........... Since Oluwale's violent death in 1969 many have warned against dwelling on his life. They have suggested that Leeds must let go of this painful episode from the city's past in order to move on. Others, however, have always felt differently. A number of artists and authors have revisited Oluwale’s ordeal, and the memorial garden now being es-tablished by the David Oluwale Memorial Association is offering other ways of understanding past injustice, belong-ing, and the future of our city. On both sides of the Atlantic recent events are now vindicating these efforts. National responses to the EU asylum crisis are reproducing Oluwale’s institutional mistreatment on a mass scale, while, in the US, the Black Lives Matter movement has revealed that the brutal policework he faced daily belongs neither to the past nor Yorkshire exclusively. Oluwale matters now, then, and not only in Leeds but because his ordeal reverberates through institutional abuses now occurring throughout the US and EU. 

 

 

Hosted in partnership with DOMA and the University of Leeds, Oluwale Now brings together those whose garden, art and literary work has (like the famous graffiti on Leeds’ Chapeltown Road) collectively acted to Remember Oluwale. An academic panel featuring Kasia Boddy and George McKay will reflect on gardening, freedom and memory, while our gardening theme will then be extended as the acclaimed artist Corinne Silva presents both her short film on Oluwale Wandering Abroad and her new work on gardening in conflict zones, Garden State. Our city’s preeminent literary artist Caryl Phillips will reflect on his work excavating Oluwale’s life in Leeds, and the Guardian journalist Gary Younge will reflect on police conduct and his extraordinary coverage of the Black Lives Matter campaign. Here we ask why popular narratives of racial progress seem so powerless in the face of an old and all too familiar logic in which images of racial dehumanisation are again being used to justify acts of racist violence. Out of Oluwale’s or-deal, for all its horrors, did forms of community resistance emerge which we might rekindle in the present crisis? What might we learn from the antiracist activism of the past, and how might we reclaim the collective energy of outrage? How can we use such lessons, harnessing them in a contemporary moment of rising homelessness and destitution, ongo-ing sexual exploitation and increasing mental distress, and anti-immigrant hatred? Oluwale Now offers a moment of local and global connection, a chance to take stock of his life and death amid a contemporary crisis in which the basic human rights of so many are again being denied.