The Blackstory Podcast launched

The Blackstory, a new Bristol-based podcast grounded in the history of Bristol’s relationship to the slave trade, will launch on February 11. The team behind the new podcast are Bristol-born Victoria Anderson (pictured) and Californian ex-pat Audra Nishita. They recorded the first episode in Bristol’s M Shed after finding the slavery exhibits there to be less than fully informative.

‘Everyone knows that Bristol is famous for its associations with the slave trade,’ says Anderson, a former academic, ‘but there’s a real lack of reliable information out there. That isn’t just a Bristol issue; black history in the UK generally is almost completely unknown. It’s not about blaming anyone for that, for us it’s literally a matter of getting to grips with our collective backstory – the hidden parts, the things we don’t know.’

The Blackstory Podcast will look at Black history. The first episode will be available from February 11.

The team of two grew to three when they met Londoner, Paul Douglas on the staircase in M Shed.

‘Paul had just come out of the slavery exhibit, shaking his head, so we knew he felt the same way about it as we did’, continues Anderson. ‘Straightaway we could tell he wanted to be involved in what we were doing, so we took it from there.

‘It makes me very sad that in Britain we know so little about black history. Black History Month is pretty irrelevant, in my view. You can’t reduce black history to a few figureheads who ‘overcame the odds’, or who fought in the war. Those things might be important, yes, but it’s also a very eurocentric notion of what black history is. And it’s a distraction. More important are all the things we struggle to talk about, that appear lost to history.’

For Nishita, coming face to face with Bristol’s history as a slave port was emotional. ‘Standing in that exhibition made me realise that ships from Bristol probably went on to kidnap my own ancestors from Africa, ancestors that I’ll never know about. People can look at us as women of colour and say we have a lot of anger, that’s a stereotype, but really a lot of that anger is pain. Not just the pain of what we as a people went through, but the pain of not knowing.’

The first episode of The Blackstory Podcast will be available from February 11.

Continuing the theme of hidden stories, Anderson is currently crowdfunding for a book of prisoner stories from inmates of London’s Wandsworth Prison, in collaboration with artist Wallis Eates. The project started out using film to record the men’s stories but as the films couldn’t be taken out of the prison no permanent record existed. After negotiating with the prison authorities, Anderson and Eates were permitted to take written transcripts of the stories out of the prison, which led to the idea of putting them together in a book.

She says, ‘Unfortunately, it’s the same ages-old pattern of erasing the words of people deemed to be unacceptable.’

‘One of the major handdowns of slavery and colonialism are the demographics of Britain’s prisons,’ she adds. ‘The reasons why there are such disproportionately high numbers of black and minority ethnic men in our prisons are complex, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no doubt that we’re working with an inheritance of confinement.’

If the crowdfunder is successful, Anderson hopes to run similar projects at HMP Horfield in Bristol. ‘My mum used to live down the road from Horfield Prison, so while I haven’t been inside it still feels familiar. If we can find a way to work with the prison, then it’s definitely something I would like to do.’

The first episode of The Blackstory Podcast will be available from February 11. For more information, visit http://theblackstory.com/

Wings: Stories from Prison is crowdfunding on kickstarter until 11.11am on February 4th. To find out more, visit wings.cellmemory.org

Read more: Birdspeed poem a day for Black History Month