Africa:
Preserving the Africa Centre
Over at African Arguments, Richard Dowdenwrites about the history and efforts to save the long dormant Africa Center at 38 King Street in Covent Garden, London - once the auction house for the sale of ancient Egyptian treasures in the 19th Century, it was given by the Catholic Church in perpetuity to the people of Africa in 1962. Above, authors Ngugi wa Thiong'o & Abdilatif Abdalla back in May 2011 share fond memories about the Africa Centre.
__________________________The battle for
London’s African heart
The Africa Centre at 38 King Street
If you wished to savour the full extent of black culture in London today, you might head east to Dalston to eat Ghanaian kenke, south to Brixton market to fill your fridge with ingredients for an egusi sauce, then north again to Walthamstow for a dose of fire and brimstone at a Nigerian church that boasts the single largest congregation in London. Or you might sink a quick Primus beer in Tottenham at the Congolese dive Papa Mapasa, before heading south to hear visiting African politicians at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. With luck, you might catch an African band performing at the Barbican, in the City, before close of play.
You would, in short, have to spend a lot of hours on the Tube or bus. Nowhere in the former capital of empire, home to more than a million Africans or people of African descent, is there a central venue showcasing the creative strides that contemporary Africa and diaspora Africans are making in business, literature and the arts. Nor is there an obvious meeting place where Ethiopians can rub shoulders with Zimbabweans, or black artists and activists mix with black bankers and lawyers. Africa in 21st-century London is as scattered as your day would be trying to locate its many parts.
For generations of people from – or engaged with – Africa, things were once different. From its opening by Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first president, in 1964, until the turn of the century, the Africa Centre at 38 King Street, Covent Garden, was a place where anyone could eat, drink, dance, read and talk all things Africa under one (increasingly leaky) roof.
Leading African politicians, heads of state, writers, musicians and artists were regular visitors to the centre, as well as thousands of punters black and white alike. It was a rare venue where races mixed in the 1960s, where Marxists eyeballed capitalists at the height of the cold war and where all could celebrate black music and culture at its cutting edge.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu described it as a “home from home” for a generation of Africans who cut their teeth in the turbulent era of liberation struggles. As Farai Sevenzo, a Zimbabwean filmmaker puts it, the centre is a place where “the great milestones of our short history, as well as the political upheavals our continent has faced since independence, have been debated”.
But the building has also been beset by controversies. The latest of these has put its very existence at risk. Earlier this year, news leaked from a whistleblower trustee that fellow members of the charity board entrusted with the centre’s upkeep and ethos were secretly planning to sell the building to Capco, a property developer with South African family roots. Capco, which declined to comment on any such plans, has transformed Covent Garden into a hub for high-end retail outlets and restaurants and has long had 38 King Street in its sights, according to trustees.
A small group from within the board handled the negotiations, in confidence at the developer’s request and without consultation. The board is self-appointed by invitation and, since the membership list lapsed, effectively unaccountable to anyone but itself.
The Africa Centre has been in decline for years; it is no longer the place people go to celebrate African culture. Yet news of the building’s proposed sale provoked outrage among those for whom it remained a kind of symbol of Africa in the wider world.
Chipo Chung, a social activist and actress of Zimbabwean origin, whose mother’s university education in the 1960s was financed by a trust housed at the Africa Centre, is among those who have led a campaign to save the site, organising a petition that has gathered about 3,000 signatures (including mine before I began to research this article). More strikingly, it has helped galvanise a consortium of African business luminaries, architects, musicians and continental leaders into a last-minute rescue mission.
Those lending their support include Tutu, Jean Ping, chairman of the commission of the African Union, Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese philanthropist and telecoms billionaire, Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel literature laureate and Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese singer. But at the core of the effort is a team led by David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect, Hadeel Ibrahim, Mo Ibrahim’s British-born daughter, and another Ghanaian Brit, Ekow Eshun, cultural commentator and former director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The campaign is as much about a younger, diaspora generation appreciation of the building’s potential (and belief that moving the Africa Centre from King Street would be tantamount to moving Parliament out of Westminster) as it is about the nostalgia of older members of the African community for the building’s past.
