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- [00:00]
Shahida Bari
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Zakiya Sewell
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- [00:45]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. How have forgotten folk and pagan traditions shaped Britain today? Ontalese episode, author Zakiya Sewell joins us to shed light on this oft overlooked element of Britain's past. In conversation with host Shahida Bari, Sewall reveals how elements of paganism are being rediscovered and reinterpreted today and what this revival reveals about identity, memory and the search for meaning in a divided modern Britain. Let's join our host Shahidabari now with more.
- [01:20]
Shahida Bari
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I am Shahidabari and our guest today is Zakiyyah Sewell. Zakiya Sewell is a broadcaster and DJ from London, but with close links to Larne in Wales, which we're going to find out more about it, I think, in a moment. Presented and produced podcasts and radio documentaries for BBC Radio 4, the World Service Tate and Boiler Room on music, history and the arts. She also hosts a weekly show called Dreamtime on BBC6. Music and DJs regularly in London and abroad. Her first book is Finding Albion, Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain, which has been long listed for the 2026 Women's Prize for Nonfiction. So welcome to Intelligence Squared Zakir, and congratulations on the book.
- [02:05]
Zakiya Sewell
Thank you, thank you. Good morning and yeah, lovely to chat with you.
- [02:09]
Shahida Bari
Well, I'm really looking forward to talking to you more. Finding Albion is a is a questing book. You set out on a journey over the course of the year, the pagan year, in fact, seeking out an alternative spirit of Britain. And this involves many curious things. It involves engaging with folk song, ancient legends, seasonal rites, mystic stone circles, Celtic and carnival traditions, and at the heart of the book, if I put it this way, is a question which is at a time when debates about Britain and who belongs here or not are fraught, can we draw from the past to find a different, more accepting way to be British? I wondered if we might start with a reading to give our listeners or viewers a sense of what the book is about.
- [03:02]
Zakiya Sewell
Absolutely. And I'll begin at the beginning and with a quote from William Blake. So all things begin and end in Albion's ancient druid rocky shore. I remember the day that the seeds for my quest were sown. It was Sunday, 29th of June, 2008. I know because I still have the ticket for the gig at home, preserved in a wooden box where my most precious artifacts are stored. Its faded brown letters read Pentangle Sweet Child, 40th Anniversary Concert C18. Pentangle were a folk band who rose to fame in the late 60s, known for fusing Britain's age old traditional songs with blues, medieval music and syncopated jazz rhythms. My dad had bought me the ticket as a kind of bonding experience. Things had been difficult at home and music was a balm for us both.
- [03:57]
Shahida Bari
That's a really. It's a very personal beginning, and the book is both personal and intellectual in certain ways. But the journey starts with music, as we realize very quickly. And that's an important thread that runs through the book. You're listening to this folk band called Pentangle and you go on to admit yourself that you are an unlikely person to be found at a Pentangle concert. Why were you there and what did you discover?
- [04:26]
Zakiya Sewell
My dad had the bright idea of taking me there. I still don't exactly know why, but as I kind of, as I say in the start, you know, music was a big part of my life and always has been, continues to be. And so it makes sense that music was the sort of gateway to this alternative world that I'm exploring in the book. But there was something about Pentangle's music that just utterly captivated me and it seemed to transport me to this alternative Britain. Anyone who knows their music will know that it's sort of. It was kind of very much sort of that 1960s flower power, free love, psychedelia kind of moment. And it is. It's sort of both haunting and strange. It kind of uses those old traditional English folk songs that were collected in the century before, but kind of blends them with jazz and with sort of psychedelia and lots of other influences. So there's something about the music that is very magical, draws upon ancient myth. So Something about the music spoke to me. I kind of became obsessed. I kind of downloaded it all as soon as I got home and kept it a secret from my school friends. But it felt like I was communing with this other Britain, this sort of alternative spirit of Britain. And it was the music that kind of kick started my obsession with British folk culture. From bands like Pentangle and people like Shirley Collins and Davey Graham, other kind of people who were part of that folk revival scene of the 1960s. I became interested in these, you know, these ancient myths about Arthur and Morgan le Fay, et cetera, finding out more about the tales of the Druids, these kind of ancient priest tribe who. You kind of hear kind of snatches of stories about who we know used to populate these isles and later the seasonal customs that I, some of which I attend in the book. So, yeah, the music and the pentangle were the sort of the gateway drug, if you like. That kind of got me hooked and I've sort of been an initiate and a follower ever since.
