BLACK CANADIANS FIGHT FOR A PLACE IN HISTORY

by Charles Quist-Adade

Pressure is growing from African Canadians for the teaching of black history in schools. Groups of black parents, teachers and historians say Eurocentric versions of history have neglected the contributions of minority groups, including the country's indigenous people and Chinese Canadians.

The struggle to include black history in school curricula has scored small recent advances. However, advocates say the battle is far from over, and fear that even their modest gains could be undermined by a combination of conservative resistance and public spending cuts.

Young black Canadians are losing out, says bookshop owner Daphne Clarke, because "they have no heroes and heroines to look up to and identify with." She points out: "Blacks have contributed in making Canada what it is today, so why isn't black history taught in the public school system? The usual response to this question is that black history books are hard to get."

To counter this excuse, Clarke, of Jamaican background, has opened a bookshop in Windsor, Ontario, called Montego Alkebulanian Enterprise, named after Montego Bay in Jamaica and Alkebulanian, a name some historians give to prehistoric Africa.

In what she calls a "black awareness bookstore and gallery", Clarke sells a moderate selection of black history, sociology and children's books and hard-to-find works by black authors.

Books by local black authors on sale include the novel Long Road by Charlotte Brown, whose husband, Dr Walter Perry, founded the annual Emancipation Day in Windsor in 1936 to celebrate the freedom of African slaves who settled in Canada.

"There is no longer any excuse as to why black history is not taught in the public schools," says Clarke.

She is part of a movement for change that embraces groups such as the Black Educators' Working Group, the Organization of Parents of Black Children, the Canadian Alliance of Black Educators and the Ontario Black History Society. Their pressure has achieved some results. Educators have started offering courses in black history and literature, and publishers are producing a new crop of books.

In Ontario, a provincial royal commission recommended syllabus changes, and province policy requires textbook publishers to eliminate racial and sexual bias. Several school boards in the Toronto area and three in the province of Nova Scotia now offer high-school courses in black history and literature. Most current textbooks, however, contain little in the way of black history, perhaps including a paragraph or two about the "Underground Railroad", a system that helped slaves escape from the United States to Canada.

Fleeing slaves and black Loyalists - who fought for the British in the American War of Independence - founded black communities in Nova Scotia and around the Niagara area of Ontario in the 18th century.

The 1991 census put Canada's black population at 225,000, but more recent statistics suggest a figure closer to half a million.

Prominent black Canadians have included Lincoln Alexander, the first black federal MP and cabinet minister; a Chief Justice, Julius Isaac; and writer and journalist Mary Ann Shadd.

Last year, the Government recognised Black History Month, 70 years after it was initiated in the United States. This annual season of events, beginning in mid-February, includes symposiums, workshops and film shows. Those pressing for change say much more needs to be done, pointing out that even the few black-history courses now on offer tend to give students a fragmented view of their place in Canadian society.

"We need a more inclusive, more holistic picture of our heritage, and not a hotch-potch curriculum that treats black history as an extension of European civilisation," says Nigel Joseph, a fourth-year philosophy student at the University of Windsor.

Existing accounts, says Joseph, a member of the University's Black Students' Alliance, make it seem "that we would not have had a history as a people without some form of intervention by Europeans."

Resistance to change comes in many forms, says Dr George Dei, a lecturer at the Ontario Institute of Studies and Learning and a leading member of the Canadian Alliance of Black Educators. In response to requests for the hiring of more minority teachers, "you hear those opposed to the idea say, 'We need a good teacher - his or her ethnic background is secondary.' " Others argue that they are against the fragmentation of the curriculum, adds Dei.

Pundits tend to parrot US conservatives on issues such as Afrocentric scholarship, dismissing it as "feelgood" history. A recent article in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper was critical of the "conspiratorial theorising" of Afrocentrism.

Another threat stems from the slash-and-burn economic policies currently in vogue, with federal and provincial spending cuts leaving little or no money for multicultural educational programmes.

This article first published in ONTARIO NETWORK FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

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