MENELIK SHABAZZ - A TRUE PIONEER IN BLACK BRITISH FILM 1954 - 2021

We often talk about the “Windrush generation” as paving the way for the modern Black presence in the UK. As important as this generation is I believe there is an equally important generation, and that is the first generation of Black Britons. This is the first generation that was either born in the UK or came over here at such an early age that Britain was the only place they ever really knew as home.

While immigrants invariably fight discrimination and hardship it is often not until the next generation call a place “home”, because they literally have no alternative, that the fight for true equality goes to the next level.

This generation is no longer the Caribbeans with a “grip (suitcase) on top of the cupboard” because they constantly had one eye on going back home.

This is the generation that not only fought to end racism but demanded equality - because if you cannot be equal in your own home, where can you be an equal?

This is the generation that truly started to forge what it meant to be "Black British" as opposed to Caribbean living in the UK.

This is the generation that created the foundations of Black British culture from Lovers Rock in the 1970s, to Soul II Soul in the 1980s.

And this week we lost a giant of this generation who shaped Black British film and culture.

Menelik Shabazz was born in Barbados in 1954 and came to the UK at the age of six. In 1974 he enrolled at the London International Film School, two years before "Pressure", the first film by a Black British director, was released.

He was a pioneer in recognising the importance of the first generation of modern Black Britons who truly called the UK home. In 1976 he directed Step Forward Youth, a 30-minute documentary about London-born Black youths. And in 1978 he directed Breaking Point which tackled the issue of systemic criminalisation of Black British youth and the police use of the “sus law” (a version of today’s “stop and search”).

Shabazz however is probably best known for his first feature-length film “Burning an Illusion” about a Black British woman in London, again focusing on the first generation of Black British people born in the UK. The film won the Grand Prix at the Amiens International Film Festival in France, and in 2011 it was honoured with a Screen Nation Classic Film Award.

The importance of the Black British community ran through his life, and not just his films, as he co-founded Kuumba Productions to provide an outlet for independent film projects in 1982.

In 1984 he went on to co-found Ceddo, a seminal Black British film collective. It was at Ceddo that I had the privilege of first meeting Menelik as I worked as an intern on his docu-drama "Time and Judgement", telling the history of the struggles of the Black community across the world through the use of newsreel footage. I was far from the only young Black person Ceddo gave pivotal training to, and I would not be working in the media industry today without the foundation they provided for me.

In Ceddo Shabazz clearly placed the Black British experience within a global context, as the film collective covered subject matters such as Rastafari women in Jamaica, with the film “Omega Rising", and the struggle against apartheid in “We Are the Elephant”.

Shabazz continued his groundbreaking work of framing Black British film in an international context as he launched the Black Filmmaker Magazine (BFM) in 1998, the first Black film publication aimed at the global Black filmmaking industry.

Menelik Shabbaz was a pioneer who saw the importance in shaping and capturing the narratives of the Black British experience, and was one of the first people to recognise its importance first to Britain and then globally.

He was an inspiration to me and will be sorely missed by every Black British person working in film.