- [06:40]
Shahida Bari
Well, the book might help increase their followers, if anything. The book is called. It's not called Finding Britain, it's called Finding Albion. So tell me where this term comes from and what you intend by it.
- [06:53]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, Albion is the ancient name for Britain. So in some of the kind of earliest written records, ancient Greek geographers describing the island, they refer to it as Albion or, you know, Britain, the. The island formerly known as Albion. And yet it's really difficult to sort of learn much more about it than that. We don't know what the word means. We don't know who the people were that initially spoke it. Perhaps the Greeks made it up. We have no. We really. It's kind of shrouded in mystery. And I think that, that, that idea of this kind of this ancient name, this time before shrouded in Mystery, has sort of, you know, drawn a lot of people in over the centuries. So there are some early stories and myths associated with Albion. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th century cleric who wrote the History of the Kings of Britain, which is one of the first kind of histories, I'll use that word lightly, of Britain. He talks about Albion as a land inhabited by a race of giants who were kind of demonic and, and sinful. And the Trojan hero Brutus arrived on the shores of this island and wiped out this race of giants and sort of colonized the country and renamed it Britain after himself. And there's also another interesting story about someone called, about a Syrian princess called Albina and her 30 sisters. Who were known for their extraordinary beauty and their disobedience, who were banished from their homelands for plotting to murder their husbands and sailed the seas and arrived at this uninhabited island, which Albina, the main sister, named after herself. And they lived in the kind. Of course, yeah, I love the fact that it's sort of. The sisters supposedly live in a kind of feminist utopia, learning to hunt the island's wild animals and sort of becoming self sufficient until they make love with incubi and give birth to this race of demonic giants. But I think obviously both of these stories are fictional, they're mythological, we're not necessarily meant to read them as truth. But I do find it really interesting that in some of these early stories we have Britain as this refuge for outsiders, people arriving from Syria in small boats to start life anew. So that just kind of gives you a glimpse of. It's a very different type of Britain to the Britain that we. That is sort of. That we know, the Britain that is expressed and sort of conjured in our more dominant national myths and symbols. And I see Albion as a kind of alternative spirit of the nation that sort of leaves traces all through our culture, but it's sort of beneath the surface. You have to do a little bit of digging in order to reach it.
- [09:51]
Shahida Bari
I feel like we should have a national Albina Day along with a St. George's Day where we find incubi to hang out with. But after the concert that we started with, you set off seeking out folk artifacts and customs and pagan rites, following the Wheel of the Year. For people who don't know what that is, what is it?
- [10:13]
Zakiya Sewell
So the Wheel of the Year is a cycle of seasonal celebrations. It's largely a kind of a modern invention, sort of 20th century, but it's. But it has its roots in older Celtic traditions. So it marks the equinoxes, the solstices and the midpoints in between. And ultimately it's a kind of. It's an attempt to reconnect with the kind of practices of our pre Christian ancestors who marked, you know, who kind of. Who revered the natural world, who kind of honored the shifts in the year with rituals and customs. Singing, dancing. There's a lot of folklore attached to each of those moments, but really it's. And so it's a kind of modern phenomenon ultimately, where neo pagans have tried to sort of resurrect the traditions of the past.
- [11:11]
Shahida Bari
You say in the book that you call yourself a pagan or that you've been calling yourself a pagan for a while, but you add, but mostly tongue in cheek. So what do you take pagan to mean? And why tongue in cheek for you?
