1. 

In 1891, a poster for William Edwards & Son Wolverhampton, a small edge tool business boasts the creation of 

SPADES
SHOVELS
HAMMERS,
P L A N T A T I O N H O E S,

PICKS, AXES,
ADZES
IRON & STEEL
WHEELBARROWS
SPECIAL TOOLS FOR AFRICA. 

the quality of these tools is second to none, “superior to anything yet introduced in the trade.” Made right here at home.

The term ‘Black Country’ describes the layers of soot emitted by ironworking foundries and coal mines which extended across the West Midlands during the Industrial Revolution. A country was born, and the productive labour of its workers fuelled the abjection of half the world. In the early 1720s, the establishment of the Birmingham Canal and then the Worcester Canal in 1771 transformed Wolverhampton into a distribution centre for raw materials. The theft began here. The earth was the very first supplier – iron ore, rocks and minerals were extracted and transformed into steel and iron. The streets were said to be filled with skilled artisans creating specialised patents for locks, screws, hammers, and fine steel toys. The detailed skill of artisans increased the ironmongery trade. Did these workers know or care about what happened to that steel and iron once it appeared at the end of the assembly line? Did they consider their own part in the creation of ‘special tools’ that ended thousands of lives prematurely? Did they know the weight of the plantation hoe and what it did to the bodies of the people forced to use it? 

These special tools were innovative creations in human misery. The sharp blade of the plantation hoe, the wood, copper and iron used to construct slave ships, the metal spoons traded for a slave’s life were at one point in history ingenious solutions created to make slave labour more expedient. They solved several problems: the slow work pace in the fields and plantations, the mass transportation of workers, the lack of money for bartering. Certain objects secured the dominance of enduring racial hierarchy, others marked the difference between valuable and expendable labour. 

The living slave, plantation hoe in hand, was an expendable commodity, to be replaced when necessary. 

The inanimate steam engines powering the production of iron and steel were invaluable generators of Britain’s future. 

In the plantation fields, the imperative was growth; planting, harvesting, picking, weeding, expendable labour was vital to ever growing industries, in turn, these industries guzzled up more of the earth’s resource, devoured human time and energy, altered the course of the world. The movement away from subsistence economies toward the profit motive required not only the abuse and exploitation of people but the creation of painful objects. Objects whose weight and dimensions correlate to screams, cries, pleas for help, exhaustion, rape, over work, degradation, torture, sadistic and ritualistic violence. Special tools these are indeed. Their existence is evidence of imperial intimacy knitted across the globe; they show us the true nature of human interdependence, the impossibility of one without the other. 

2.

 

Another kind of labour keeps the world turning. At The Heritage Centre in Wolverhampton, the roundtable is a counter-history of production, an intergenerational meeting between aspiration, failure and every feeling in between. Here, exertion services creation, labour finds its most enduring form because the profit-motive has been removed. These black people maintain very unprofitable business and rescue one another in the process.

Love’s labour is careful and meticulous; always trying to satisfy clouds of possibility just outside reach, always rescuing the otherwise damned from their damnation, stabilizing the tumult of racial dispossession. A dedication to place that extends far beyond the question of an individual life. Love’s Labour is nurse, then city councillor, then community board member, then administrator, (despite ongoing health problems), it is creating work where there was none. It is finding ways to keep the lights on when the funding is pulled, meeting the young people wherever they are: on the streets, in the clubs, trying to convince them that this is not an old people’s home but the beating heart of dead space. Love’s labour undoes the plot of historical record, makes the event something other than what it was. Think about how they come to find themselves in this place, in this time, the making of the plantation hoe happened just two streets down. Do the fascists know? As they wander the streets outside? Love’s labour is protection and community defence. The centre holds its ground. 

The building’s roots burrow deep into the earth, thick and strong. The centre holds its ground. You look across the newly refurbished space and you see your grandmother as girl, tugging at her father’s blazer. You see the child who begs to leave as his mother finishes organising papers in the office. The building burrowed deep in the earth becomes the place for asking Mabel to watch the kids, for finding your uncle, dad and grandfather when they have gone missing on a Saturday afternoon. It becomes the house of dominos, sorrel, ginger cake, fish, rice. Keywords. It becomes the site of your first kiss in Sunday best. These associations, as they are casually named, give structure to collective demand. They formalise certain attachments and inclinations, what matters is not their formal elements, but the manufacturing that takes place inside them.  

At the Sheffield and District African Caribbean Association, black workers are constructing a will to live. They are subjects of the state, yes, but they are working diligently to abolish the present state of things. Sitting at the table, recounting memories, they realise that every game, community town hall, makeshift dance, every political meeting, every makeshift archive engineers their own defiance. Just like the assembly line, they behave as one. They are doing the work the state refuses to: keeping each other here, plodding on heads held high, honouring the history, insisting on their presence, making a home where home has been withheld from them. Think of the administrative tasks necessary to create and maintain the records of members, to communicate information promptly, to organise the buses and trains that enable day trips for the elderly. Work that fulfils.

3.

You are no longer subject. 

I tried to leave this statement in the archive for you to find. Amidst ego, infighting and intergenerational strife, I was determined that the message be legible. I needed you to know that these organisations were crucial, that collective determination enabled the development of a political strategy in every corner of what is formally known as ‘Great Britain’. I want to tell you the good news: All the implements of violence (remember the plantation hoe?) all the tired eyes of our elders, all the thinking about where we are and how we got here, all the theorising about Blackness in Britain, ‘Black Britishness’, being in but not of the nation did indeed help reconstruct the world around us. Even the earth changed, the minerals beneath your feet said no. They refused to grease the engines, we stopped the flow of money. Believe it: the earth said no, just as you did. 

Conditions on being have all but fallen away, time does not bend according to the aftermath of the events. Race holds no disciplinary power. It is difficult to write from a place not yet theorised. I promise you, the many actions it took to create this location were adequately acknowledged. Do not worry, pain was not sublimated to joy or business or generational wealth or the black middle class. We did not think ourselves into the future, we laboured for it. Your labours were of great use. When you behaved as if it were possible to reach us, that is how you bypassed the statis induced by your sorrowful attachment to defeat, when you remembered three simple worlds “THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES” you dignified your own life, even as the state was determined you remain undignified. You made hard work beautiful again. Your being there, your commitment to keeping the buildings open, accessible, a place for chatter and consciousness raising created fighters. Your repeated actions were necessary. You did not labour in vain. You wove a tapestry.

Now time behaves differently, we are not in the future so much as the fruition of a social vision which is achieved today, tomorrow and again the next day. The experience of human duration needn’t be over directed. Through sustained revolution, we shed the shame of the unthinkable. Here is everything about the old world: all its tools were destroyed. Here is everything about the new world: we no longer try to capture what it is we cannot explain, we have relinquished ownership, we toil without drudgery. 

The roads are still the same but you are no longer subject, you’re free to roam. 

--

Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is author of 'Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power' (Pluto Press, 2020) and 'Experiments in Imagining Otherwise' (Hajar Press, 2021). Her writing has been published by Afterall Journal, Architectural Review, Wasafiri, Stenberg Press, Aperture, La Fabrique editions, Arcadia Missa, Vittles, Extra Extra Magazine, Lawrence and Wishart and others.