The first black person to appear in written British records was a Roman centurion put under guard for disobeying an order. So the story goes, and whether this is true or false, apocryphal or factual, there have been blacks living in Britain in established communities for many centuries. The unfulfilled wish of Britain's first Queen Elizabeth to rid her imperial self of these ‘blackamores’ is testimony. According to a recent UK census by the year 2011 twenty-eight per cent of Londoners will be of either Black or Asian descent, forty six per cent of whom will have been born in the UK.

This short article concentrates on just one strand of the manifold cultural inroads which support the blossoming reality of a Britain where many cultures co-exist and sometimes thrive. It will take a look at two decades of development in the history of Black Theatre in Britain: the 1970s where it will focus on the playwrights and the productions, and the 1980s (when there was a unique flowering of Black theatre companies in England) where it will attempt to pull together representative high points of the activity and imagination in Black British Theatre companies experienced then.

There have been as many words used to describe African and African-Caribbean members of the population as there have been centuries of their presence in the United Kingdom, including ‘immigrant’, ‘coloured’, ‘darkie’ and ‘ethnic minority’ and so on.