- [11:26]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, there are lots of things that appeal to me about paganism. You know, I'm kind of interested in spirituality. I like the fact that here is a spiritual path that is all about honoring the kind of the power of nature, that there's no kind of dogma, there's no kind of notion of sin, there is no book that you must follow. It's a very kind of personal practice that's. That connects, that is. That is sort of imagined in. That is sort of. It's a very personal practice that draws upon the traditions of the past. At least what we can know about what, you know, pre Christian communities were doing in Britain and elsewhere. But it's also. It's a little bit. It's open, it's porous. And I think that that always appealed to me and also the fact that it kind of echoed some of the traditional spiritual practices that I'd seen or that I kind of knew about in the Caribbean. So it had this way of sort of connecting me with Britain, a kind of spirituality rooted in British soil, but also that connected me with my Caribbean ancestors, where, you know, the kind of the natural world and the world of spirits and ancestors is worshipped and is honored in ritual. So it had this lovely way of connecting the two. And yet at the same time, I'm not a practicing pagan. So, you know, it's sort of, you know, I'm a light touch pagan. And basically, yeah, I'm by no means a serious practicing pagan. It's a light touch. Paganism.
- [13:03]
Shahida Bari
Pagan light. Okay, you start the book at Glastonbury on the spring equinox. And many people have a notion of who goes to Glastonbury for the festival, but who is there for the equinox and what are they seeking?
- [13:17]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, it's a mixed bunch. It was a sort of raggle taggle bunch. When I went up there in research for the book, surprisingly, it was more diverse than I thought it would be because I've been to quite a few of these kinds of rites and rituals. And it's usually you have a mixture of sort of, you know, people who look very, very kind of deep in the pagan faith in robes and amulets and, you know, ladies with kind of floral wreaths and people ringing bells and, you know, people perhaps who are people, you might say are kind of deep in the woo woo. But then there were lots of other kind of ordinary looking people around as well in their kind of waterproof, their waterproofs and their. Their hiking boots who perhaps you wouldn't expect to see at a kind of cosmic pagan ritual. But it was also lovely to see other people like me. You know, there were a handful of black people, Asian, mixed race, you know, people of color from all different walks of life there as well. And I think that was. That was quite surprising to me because for a long time I felt quite al. In my fascination with ancient Britain. And I think that people are beginning to recognize these points of connection that I kind of touched on. The fact that actually when you kind of boil down to it, sort of climbing up a big hill at six o' clock in the morning on the spring equinox and, you know, breathing together, perhaps singing a song together, leaving a few offerings, you know, at the top of the hill, you know, these are kind of simple ritualistic acts that actually connect people in Britain with people all over the world. And I think that perhaps other people like me are starting to kind of are yearning to sort of make those connections, you know, for those of us with roots here and elsewhere.
- [15:06]
Shahida Bari
Well, you say that Britain, it seems, is in a folk frenzy. Is it? And what accounts for this folk renaissance?
- [15:16]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, as I mentioned, for a long time I sort of thought I was just kind of very. I thought I was strange. I thought I was just a kind of lone wolf folk weirdo. Back in 2020, I made a series called My Albion, on which this book is based. And at the time I was still kind of a lone wolf in my folk exploration and fascination. Since then, Britain has been caught up in a kind of another folk revival. And we can see this through the kind of plethora of new folk traditions that are popping up all across the country. There have been numerous sort of, you know, trendy magazine articles and even the Guardian and the Times and, you know, kind of heralding the renaissance of this new folk wave and people asking why, why and why now? You know, what is it about this moment that there's many young and young people? And that's the thing, that this revival is largely happening online. Social media is a big part of it. You know, people sort of turning up at different folk customs around country and sort of posting them on Instagram and they're kind of. It's a kind of aesthetic rev. It's in a. It's kind of a revival of the aesthetics of folk as well. You've got magazines like Weird Walk popping up. You've got. You had Morris dancing at the Brit Awards. You know, it's it's sort of, yes, somehow, you know, something that was for a long time seen as deathly uncool is finding its way into, into mainstream culture. And I think that it speaks to a yearning that a lot of people have for, you know, it connects to this wider yearning, I think, for alternative ways of making sen. Sense of who we are. Our place in the world, you know, connects to people becoming more interested in astrology.
