Forgive me. This isn’t me dropping a single or announcing a new album.

Instead, what has pulled me out from my creative bunker is the call to arms that is the movement for Black lives that has spurred an overwhelming desire for conversation about Black history in the UK.

Events such as the ‘forcible removal’ of Edward Colston’s statue from Bristol’s town centre, and the ongoing debate about the African artifacts being kept in The British Museum, have challenged Britain about where it really stands on Blackness.

As a singer-songwriter, what came to mind during this period of introspection – perhaps selfishly – was the history of Black British music.

I suddenly wondered whether my knowledge of my expert subject was missing as many entries about black British history as my formal history education did at school. 

What was Black British music history? Where was it? And why couldn’t I recall more about the contributions of Black Brits to our culture? My memory crassly told me that they didn’t exist before Windrush – that they were simply absent from all innovation and creativity until the Second World War. That’s what living in Britain had seemingly taught me.

But of course, I knew, that couldn’t be true.

When you dig a little deeper, you see there is plenty of Black musical heritage to be found here. It stretches back as far as the early 16th century, when John Blanke, an African trumpeter, played for Henry VIII.

It includes classical Violinist, George Bridgetower who lived much of his life in England, and was by all accounts (including Beethoven’s) a highly accomplished player. 

During the Victorian era, Holborn-born composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor achieved great success in Britain and overseas. And in the early 20th century, jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington visited and performed here, long before the introduction of the Windrush generation and the Calypso music that came with it.

Black people’s place in the musical landscape of this country runs longer and deeper than can be explained in my brief introduction. And yet it is missing from my knowledge of Britain, seemingly hidden beneath a general British desire to avoid dwelling too long on the parts of history that may “embarrass” us.

But this history isn’t embarrassing. It’s enlightening. This is history we should dwell on. Few of us could have pictured Black musicians living in Victorian London. Fewer still could imagine that those musicians were contemporaries of national “institutions” such as Edward Elgar – composer of Pomp and Circumstance (or, as most people know it, Land of Hope and Glory).

This fuller, more accurate picture is much more interesting to me. But here we are, stuck toting a version of history that doesn’t pay Black musicians their full dues, while keeping the achievements of their non-Black peers permanently visible.

This gap in our education about Black British creativity represents a problem with how we think of our culture. It pervades and inhibits our ability to accept that UK culture is the sum of several diverse parts, from distinct perspectives.

And it lets us slide into a tendency to see Black contributions as secondary, outside influences, rather than being valuable and canon in the long history of our nation. 

Nowadays evidence of this is written all over our responses to Black artistic expression. Stormzy and Dave’s BRIT Awards performances garnered hundreds of complaints to Ofcom this year, many citing that their lyrics – challenging the political establishment and bringing light to anti-Black marginalisation – constituted racism on their part.

It doesn’t make sense that two of the most successful and credible artists in the country would suddenly become the objects of such targeted negativity, unless, perhaps, that pervasive perception of Black people as outsiders is at play, making their critiques of Britain harder to hear than when they come from their non-Black peers (think Plan B and his song, “Ill Manors”). This trend continued with reactions to dance group Diversity’s BLM-inspired piece on Britain’s Got Talent, which brought in 24,500 similar complaints.

It’s clear that British people enjoy the output and cultural influence of Black musicians. It’s also true that music has the ability to bring people of all cultures and races “to the table” as listeners and fans, but still, some of us bristle at the mention of Black people’s experiences in that context.

So it raises the question: do we love Black music more than the people it represents? When I say “love” I mean that generalised feeling of empathy we have for our fellow person’s pain, happiness or anger; the willingness we have to see others win in life and our ability to see ourselves in others. The erasure of Blackness from our memories of history has made that empathy harder to feel, as we all battle with our perceptions of ignorance or being ignored and generally find ourselves not on the same page. 

So what do we do with this frustrating discrepancy? 

The answer is that we push through it. It doesn’t matter that doing so is awkward or difficult. We have to actively educate ourselves and talk with our friends about the history behind this music we all love. We must continue to uplift and support the output of Black musicians and artists we enjoy, knowing that they may have views that challenge and expand our perception of Britain, and being ready to defend them in the aftermath of criticism for expressing those views. And lastly we should encourage them, and by extension our black peers, to feel they can speak about those views freely, celebrating that our shared love of Black music may also give rise to important conversations about Black people in this Britain.

Our history – Black history – is British History, now and forever. And Black music is huge part of it – it’s popularity reminding us who we’re supposed to be: a nation that sees value in people across cultural and racial borders.

Music remains eternally capable of binding us through a shared love of its greatness, despite the divisiveness in today’s world.  But if we really want to access its power of unity then we must learn to love the people it represents.

Kwabena “Kwabs” Adjepong is a singer and songwriter.