the subject was Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain (1939-45), published in 1985. It was one of the first publications to highlight “the racism meted out to Black people by the British state” during the second world war, and to demonstrate that those from the Caribbean were an integral part of the war effort. Over the next 40 years she would produce more than 20 books and almost 100 articles.
Her books covered a vast variety of topics. In After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807 (2007), she presented a reminder, during the bicentennial commemoration of the Abolition Act, that Britain’s involvement in human trafficking continued long after 1807. In much of her work she provided in-depth histories centred on key figures and their largely unknown political activities and organisations in Britain, including Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935-1947 (1996); Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (1999); Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora (2011); Malcolm X: Visits Abroad (2011); and Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War: The West African National Secretariat 1945-48 (2019).
To bring her pioneering work to a wider readership, from the early 90s she self-published seven of her shorter books under the imprint of Savannah Press, including work on slavery, pan-Africanism and Caribbean history. The most recent of these was World War II: Colonies and Colonials (2013), a return to her initial concerns.
In addition to her writing and teaching, in 1991 Sherwood co-founded the Association for the Study of African, Caribbean and Asian Culture and History in Britain, later renamed the Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA). It produced a quarterly newsletter, which she edited until 2007, and became the vehicle for her unrelenting campaigning.
She lobbied the Department of Education, including government ministers, demanding a more inclusive national history curriculum; the Home Office over files withheld from the National Archives relating to prominent Black political activists; and encouraged and cajoled archives, libraries and museums to be more sensitive to everything relating to diversity, from collections to cataloguing. She organised conferences, workshops for teachers and a host of other activities designed to encourage a wider appreciation of the importance of what has more recently been termed Black British history. With her BASA colleagues, she recently designed and wrote a GCSE module and textbook on migration to Britain (2016). We worked together on this and many other projects.
In 1990 Marika was appointed a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, and began organising history seminars there, which continued for some 30 years. These, and her other activities with BASA, connected everyone who had an interest in a history of Britain that included those of African, Caribbean and south Asian heritage. With her extensive knowledge, rich archival sources and key contacts in many countries, Marika became a resource for many. Always generous with her time, research material and advice, she was widely recognised for her expertise not only in Britain, but in the US, the Caribbean and Africa.
Born in Budapest, Marika was the daughter of Hungarian-Jewish parents, Laszlo (Laci) Fenyő and Magda (nee Langer). Before the war, Laci was an architecture student. He survived Hungary’s forced labour system, but many relatives died in the Holocaust, including Marika’s maternal uncle Gyula Langer. Magda managed to secure false Christian identity papers for her and Marika, and they survived the Nazi occupation, reuniting with Laci after the war. Marika, who remembered having to wear a yellow star and witnessing many atrocities, later spoke of the impact of these wartime experiences in shaping her very public support of the Palestinian cause.
In 1948 the family emigrated to Sydney, Australia, where Marika’s brother, Andrew, was born, and Laci worked as an inventor and business owner. Marika attended North Sydney girls’ high school, leaving in 1954 and finding clerical work. She married Ronald Troy the following year and they had a son, Craig, before divorcing in 1962. While working and raising her son, Marika returned to education, gaining a BA in anthropology from Sydney University (1965).
She had a brief marriage with Peter Sherwood, a professor of French, before moving to the UK and settling in Highgate, north London. Her first teaching role was at Haringey infants school, then at Hampstead secondary school (1967-69), where she saw that students of colour and white, working-class children were often placed in the bottom groups, and witnessed racism that inspired her to organise her own extracurricular reading groups. She told students to “fight with knowledge not your fists”.
After teaching a unit of expelled children for Haringey council, Marika gained a counselling certificate from the Tavistock Clinic and a psychotherapy diploma. She found work at North London Polytechnic as a counsellor and tutor, then research fellow (1972-81). In the 80s, she also spent time in New York, teaching in colleges, and as a volunteer in prisons. Returning to London in 1986, she taught at Birkbeck College and the City Lit before joining the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
In her later years Marika devoted time to Zuarungu-Moshi, a small village in northern Ghana that she first visited in 2006. She returned regularly, working with local women and raising money for a well, several boreholes, a refrigerator for the local health centre and a village school, stocking it with books and other material.
In recent years Marika suffered from Alzheimer’s, but continued her writing, correspondence and campaigning. In 2022 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Chichester.
She is survived by Craig, by two granddaughters, Rosie and Kim, and by Andrew.
• Marika Sherwood, historian and campaigner, born 8 November 1937; died 16 February 2025