- [16:56]
Shahida Bari
And I love that you go Morris dancing on May Day in Oxford and, and you, you describe it or you liken it to break dancing or voguing. And I have to tell you, Zaki, I wasn't convinced. But then I thought actually you put your finger on what is at a kind of element of embarrassment about folk culture, that it's, that it's twee. But actually in your book you make a case for it being cool, that the people that you find engaging with these rituals are deeply cool, actually like you.
- [17:31]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, also, I think that embarrassment is there and it's kind of important. It's kind of. And that's sort of what I, that's part of what draws. Draws me to these folk, you know, traditions and customs that they're so opposite to the vision of Britishness that is, it kind of exported, that is conjured through our kind of more traditional stories and symbols of, you know, Britain is this kind of bastion of enlightened culture and civilization and imperial and military might. You know, that actually when you turn up at a Morris dancing event and you see these kind of lovely blokes, you probably hand stitched, these kind of flamboyant costumes jumping around with, you know, tankards full of ale, you think this is eccentric, this is mischievous, this is playful, it's kind of humbling. And I, and, and it's so much more appealing to me than the kind of bombast of, of, you know, Rule Britannia or another, you know, another kind of dominant national symbol like that. So I think, yes, it is, it is cool. There are lots of kind of trendy young hipsters and younger people reclaiming folk culture and kind of making it cool. But all. But I, I'm also, I'm. I think it's also important to embrace the embarrassingness of it because I think it teaches us something. I think it reveals to us that there is this other England, there is this other Britain beneath the surface, and that should be cherished.
- [19:05]
Shahida Bari
A very important element of your book is your own mixed heritage. Your Welsh father and your Caribbean mother from the Grendel Islands of Caracou. And those histories Are surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, as we discover in your book, connected in folk traditions. Tell me about that. I think carnival in particular is the carnival in Notting Hill that you attend reveals something completely fascinating.
- [19:29]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, this is actually one of. The chapter about the carnival was actually my favorite chapter to write. It felt like I discovered all of these incredible connections between British folk culture and Caribbean folk culture that I had no idea about. So I know that on the island where my grandparents are from, Karaku, it's so small that during the colonial era, a lot of folk traditions that were suppressed elsewhere were kind of able to survive and have been passed down. So on that island, there's a tradition of kind of fiddle music that brings together kind of Scottish reels with West African drums. There is a version of a mummer's play which is a kind of type of traveling folk theater that happens in England in winter. So it's this type of folk traveling folk drama that happens across the country here in Britain, but. But it was sort of exported to the colonies, and in Caricou, it's called Shakespeare Mass. So I knew that it happened in Karaku, but I wasn't aware of similar traditions around the world. I wasn't aware of similar traditions across the Caribbean. When it comes to the carnival itself, the story of Claudia Jones, the incredible Trinidadian political activist, who he started the first carnival in the late 50s, is the story that's most well known. But what people don't know is that the first carnival to happen in Notting Hill as a kind of parade around the streets of West London was very much influenced and sort of born out of the tradition of the kind of fetes and fairs, the ye olde English fairs, that used to happen across London in, you know, from the 12th century onwards. And the carnival in Trinidad actually started off as a form of entertainment for the white planter class, a tradition which the. A tradition which the enslaved and the free people of color were completely exiled from. So here, just in the history of Carnival, we've kind of got this kind of entangled history, this kind of toing and froing, this exchange of culture and tradition that is not straightforward. And I think that in that sense, it's a very useful sort of artifact for thinking about our identity and heritage in Britain.
- [21:47]
Shahida Bari
Yes. And I suppose the key is that what one inherits doesn't have to stay the same. It can be altered and transformed by your part in it. I think one of the difficulties or the tangles that your book is wrangling with is the idea that the English in particular. I won't include the Scots and the Welsh necessarily, but the English in particular are caught between a version of English culture that is either a bit embarrassing and twee or aggressive and thuggish. And you're asking, how do we get out of that? And I wonder, I wonder what your answer is ultimately to that.