Architect David Adjaye
“For too long Africa’s assets – land, commodities and even people – have been sold to others who value them more highly,” says Hadeel Ibrahim. “Previous generations have failed to safeguard the future of this African landmark. Now is the moment for us to come together to create something more representative of Africa this century: young, dynamic and better-governed.”
The board of trustees, together with 14 recently appointed new members, voted almost unanimously to endorse the sale last month at an extraordinary general meeting called as a result of pressure from the campaign. But they have granted a stay of execution, apparently realising that it would be a public relations disaster to dismiss the moral authority of Tutu, and the credentials of Ibrahim and Adjaye, who believe the building can be saved. The rescue team was given six weeks to raise millions of pounds to rehabilitate the building and to provide a plan that would solve the centre’s chronic financing problems.
For Chung, success is essential, not only to save a piece of the African community’s London heritage but to demonstrate how African leadership can work. “We can either present our community as poor and helpless and unable to make things work,” she says. “Or we can prove that we have gained the social capital and vision for what Africa could be in the next century.”
It is not the first time 38 King Street has been held up as something of a mirror to Africa’s fortunes. The building began life in the 18th century as a banana warehouse – where, folklore has it, slaves were sold. It later became an auction house and, among other things, sold Benin bronzes from Nigeria. It was bought by the Catholic Church and, in 1962, gifted to the African community in its broadest sense. The idea was to provide a social, political and cultural platform at the heart of London for Africans and people interested in the continent during a period of tumultuous change. When it opened, the nearby piazza in Covent Garden was still a vegetable market, its environs a scruffy home to artisans, second-hand clothes stores and family-owned cafés. There wasn’t a Burberry bag in sight.
Over the years, the centre shed its Catholic skin to become a hotbed of liberation movements and anti-apartheid intrigue. In the 1980s and early 1990s it is best remembered as a venue where Jazzie B of Soul II Soul held club sessions on Sundays and where break-dancers scaled the walls.
It remained a place where you could buy any contemporary book in English on Africa. You could then read it at the Calabash restaurant, having chosen from a pan-African menu, and discuss it later at the basement bar, dubbed “Soweto”, which made up for dingy décor with raucous atmospherics and political debate.
By the turn of the millennium, however, the centre was becoming a shabby anachronism in deep financial trouble. In increasingly smart surroundings, it was more a reflection of Africa’s decline than of the continental revival under way.
As Westminster Council closed down sections, enforcing health and safety regulations, the centre’s income from events, rent and sales dwindled and the management borrowed to pay the staff. It was virtually bankrupt when, in 2006, the Arts Council – in the role of a cultural International Monetary Fund – earmarked £3m in loans and grants.
Before releasing the funds, the Arts Council insisted on a change of direction and imposed conditions akin to the belt-tightening enforced on indebted African countries by multilateral lenders. Staff were laid off, debts paid and the finances gradually sanitised. Today, there has been a significant turnround; the centre has roughly half a million sterling in the bank and runs at a negligible loss each month.
It was a place where you could buy any contemporary book in English on Africa then discuss it in a bar dubbed ‘Soweto’Still, it is a shadow of its former self. Refurbishment of some front upper floors has allowed the charity to draw rent from NGOs, a shop and consultancies. But the core auction hall and rear of the building continue to decay. The glass lectern roof, which once beamed light down past an elegant mezzanine floor, has long been boarded up. In a warren of back rooms, valuable art works collect dust, archives lie jumbled in boxes and mould is spreading across the walls. There is one employee running a skeleton programme of events.
By the time Capco approached the trustees with a £10.5m offer, many were already convinced that the only way to save the charity was to sell the building. They were frustrated that an ambitious plan to revitalise it (costed at £10m- £12m) never got off the ground. (It was completed just as world markets tumbled in 2008.)
They had concluded that the building was, according to chairman Oliver Tunde Andrews, a Lagos-based banker, “not fit for purpose”. And it would be prohibitively expensive to make it so because of its Grade II listed status. With the proceeds of a sale they would buy a more manageable space, and create an endowment fund with the difference – perhaps £5m. With this, Andrews tells me, they would place the centre on a sound financial footing for the first time and relaunch with a programme of events relevant to a new generation of Africans in the UK.
