Shining a light on ordinary people forgotten by history
There was a moment in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One) that showed why this series, now in its 14th year, has such an enduring appeal. Strictly head judge Shirley Ballas was staring at a black-and-white photo of a laundry in the Muslim quarter of 19th-century Capetown. A washerwoman carried a huge bundle on her head, while a man in a hat stood close by.
Ballas’s face tightened as she began to imagine the life of her three-times great grandmother Caroline, who had worked in a place like this. “So this was hard work?” she asked the museum curator who had showed her the photo. It was a hard job, he confirmed, but he had more news to convey. It was possible that Caroline’s parents had been brought to South Africa as slaves. Ballas took this in, visibly wrestling with the information.
It was this moment which gives the show that traces the ancestry of celebrities its irresistible appeal: when it puts its audience, fully engaged, into the life of a person who was never famous, whom history has forgotten but for a few church and census records. The lives of ordinary people become special, however painful.
Ballas had begun her search with the slightest of leads, the sort of tales that are passed down in families everywhere. One was that a greatgrandmother had run off to the US and left her children behind, another was that there had been a black ancestor on her father’s side.
The first story led to a painful new understanding of “Clara”, whose husband had died young from cancer, and left all his money to his mother. Ballas wept as she learnt how the woman so disapproved of by her family had left for Boston, where she was abused by her violent, drunken, prostitute-visiting second husband and died in an institution from the syphilis he had given her.
The second story opened a doorway into a shameful period of colonial history, one that linked the glamour of the glitterball trophy to the Malay people stolen from Madagascar and sold into slavery. It was sobering and emotional, even though one detail remained tantalisingly out of reach. What was the relationship between one Isaac Dacosta and Caroline, to whom he had left a home and £600? Her mother may have been the Dacosta’s nursemaid, the programme speculated. I expected a different guess, but we will never know…
Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History (BBC Four) was a revelatory survey of the black and Asian artists whose work is largely obscured in British art history. It began with a series of startling archive interviews with young artists in the Eighties. “I was told by my lecturers that there was no such thing as black art,” one of them said. They included last year’s Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, now 64, who arrived in Britain from Zanzibar as a child.
The documentary was driven by the remarkable efforts of Afro-caribbean British artist Sonia Boyce, who has been searching museum and gallery collections for works hidden in the archives and rarely displayed. She had discovered 2,000 works, including exciting and thought-provoking abstract pieces, figurative paintings and political art.
The struggle for recognition of the artists who arrived from Commonwealth countries in the years after the Windrush docked in 1948, and the generations that followed, was encapsulated in one very affecting sequence. The first large-scale exhibition of work from artists of ethnic backgrounds was held at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. It was called The Other Story, and it had been put together by the artist Rasheed Araeen, who arrived from Pakistan in 1964. It was a watershed moment, yet the reviews had not only been sneering, but included personal attacks on its curator.
“Everybody rubbished it,” said Araeen, now 83. “What impact did it have on you and the others?” asked presenter Brenda Emmanus. Araeen looked hearbroken. “How do you respond to powerful people when you have no power?” he said.
In the decade that followed, the documentary showed, newly confident and prize-winning artists emerged, such as Anish Kapoor, Steve Mcqueen, and Yinka Shonibare, who gave a brilliant interview here. But this powerful film belonged to the artists whose work had been obscured, until now.
Who Do You Think You Are?★★★★ Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History★★★★