“Sylvia! Why did you have to leave us all so soon?” poet and activist Kadifa lamented in a poem published in honour of her friend, Sylvia Ome Erike. Kadifa and Erike organised together within the British Black Women’s Movement; however, at only the age of thirty, Erike tragically fell to her death from the balcony of her home in Clapton. Kadifa wished she “could turn back time” to “cushion her fall,” referring to the premature nature of Erike’s death and, perhaps, regret that she did not receive more support during her battles with mental health and addiction. The tragic death which followed these struggles reflected the longstanding effects of using addiction to cope with adversity, but her absence from most narratives of Black women’s activism reveals how the politics of remembrance can be complicated by ideas of morality. This piece draws on direct quotations from Erike’s friends and fellow activists to represent her story, reinserting Erike back into the history of activism.
Erike and her brother were born in London to immigrant parents: a White German mother and an absent Nigerian father. According to Stella Dadzie, friend and co-author of The Heart of the Race, Erike’s mother raised “these two black children without any consciousness at all, and Sylvia became a very radical sister.” She helped organise the first National Black Women’s Conference in 1979 and delivered a “powerful” paper titled “Black women and the State.” Witnesses, such as Jocelyn Wolfe, emphasised the importance of Erike’s intellect to the conference and the Black Women’s Movement: “She had a good brain and was very good at writing stuff… you’d throw an idea, and you’d be struggling with a paragraph and she’d just kind of take it and run with it and next thing you know, you’d have a page full of stuff.”
Despite being preoccupied with her doctoral research at the London School of Economics, Erike joined the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the coordinating committee of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). She played an instrumental role in their Afro-Asian unity workshops because, according to her sisters within OWAAD, she understood “the destructive nature of cultural nationalism in our community,” due to her “upbringing and first-hand experience of racism.” While most racist incidents occur in public, many mixed-race children were affected by the racism which emerged within their own homes.
Their shared experiences as mixed-race children was something that Erike and Dadzie bonded over. In one interview, Dadzie recalled struggling to embrace her Ghanian heritage while her mother made comments such as “cover your hair, don’t go out in the sun, you’re not Black, you’re coffee-coloured.” Erike’s mother would do “really obvious, nasty things” when Black friends visited, such as hiding her valuables. As Dadzie reflected: “Both of us had an understanding of how difficult that can be if your mother really doesn’t understand you.” These tensions are captured in Dadze’s 1980 poem:
I’m not half-caste
Half-arsed
(To ras!)
Half-baked
A fake
Brown Skin, White Mask
My mum
(Who’s white)
Would sigh and say
‘Thank God you’re light’
We’d fight
(All night)
‘You’re wrong!’
‘I’m right!’
I may be yours
But I’m not white
(So I must be Black – right?)
Throughout the stanzas Dadzie captures the anger and self-doubt of a mixed-race activist within Black politics – issues which Erike discussed with her. During a particularly difficult time, while Erike’s mother was dying of cancer, she confided her conflicting emotions to Dadzie: “I went to see my mother, and I can’t reconcile the fact that I love her, but I hate her. I love her because she’s my mother, but I hate her because she stands for everything that my politics say I should stand against.” Despite these struggles, Erike weaponised her proximity to whiteness – and thus, proximity to the source of harm – to inform her analysis of Black womanhood and political blackness.
As Dadzie suggested, it seems likely that Erike struggled with addiction and her mental health “because she was so damaged by that experience of racism with her mother.” During the summer of 1983, Erike fell from her balcony while intoxicated: an incident which most recognised as an awful accident, although there was some speculation that it was suicide. Nonetheless, the sisters decided to focus on Erike’s impact on their lives and the Movement. According to her obituary, “Sylvia died at a time when many of her plans and ambitions were on the point of being realised.” She had started to lecture on racism and sexism at Thames Polytechnic, and she planned to use her thesis – which “was on the verge of completion” – to establish a course at Hackney college. Her sisters added: “She was also making a determined effort to confront and come to terms with the pain and frustrations of her own life.” The effort included a planned trip to Nigeria to establish her African roots and begin undoing the damage inflicted by her mother’s racism. “How we wish for her sake that she could have made it,” her sisters sadly reflected.
