Nana Akua: While I am black, I am not in favour of Black History Month

Black History Month. I have nothing against months that highlight awareness of diseases to raise money into research for a cure, or celebratory months for something specific but I’m going to put it out there.

While I am black, I am not in favour of Black History Month. Why I hear you cry, I can literally feel the tweets now from some people of colour calling me a traitor, which by the way is sort of like a racism in itself. So let me give you a history lesson.

Bones of primitive Homo sapiens, that’s us, first appeared 300,000 years ago in you guessed it.... Africa. With brains about the same size or even larger than ours. Our black African ancestors theoretically could have discovered relativity, built space telescopes, written novels and love songs. Their bones and DNA say they were just as human as we are.

It seems to me that we start telling the story of history in schools from the bit where black people were slaves, who wrote this stuff? I used to go out with somebody who never told the story from the start. We're now, as a society, missing the most important bits. We are educating our children to believe that black people are somehow different from white, having a dodgy start to life.

Now the history I was taught certainly didn’t go to the point where we all acknowledged that the human species started in Africa and that we were all black in the first place, the emphasis was on the slave trade.

Things like Black History month, divide us into convenient categories, compartmentalize history, circumnavigate facts and isolate people from communities. We were all black once.. So history should just be history. Once you call it Black History Month you narrow its appeal, the assumption is, it is only history of black people.

It negates the fact that if we are truly telling the story, we need to tell it from the start. As for the slave trade which is where the story usually begins, which depicts how black people came to the UK, that is a nonsense, because all of our ancestors were black.

Even Cheddar man, the earliest human skull found in Cheddar gorge has been reconstructed, from a white man, to a black one, because they suspect he was in fact black, although this is inconclusive. Slavery is not just isolated to black history. If people really want to stop slavery, well it’s still going on today and I can provide them with a list of causes where their energy will be better placed. Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China North Korea and Nigeria to name just a few.

The Welsh Government has added learning about the diversity of communities, in particular the stories of Black, Asian and minority ethnic people, into their new Curriculum for Wales guidance to coincide with the start of Black History Month. It’s a nice sentiment. But I truly believe we need to place the emphasis on the fact that we all have the same origins and to constantly remind us that we are all connected. So when we divide history in this divisive manner, we negate the facts.

Mankind lived 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. All living humans descend from those people, that includes you. Which means we all inherited the fundamental commonalities of our species and humanity, from them Mankind came from Africa we are all Africans and all of our ancestors were black.