Graeme Jennings, a consultant brought in by the Arts Council to run the centre, elaborates. He explains that the putative new venue, also in central London, would be smaller, big enough to host a book launch or corporate seminar, but not a concert or a club. There would be an information centre but not necessarily a bar or café. The focus would be on using the endowment to leverage further financing, to bring African talent to London and to host events at bigger, world-class venues around the city. The demise of 38 King Street is “tragic”, he tells me, but he fears that if the Africa Centre stayed there the building would bring down the organisation again.
Where Andrews and pro-sale board members see dry rot, wet rot, asbestos and prohibitive bills, others who visit 38 King Street see great potential. For them the building is a priceless asset that, with the right vision and support, could be dragged into the 21st century to showcase Africa and Africans again, to fulfil, as they see it, the centre’s proper purpose.
As Adjaye puts it: “The centre has the history and it would be a shame not to reinvent it for another generation. It has lasted through the most difficult times. Now there is an affluent African class that can support it. This is the moment we should be galvanising that support, not giving up.”
Broadly, what Adjaye and others will propose is the complete refurbishment of the building. The ground floor and central venue would remain a public space for cultural events, the restaurant and bar would be restored and possibly given to a high-end franchise such as Momo, which has expressed interest in the past. The top floors would become a private members’ club, income from which would – together with the restaurant and bar – subsidise the rest.
Ekow Eshun, who is working out the programming side to the rescue plan, points to the success of the Double Club, a temporary nightclub-restaurant with a Congolese theme that enjoyed success in Islington a couple of years ago: “This is a hard-nosed proposition, one that is not just about holding on to the legacy of the building.”
Jazzie B, who breathed new cultural life into the centre in the 1980s, believes a turnround is in sight: “This is the generation that can do it,” he told me. “In such a short time all these people have come together – they know how to run a business and they have a clear vision of what the centre’s about.”
For the plan to work, however, the board of trustees must agree to shelve their own ambitions – something they have exhibited little inclination to do so far. Various trustees I spoke to dismissed the many offers of advice and assistance they have received including the most recent. The Ibrahims are “unreliable”, I was told. Adjaye, Britain’s most distinguished black architect, “offered a poor submission in the past”. And, Desmond Tutu is not in possession of the facts. He has been “manipulated” into backing the campaign.
There’s the rub. Before anyone sensible puts their money into the building, whether in the form of loans or grants, they will first need to persuade the board to put the sale on hold. And then they will almost certainly want to gain control of the board and change the governance structures. These have been described by Andy Gregg, an expert in charitable foundations, as “blatantly oligarchic”.
“If the centre is an anachronism in its current state then so is the way it is run,” agrees Chipo Chung. Unless that changes too, it is likely that to experience anything comparable to what 38 King Street once offered, you will continue to spend long hours on the Tube.
William Wallis is the FT’s Africa editor
__________________________
Saving The Africa Centre?
By Richard Dowden
I thought the days of effective agitprop and demos were over but this story might have a happy ending. For more than a decade the Africa Centre at 38 King Street in Covent Garden has been dormant. Once the vibrant cultural, political, social centre for Africans and anyone interested in Africa, bad management and the cost of maintaining the Grade II listed building had left it on the edge of dereliction.
Once the auction house for the sale of ancient Egyptian treasures in the 19th Century, it was given by the Catholic Church in perpetuity to the people of Africa in 1962. President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia opened it and from then on it became The Place for African presidents, freedom fighters, writers and artists to speak and debate. You could find everything African there, from Ghanaian food to fierce debates and fantastic parties. Sometimes all three at the same time on a Saturday night; a High Life or Congolese band playing to a crammed floor of dancers while below in the basement radicals and reactionaries sipped pepper soup and argued about evolutionary versus revolutionary change. During the week there were talks about art, African dance lessons, films and plays.
Like the rest of Covent Garden at that time it was scruffy and run down but open to the street and its staff always welcoming. A safe place for all, never in the hands of an ideological clique that excluded others. Even the most right-wing conservatives and hardline Marxists felt at ease there.
