Mary Seacole: The Real Angel of the Crimea

Writer: Andrea Stuart

Intro | Who was Mary Seacole? | Mary Seacole's impact | Black British Contribution | Forgotten People of Colour

Black British Contribution

Black contribution to British life is often neglected. There are many reasons for this. Often the cause is racism. In the years that followed Seacole's death, for example, British attitudes to race hardened because of its problems in India. Soon after her autobiography was published, the Indian Mutiny saw the deaths of white soldiers across the sub-continent at the hands of Indian soldiers. Suddenly celebrating Black heroines didn't have the same public appeal.

Another cause lies in who writes history: by and large, this has been the province of white men, not Black women. The oral history of which Mary Seacole was part was vulnerable to the assaults of slavery, migration, and the learning of new languages, cultures and traditions. The voices of Black women have simply not registered in white men's accounts of what is important, what counts as 'proper history'. Over the last few decades, Black people - as well as other 'forgotten' groups, such as women and lesbian and gay people - have worked hard to uncover these 'hidden histories'.

A third reason is due to the nature of the relationship between colonial power and colonial subject. While people living in the colonies usually considered themselves fully British, those actually living in 'the Motherland' did not share this perception. For most British people, Mary Seacole was simply not British and therefore not a worthy subject of British history. Academic Benedict Anderson explains how we understand nationhood by the term 'imagined communities'. As we can never know all the people in our homeland, we come to understand what it is to be 'British' by how it is represented to us, in books newspapers and the television. If a particular group is under-represented - as black people or gay people, for example, often are - we tend to see them as not 'belonging'; not being really part of our national identity. Mary Seacole, as a black woman, couldn't in many imaginations be a British heroine.

The re-emergence of Mary Seacole proves how important these issues are. Since the mass migration of Caribbean people to Britain in the 1950s, they have been a vibrant part of British life. But for a long time they remained virtually absent from our television screens and other media. As African-Caribbeans have become more vocal, there have been greater calls for positive representation and increased focus on young Black people's need for positive role models. In the 1970s people in Britain began to understand the importance of remembering figures like Mary Seacole. Her story was publicized in an exhibition called Roots of Britain, and her autobiography - the first by a black woman in Britain - was reprinted in 1984. Today primary school students learn about her, alongside Florence Nightingale, as part of the national curriculum. Academics study her contribution, and there are Mary Seacole nurseries, offices and streets. An annual Mary Seacole award, funded by the Government, is given for innovation in the nursing and midwifery professions. In 2004 Mary Seacole was voted the 'greatest Black Briton in history.' A new biography of her, by Jane Robinson, was published in 2005.

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