- [22:32]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, I think there's a lot more to kind of the Englishness revealed through my kind of quest for these older stories and symbols was much more than a kind of embarrassing twee Englishness. I also discovered the kind of radical histories. And in one of the chapters, I'm looking at a song, an old folk song called the Rufford Park Poachers, which speaks of a clash between poachers and gamekeepers that happened in Nottinghamshire in 1851. And as with all of the traditions and customs that I sort of look at in the book, you sort of have to commune with them. You have to kind of dig beneath the surface and unpick in order to sort of absorb the wisdom within or to kind of get it to get. In order to sort of absorb the story that they're really trying to tell you. In the case of this song, it kind of opened up this history of. Of radicalism and protest in Britain that I read that I never was taught at, that I was never taught at school. This particular clash happened at a time known as the long affray, where ordinary working people in the countryside were fighting against enclosure and the stripping away of their rights to hunt rabbits or whatever they needed in order to supplement their meager diets. I also kind of discovered other acts of rebellion, resistance, like, you know, Kett's Rebellion and peasant revolt, the Luddites who burnt down mills and destroyed the. Destroyed machinery in revolt against their factory owners. So this, to me, was a real kind of glimpse of an alternative Englishness that wasn't the thuggishness of, nor the cute, embarrassing to some folk customs, but a kind of radical history that I think a lot of people could really find inspiring.
- [24:39]
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- [25:32]
Shahida Bari
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- [26:00]
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- [26:30]
Zakiya Sewell
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- [26:42]
Zakiya Sewell
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Zakiya Sewell
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- [27:06]
Shahida Bari
The radical history is really interesting because I think one of the the things you're arguing is that folk culture is a form of counterculture. And then when we think about the circumstances in which countercultures have arisen, you've just given an example from the 1850s, but most familiar to many people will be the 1960s. I wonder if that begs the question that if we're undergoing a folk renaissance now, or folk frenzy as you put it, what is it about our current circumstances that are giving rise to this
- [27:46]
Zakiya Sewell
well you know, we're living through extremely trying times for many different reasons. And I think the kind of this emergent counterculture, this folk culture, is sort of offering alternatives on many different levels. So we're living in the midst of a climate crisis, all this kind of ecological uncertainty. People. The idea of then sort of reconnecting a seasonal cycle to honoring and marking those kind of moments in the year of transition and change, I think is sort of offering people a kind of a grounding, a kind of a way to feel more connected to the natural world as it is sort of being destroyed. And I think that's a really important aspect for people. Obviously, politically, we're living in deeply uncertain times. The far right is on the rise. There is kind of the global conflicts, money. You know, we're living in a cost of living crisis.
- [28:47]
Shahida Bari
So many reasons.
- [28:48]
Zakiya Sewell
Yeah. I think that people are feeling increasingly isolated and alone. And also, I mean, one of the other things in the book, you know, the rise in paganism is sort of corresponding with mainstream religion, becoming less and less sort of viable for people or kind of less and less appealing to people. So. But with that, there is a kind of void of meaning. There is. You know, it doesn't take away the yearning that we have for stories that help us to understand who we are, where we come from and why we're here. And I think that, you know, turning to the wisdom of those who've gone before us, our ancestors who expressed their kind of way of life or their beliefs in old folk songs or in dances, in ritual acts, I think that there's something grounding about returning to that wisdom in a time of deep instability and uncertainty.
- [29:42]
Shahida Bari
Yes. I feel that when I read your book. I'm persuaded by it when I read your book. But there are also moments where you are very candid, I think, in contending with the checkered past of the folk tradition itself, which you say has and continues to be appropriated by far right sympathisers, but which also has a history, parts of which lend itself to exclusionary, racist political positions. I think you say there is a relationship between fascism and folk culture.
