The neat living room in suburban Ealing, west London, seems an unlikely place for the birth of the UK’s first radical black publishing house. But it was here, in the home they still live in today, that Eric and Jessica Huntley, who moved to London from Guyana in their youth, set up Bogle-L’Ouverture in 1969.
Jessica, 80, and her 78-year-old husband have provided a fascinating insight into the last half century of black British history by donating their substantial archive of books, letters and documents to the London Metropolitan Archives.
Bogle-L’Ouverture – named after two black slaves who became freedom fighters, Paul Bogle and Toussaint L’Ouverture – started more or less by accident. The Huntleys were trade union activists in Guyana and often printed political pamphlets. They continued to produce pamphlets in London, but, tiring of the rudimentary Gestetner duplicating machine she was using, Jessica began taking material to a printer – and the publishing house was born.
Walter Rodney, the Guyanese political activist, writer and academic, was part of their circle, and when he was assassinated in 1980 the bookshop the Huntleys had opened in 1971 to showcase black writers was renamed after him. His book, The Groundings With My Brothers, was Bogle-L’Ouverture’s first, in 1969, and they also imported books by African and African-American writers such as Maya Angelou, George Jackson and Frantz Fanon, introducing them to a UK readership.
Patrick Vernon, proprietor of the Every Generation Media publishing house, believes that the Huntleys laid the foundation upon which the latest generation of black British publishers have been able to build. He says: “We should never forget the role they played in creating a stage upon which African-Caribbean and black British academics and authors could prove that what they had to say was valid and important.”
Does the handover of their archive mean they are going to put their feet up? Jessica has her eye on a book previously published by a large publisher but subsequently withdrawn. “I wouldn’t mind taking that one on,” she says, with a glint in her eye.