The disappearance of Erike’s works, notably her innovative thesis on Black women in Britain, is one of many records of Black women’s labour which have been lost. Had she published her thesis and initiated her workshops, she may have become one of the trailblazing academics who emerged from the Movement, like Gail Lewis or Heidi Mirza. However, memorialising Erike proved difficult due to her troubled life and the nature of her death. Dadzie noted that Erike’s reliance on alcohol to cope could make her “a hard, hard sister to deal with,” but Dadzie’s sympathy stemmed from her personal understanding of the battles Erike faced. This sympathy extended to Erike’s friends – it would be impossible to write this blog without the women who realised that Erike was not being memorialised in the same way as her fellow activists, and who actively entered her into the record to combat her erasure.
Olive Morris, for example, was a prominent Black activist who tragically succumbed to lymphoma in 1979 but has been well memorialised – from the Brixton pound note to the Google Doodle – whereas Erike is hardly discussed except by her fellow activists. The monumental Black feminist oral history collection – The Heart of the Race – was dedicated to both women, reading: “To Olive Morris and Sylvia Erike, who were true sisters in the struggle. May this book keep your memory alive.” But the differences between how Morris and Erike were remembered reveals how the circumstances of death shape the processes of memorialisation.
In an attempt to counter the silences on Erike’s contributions, many of her fellow activists found ways to include her in the memorials for Olive Morris. During her interview with the Do You Remember Olive Morris oral history project team, Jocelyn Wolfe emphasised Morris’ role within a collective, noting others, including Erike, were also significant: “I don’t want it to seem as if she was the only one doing all of these things […] I also think about someone, for instance, like Sylvia, who has died. I don’t know who is going to do a Remember Sylvia project.” Dadzie added in her own interview for the project: “Certainly if I think of Olive, I think of Sylvia Erike who was another young woman who was part of our movement.”
But Morris’ less controversial life and death were some of the factors which kept her “memory alive,” whereas others struggled to discuss Erike. “There was another girl called Sylvia Erike and…” began Gerlin Bean – the “Mother of the Movement” – in her interview for the Olive Morris project. Her voice trailed off as memories of Erike flooded her mind. “… It was an interesting time, difficult time,” Bean elected to say, possibly wondering how she could discuss Erike without mentioning her alcoholism and awful death. Would the interviewers be interested in the story when they sought to discuss Morris? Would Erike have wanted Bean to tell her truth? Perhaps this type of internal questioning persuaded Bean to be silent when others, such as Wolfe and Dadzie, sought to use the Morris project to reflect on the forgotten Erike. Here we see the politics of remembrance playing out: the conditions which ensure that some contributions are remembered, and others are forgotten.
Activists suffered and lost, erred and regretted, just as we do. The memorialisation of individual activists may not only overlook the ways in which collectives worked together, but it may also produce a script that determines whose story is appropriate for recollection. As Dadzie highlighted in her concluding remarks for the Olive Morris project: “She needs to be remembered, because everybody focuses on Olive, and they forget about Sylvia. So, I just wanted to talk about Sylvia for a while and remind people that she was also part of our project, and although she was a damaged person, many of us were damaged by racism and by the contradictions that shaped and formed our lives.”
Many thanks to Stella Dadzie for her helpful feedback, her life-long commitment to adult and community education, and her efforts to ensure the survival of Sylvia Ome Erike’s memory.
Olivia Wyatt is a final-year PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London and an incoming Visiting Fellow of the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). She is currently completing her thesis as the Justin Champion doctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. She is a recipient of the NACBS Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship and you can read more about her research here.
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