SPECIALFEATURE
African and Caribbean Association, as well as visitors to Gillingham’ s Sunlight Centre, a long-established community hub used by the association. Ronald Hill recalled living in Medway during the 1960s, while Madge Cole spoke about moving to the area from London in the 1980s and the formation of the Medway African and Caribbean Association in 1984.
Another interview with Percival Thomas shows exactly what spoken history can preserve that a parish register cannot. He recalled arriving in the UK from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1960 at the age of 21, then working in tailoring, carpet delivery and a paint factory before gaining a degree in social sciences and going on to teach economics. This leaves us with something far richer than a record of where and when Percival lived, providing a glimpse of the journey, experiences and everyday details that made up the life behind the name.
That work continued through Black History Live, a Medway African and Caribbean Association project focused on the history and legacy of African and Caribbean people in Kent and Medway during the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2018, The Untold Story of Kent’ s Black History brought historical research and spoken-history interviews together in a documentary and museum installation at The Historic Dockyard Chatham, using first-person testimony to build a fuller picture of Black life in Kent across the preceding half-century.
This is where spoken history becomes so valuable. Conventional records have traditionally tended to favour major events and prominent people, while the everyday detail of ordinary lives can be much harder to find. Spoken history does not replace documentary evidence, but it can add something those sources often cannot- allowing people to tell their own stories in their own words.
Now, a new Medway project is taking that principle forward. Created in 2026, Twenty- Medway’ s Black Heritage is led by artist, photographer and historian Michi Masumi, and supported through Medway Heritage Place, a partnership with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project, created with Medway’ s Black community at its heart, is documenting 20 Black residents through guided audio conversations and professional archival portraits.
The thinking behind this new initiative is also refreshingly straightforward- the experiences being lived in Medway today are already part of the area’ s heritage, so why wait for them to become distant history before deciding they are worth recording?
The way Twenty- Medway’ s Black Heritage is building that record matters, too. Participants are given detailed choices around consent and how their words, voices, portraits and names may be used. Subject to those permissions, contributions are intended for permanent preservation in the Benjamin Zephaniah Archive & Library online, while the project also includes educational presentations involving Medway Archives and Medway Libraries. them while the people living those stories are still able to tell them for themselves
For a future researcher, that could mean something far richer than the fragments that lead us back to Wylmm, Rich or Susana Dafne. Alongside a name and date, there can be a voice, a face, memories and context, offering a much fuller picture of the person behind the record rather than leaving somebody centuries later to piece that life together from whatever happens to have survived. None of this makes the older records less valuable, either; in fact, it shows exactly why they matter.
Black History Month has always involved looking again at the stories a society chooses to remember and, 100 years after the first Negro History Week was held in America, perhaps one of the most progressive things we can do is recognise that the historical record is never‘ finished’. Across Kent and beyond, it is still being found, questioned, expanded and created, meaning the history someone discovers here in 2126 is being made, and archived, right now.
This means the project is doing more than simply looking back at Black history once enough time has passed for it to feel historical. Instead, it is recognising that today’ s ordinary lives will become tomorrow’ s primary sources, but only if somebody makes the decision to preserve www. insidekent. co. uk • 19