The cultural landscape of London at the beginning of the twenty-first century was a very different land to the one that we currently inhabit. We slid into the year 2000, with bated breath, as we watched and waited for the potential crashing of computer programmes and the end of civilization as we knew it. Perhaps we did not really believe it, but there seemed to be a real possibility that something could go drastically wrong.

After living abroad for many years I returned to London in the late 1980s and spent much of the 1990s teaching and developing a creative writing portfolio, getting published in anthologies and magazines, and writing reviews for community, national, and international publications. In 2000 one of my poems and a short story were published in the iconic IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. In 2004 my poetry collection My Grandmother Sings to Me was published by Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, a radical black publishing house owned by publishers and civil rights activists Eric and Jessica Huntley. I discovered the Huntleys through one of their major literary events, Salkey's Score: held at the Commonwealth Institute, it was a celebration of the life and work of author Andrew Salkey. As a writer working on an MA at Goldsmiths University, I was looking for a publisher. I came to be involved with the work of Eric and Jessica Huntley during the time they were concerned with finding somewhere to house their archive collection that would ensure its preservation and enable public access to it. Jessica especially wanted the collection to be used by schools and students.

The Huntleys had emigrated from British Guiana, now Guyana, to London between 1957 and 1958 and founded Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications Limited in 1969. It was established after Dr. Walter Rodney, an academic and political activist friend of the Huntleys, was banned from re-entering Jamaica in 1968. His crime was to teach Rastafarians and working-class Jamaicans outside of the University of the West Indies, where he was a lecturer, on African history. The Huntleys published Rodney's lectures in The Groundings with My Brothers and would go on to publish his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.