October is Black History Month and since 1987, people across the UK have come together during this time to celebrate the lives, achievements and contributions of Black people both in Britain and across the world.
While Black history is not and should not be limited to one month of the year, Black History Month is important precisely because it offers a time for reflection and a challenge to conventional perspectives on the past.
For example, one of the core purposes of Black History Month has always been to draw attention to stories and individuals otherwise ‘hidden’ or missing from traditional mainstream history. This means thinking critically about what we see and think we know. It means recognising the particular context and circumstances in which our sources of information have been created, and the extent to which the lives of Black people have often been overlooked or excluded from historical accounts.
Yet absence is a form of story in itself, in so much as what it reveals to us, and applies as much to physical spaces and objects as it does written texts. When we walk around Winchester Cathedral and study its statues and memorials, the stories and inscriptions we find carved in marble monuments are of those with the prestige and means to set them in stone. So, it is worth asking the question, ‘who is not represented here and which stories are not being told?’
This doesn’t mean the stories of these privileged individuals and their family members are invalid or ‘wrong’ – they are a significant part of the Cathedral’s history too.
But perhaps Black History Month invites us to ask a different set of questions, to try to understand what we see within the broader view of what is currently absent. It is only when we ask “why and “how” an object is, rather than simply “what” it is, that we can begin to form new and more thoughtful ways of making sense of the Cathedral’s visible heritage. We can identify different histories and varied interpretations. And our experience of the Cathedral will surely be all the richer for it.