- [30:14]
Zakiya Sewell
Absolutely. And I think perhaps when I set off on my quest, I hope that I would discover this kind of utopian Britain. Right. The kind of the magical, enchanted Britain that I heard in Pentangle's music at 15. And the reality, you know, and we all perhaps have a yearning for that escape, that fantasy, in a sense, it's what kind of. Of ties my own quest for Albion or my own kind of visions of Albion. With the far right, you know, this fantasy time before that we can return to. But the reality. The reality is that place does not exist. And that my journey, my kind of quest for Albion, rather than being an escape from those knottier, divisive, more exclusionary aspects of our past here in Britain, actually kind of brought me straight into the. Into the middle of them. You know, Cecil Sharp, who was the kind of perhaps most famous English folk collector and who's kind of held up as a hero by many, was deeply racist. And in fact, the way in which he collected folk customs was, of course, influenced by his beliefs about white English people being the superior race. Ultimately, you know, I came across the use of blackface in Morris dancing, which some morris dance has. Claim has its roots in kind of disguise, you know, going back to the 15th century, but going back to the 16th century, but in fact is deeply entwined with the minstrelsy craze of the 19th and 20th century. So Albion is no escape from these dark aspects of our past. In fact, what I hope and what my kind of mission, I suppose, is to say we cannot escape these dark aspects of who we are and who we've been in Britain. What we need are stories that can hold that darkness without being entirely eclipsed by it. You know, we need to be able to see the magic, see the kind of hopeful stories of radical activism, and yet not use those to run away from our dark imperial past. And the only way forward is a truthful, honest way forward that can actually hold both of those truths and both of those realities at once. And I think that that's what we're missing. We've kind of got the story of Britain that is all about kind of successful success, monarchy, military. That really doesn't appeal to a lot of people. And in recent years, there's an incredible work done to unveil and make visible those dark histories of empire that actually counter that vision. But there's no middle ground. And I hope that my book can sort of offer a bit of that.
- [32:46]
Shahida Bari
Let's talk about Wales, your Welsh heritage. And my partner is Scottish, and I've just come back from Scotland this weekend, so maybe we could include the Scots in this. But it seems to me that you. The Celtic traditions seem to be less embarrassing. It's easier to claim to be Welsh or Scottish, and many of Welsh and Scottish people claim to be Welsh and Scottish rather than British. And I wonder why that is. What's going on there?
- [33:13]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, I think for a long time, as kind of a kind of independent sense of Englishness wasn't necessarily kind of cultivated or valued in the same way that it was for the Welsh and the Scots. And that's because Welsh national identity and Scottish national identity were in many ways sort of defined in opposition to Englishness or in sort of. Yeah. Were defined in opposition to Englishness, with England being the kind of greater dominant sort of colonial power within the nation of Great Britain. So, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Welsh national identity, the sort of. The kind of. The symbols and the stories of Welshness as we know them today were kind of consciously constructed. You know, there was a great kind of flourishing of national consciousness in Wales, where they kind of drew very deliberately upon their kind of older stories and older symbols in order to sort of cultivate a sense of Welshness that could sort of hold its own in the face of English oppression, whereas the English sort of perhaps never felt the need to do that because they were the greater power. And Englishness sort of. And British sort of. Britishness became the English project in a way. And we see that in the way that many of our British symbols. We see that in the kind of interchangeability of Englishness and Britishness and in the fact that many of our kind of British. British symbols are actually, when you boil it down, English ones. So I think that that is one of the reasons that actually Englishness can be sometimes quite difficult to locate in a way that Welshness and Scottishness are not.
- [34:58]
Shahida Bari
Yes. And it feels like it's a continuing problem, but I think there's so much to learn from the Welsh and the Scottish, aren't there? In that case, towards the end of the book, you head further north. You're in York for Samhain when the nights are drawing in. And it's getting col. Delighted to read about the ivory bangle lady whose story I've cherished for a long time. And you're thinking about her in York because her. I think her remains are there for people who don't know that story. Will you share it with them?