But unlike the rest of Covent Garden it did not revive in the 1990s and became a symbol of Africa’s decline, falling apart, poorly managed with no clear strategy to fund it. A new board of trustees nearly 10 years ago drew up plans but were unable to fulfil them and failed to raise money. It could not even spend a £3 million grant from the Arts Council. But the trustees kept promising revival. In 2006 Oliver Andrews, Chair of Trustees, said that the “Council is committed to keeping all its various stakeholders informed of developments at the Centre and will be issuing updates on a regular basis. It would also like to assert in the strongest terms possible that there is no intention to close down or sell the building.”
So we all waited patiently. Last year the offices in the building were done up and painted and organisations with Africa connections moved in. Then suddenly in March it leaked out that a secret deal was being done by the trustees to sell a 125 year lease to Capco, a property company that owns much of Covent Garden already. There was no announcement, no consultation and no information. The newly arrived tenants were given eviction notices. Under Charity Law the trustees have absolute power and while they are encouraged to inform the people who the charity serves, they are not obliged to. Unless trustees break the law or the terms of their charter, they can do whatever they like.
So a Save The Africa Centre campaign was launched and the Royal African Society joined the request for information and consultation from the trustees. Our Chair, Lord Mark Malloch Brown and I signed a letter to The Times on April 11th which was also signed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Boris Johnson and Baroness Kinnock. But our request for a public meeting and a delay period to consult was refused. But the chief agitators were not just nostalgic old Africa hands, bemoaning change. They were bright young African professionals, demanding openness and consultation and trying to preserve African heritage in Britain.
Lawyers were consulted, injunctions discussed, a huge dossier delivered to the Charity Commission. The African High Commissioners and Ambassadors began to get involved – cautiously. All to no avail. The agreement to start the process of selling was to be signed with Capco on June 3rd.
Last week the Trustees, who had declared there was no alternative and the building was “not fit for purpose”, announced that there would be an Emergency General Meeting on June 20th to confirm the decision to sell and the sack the trustee who had leaked news of the sale. The sale process would have already begun by then and again the trustees were secretive about who was to be invited. Lobbying members is difficult if there is no public record of the membership.
On June 2nd, the Save the Africa Centre campaign mounted a demonstration outside the building and offices of Capco. Suddenly Capco invited them in – something the trustees had never done – to discuss the sale. They then agreed to a postponement on the signing.
A process of consultation has now started. And we hope the Africa Centre as well as the Save The Africa Centre will post information and views on their websites: http://africadatabase.org/index.htm andhttp://savetheafricacentre.wordpress.com/.
In a way the trustees may have done the Centre a favour. After years of fruitless attempts to raise funds, an imminent sale date may have concentrated minds. Africa is the coming continent and investors are taking it increasingly seriously. Wealthy Africans have been approached and some are pondering the possibility of buying the Centre and restoring it. Or perhaps if Capco does buy it, they might even be persuaded to do up the building and franchise some of it to African enterprises – or the Africa Centre itself.
******
The real Mother of the Nation
Albertina Sisulu, who died on June 3rd, was a nurse who became a real “Mother of the Nation”. Not a natural politician, she became involved in the struggle against white rule through her marriage to Walter Sisulu, a leading African National Congress activist and Mandela’s closest friend. But she became a powerful leader in her own right, keeping hope alive as the others were imprisoned or banned, and became the president of the United Democratic Front, the front for the ANC after it was banned.
I visited her in 1986 at a shack that served as a clinic in Rockville, a particularly bleak part of Soweto. She served as nurse and receptionist to Doctor Abu Asvat, “the peoples’ doctor”, who promoted pan-Africanist politics, a rival to the African National Congress. He was later murdered, almost certainly as result of that rivalry.
I met a neatly dressed elderly nurse who gave me – and everyone else at the clinic – a courteous welcome. I had to wait my turn in the queue though my mission was not medical. Like many of that generation she treated everyone equally, rich and poor, black and white. A warm, motherly person, she had beautiful manners. I did not keep a note of the meeting as I did not want to endanger her. She had just been acquitted in a major trial and had already been to jail or banned numerous times.
When everyone else had gone she made me tea and chatted calmly about the state of the struggle against apartheid. Even then she had a remarkable calmness, a faith that all would turn out well. And when I left she gave me a big hug.