Dorothy Kuya, Bernie Grant, and the Novel I Didn’t Expect to Find Her In
While I was researching Melly Strikes Back, I came across a name I hadn’t been looking for: Dorothy Kuya. She appears in the novel as herself — a real Liverpool community activist and Black-history scholar, keeping her own record alongside my narrator, Melly, through the 1970 dock strike. I put her in because she belonged there. What I didn’t expect was to find, months later, that she and a man I actually knew were founding members of the same organisation.
That man was Bernie Grant. Like me, Bernie started out as a NUPE official — the same union I worked for full-time — before he became leader of the council at Haringey, and later the Labour MP for Tottenham. I was in London for a while myself, and I knew Bernie reasonably well through NUPE and through the council. What I hadn’t known, until the novel sent me looking properly into Dorothy Kuya’s life, was that the two of them had worked together directly, twice over.
Who was Dorothy Kuya
Kuya was born in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1933, to a Sierra Leonean father and a white British mother, and grew up in Liverpool 8 — one of Britain’s oldest Black communities, and a working-class corner of the city I know well from my own upbringing in Bootle. She joined the Young Communist League at thirteen and stayed a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, campaigning against poverty, racism and unemployment from the 1940s onward. She trained as both a nurse and a teacher, and in 1970 became Liverpool’s first Senior Community Relations Officer, a post she held for seven years.
Her activism ran in every direction at once: co-founding Teachers Against Racism, helping establish one of the first Black Studies courses in a British comprehensive school, chairing Ujima Housing Association as it grew into one of Europe’s largest Black-led social enterprises, and — back in Liverpool in later years — leading the campaign that gave the city its International Slavery Museum, which opened in 2007, and establishing Slavery Remembrance Day. She died in 2013. Liverpool has since renamed a university hall of residence after her, and National Museums Liverpool now runs an annual lecture series and a Creative Archives Project in her name.
The Haringey connection
Here is the part that startled me. In the 1980s, Kuya was Head of Race Equality at Haringey Council — the same council Bernie led before he went to Westminster. The two of them worked closely together there, years before either name meant anything to me personally through the union.
Then, in 1993, Bernie founded the African Reparations Movement (ARM) — the UK’s answer to that year’s Pan-African Conference on Reparations in Abuja, which he’d attended in person. Dorothy Kuya was one of ARM’s founding members alongside him. The organisation researched Britain’s colonial acquisitions, campaigned for the return of looted African artefacts, and pushed — with real difficulty, and only partial success — for the restitution of the Benin Bronzes, taken from the Kingdom of Benin by British forces in 1897 and scattered across museums including, as it happens, Liverpool’s own World Museum. Bernie was contacted directly by Benin’s monarch in 1996 and tried to broker their return in time for the invasion’s centenary; he was turned down by the institutions holding them.
So the woman I’d written into a strike novel set in 1970, and the man I used to know from union meetings and council business a decade or more later, had already stood on the same platform, arguing the same case, before I ever met either of their stories properly.
A door she opened in Toxteth
I went looking for one more connection, on a hunch that Kuya had been a founder of the Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre on Princes Road, in the heart of Liverpool 8. I can’t confirm that one — by every source I can find, the credit for founding the centre in 2006 belongs to Michelle Charters, building on decades of work by the Liverpool Black Sisters going back to 1979. But there’s a real link worth putting on record instead of the one I went looking for: Charters has said she was introduced to National Museums Liverpool by Dorothy Kuya back in 1994, which set her on the path that led, twelve years later, to founding Kuumba Imani — and, in 2023, to becoming head of the very International Slavery Museum that Kuya had spent years campaigning to establish. Not a founding credit. A door opened that closed a circle instead.
Why this matters to the novel
Melly Strikes Back isn’t about reparations or restitution — it’s about a strike, a family, and a girl with a notebook. But the instinct behind putting Dorothy Kuya into it, keeping her own record of the same events Melly is recording, was the same instinct that ran through her whole life’s work: insisting that the people usually left out of the official account get counted properly, in the record, by name. That’s true of a Liverpool dock strike in 1970. It’s equally true of a museum case label that doesn’t say how the object in it actually arrived in Liverpool.
I’d recommend going straight to the source for the fuller picture of her life and the archive project built around it: Writing on the Wall’s Dorothy Kuya Creative Archives Project. There’s also a short ITV Granada Reports piece on the project, with footage of Kuya herself running an anti-racism training session, well worth the few minutes: ITV News Granada, “The life of anti-racism campaigner Dorothy Kuya is celebrated in Liverpool”.
Melly Strikes Back is out now — find it here.
Sources
- Dorothy Kuya Creative Archives Project — Writing on the Wall
- Dorothy Kuya — Wikipedia
- Reparations — The Bernie Grant Archive
- Liverpool and Benin, a Global Story — National Museums Liverpool
- The life of anti-racism campaigner Dorothy Kuya is celebrated in Liverpool — ITV News Granada
- Michelle Charters — Wikipedia
- Liverpool Black Sisters: Doing It For Themselves — National Museums Liverpool
[Photo of Dorothy Kuya to follow — pending permission from the Maritime Museum Archives Centre.]