- [35:30]
Zakiya Sewell
The ivory bangle lady, she was a skeleton who was discovered in the early 1900s in a back garden in York. And that's where I kind of go to try and commune with her spirit in the book. She was found in an area with a lot, you know, in an area of Roman burials. She was found with sumptuous grave goods, you know, these kind of gorgeous bangles made of ivory and jet from York. And, you know, she was a woman of high status. But what surprised the archaeologists when they kind of did later tests on her bones was that she was most likely of mixed racial origin. She had roots in North Africa, much like the Roman emperor Septa Septimius Severus who lived and ruled in York. But she had. There was evidence of both black and white ancestral traits which completely kind of explodes our image of Roman Britain. You know, it wasn't just this one North African emperor, which has kind of been the kind of story that has been told again and again. Actually, when they kind of conducted analysis on other burials in that site, they found that up to 10% of them had roots in Africa. So here we have this potentially mixed race woman living in Roman York of high status. And it just completely challenges so many of the kind of dominant and exclusionary narratives about the British past being kind of exclusively white. So, yes, for me, and I think for many others, she kind of represents a kind of an ancestor that we can all connect to. You know, there were people like us here a long, long time, and they had status and they had wealth and they were respected. And we can tell that from the way that this ivory wrangle lady was buried. So a hopeful story.
- [37:22]
Shahida Bari
Yeah, there's lots of hope in your book, I think, as well as anxiety and I think also a real sense of your affection for many of these rituals and traditions. And I wonder what you would say to the idea that there is a kind of nostalgia here in folk culture for a past that no longer exists. This is a romantic, romanticized idea of culture. I feel like you would have a robust rejoinder to that.
- [37:48]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, I think that this is absolutely a culture rooted in the traditions of the past. But as sort. As I sort of discovered through the writing of the book and through talking to kind of contemporary folk practitioners, it is absolutely a living tradition. You know, that there are new folk customs being dreamed up all of the time, either ones that are being revived from older customs and practices or completely new traditions in our own. I spoke to one group of people who were sort of blending sound system culture with pagan ritual. And I just thought that that is a symbol of modern Britain. Folk is all around us. It is not just the kind of Morris dancer, you know, dancing in the way that his ancestors did. Folk can be a group of people getting together in London and, you know, just like creating a ritual of their own.
- [38:39]
Shahida Bari
Something I'm gonna have to think of. I think that's my challenge. I mean, I want to come back to close, to come back to music. You started with music and dance, actually. I think you write that the human need to dance and Sing and be merry together is as old as time. It is a fundamental aspect of who we are and is vital for our well being both as communities and individuals. And I love that. But I was also thinking, you are invested in these acts of dancing and storytelling and ritual. How do you get buy in? How do you get others to invest in this as you have?
- [39:20]
Zakiya Sewell
Well, yeah, Morris dancing is not. I'm not out here trying to suggest that everybody should start morris dancing. You know, I understand that folk culture is not for everyone. And for me this is one kind of seam of our heritage and culture that I've been particularly drawn to, that I have sort of sort of digging that I've sort of started digging at in order to sort of unveil these alternative visions. But I kind of totally respect that. That might not be the same for everyone, but at the end of the book I kind of invite readers to sort of go forth on their own quest. And that quest doesn't necessarily have to be one into folk culture, but rather it's an invitation to sort of seek to sort of reflect and think about, well, what are those, what are the aspects of Britishness, of our past, of our culture that are kind of magical, enchanted to me. Where should I start digging in order to, to find kind of artifacts or different ways of thinking about who we are here that could sort of offer hope, you know, that can offer a counter vision to the extremely powerful negative vision being conjured currently by the far right. And perhaps for others it will be ritual and you know, older stories. But I totally accept that other people will have entirely different visions. And I think that that is what is important. I think a collective endeavor is. I think that what is needed is a kind of collective conjuring. It's a kind of collective work that is required that all of us who kind of reject the exclusionary aspects and visions of Britishness that are so dominant. Well, okay, we need to do some work to find out what the alternatives are. This is my path, this is my personal quest. But I hope that others feel inspired to sort of go on that journey of their own and discover which aspects of Britishness give their them hope.
- [41:15]
Shahida Bari
Thank you, Zakiya. It's a really enchanting book and I wish you great luck on your continuing quest.
- [41:22]
Zakiya Sewell
Thank you.
- [41:22]
Shahida Bari
That was Zaki as Yule, author of Finding Albion, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. I'm Shahidabari. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us.
- [41:34]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Volpatto and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and if you'd like to join us at any future events, you can see our full Events program and buy tickets@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [42:14]
Zakiya Sewell
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Zakiya Sewell
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