Why we must continue to remember the ill-treatment of David Oluwale - Max Farrar

Her grandma was so indignant, and so upset, that for many years Carole thought David must be a relative. Carole and her family are excited to be with us today as we open Hibiscus Rising, by Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA in memory of David Oluwale.

David Oluwale arrived in Hull as a stowaway from Lagos, Nigeria in 1949. His friend, the late Gabriel Adams, told me that he and David were so poor they earned a penny at the Lagos golf club for each ball that had been lost by the British colonials. As British citizens, Gabe and David served only a month in Armley Jail for failing to buy a ticket on the cargo ships that brought them to Hull.

Gabe said he had a good life here in Leeds, but David became a shadow of his former self after eight years in Menston psychiatric hospital. He lived in temporary accommodation from 1961 and then slept rough in the city centre. After another spell in hospital, from 1968 onwards he was mercilessly harassed and beaten by two officers of Leeds Police, Inspector Ellerker and Sergeant Kitching.

I talked with Carole about this at the Nice Up event we organised in August at The Tetley Art Centre, where young Leeds people of African Heritage from The Music House performed in concert and spoke of their responses to David Oluwale’s life here in Leeds in the 1950s and 60s.

Carole, who works in the NHS, came to realise that her grandma identified with David because, as an Irish Catholic immigrant to Leeds, she too had experienced severe discrimination. Carole can remember as a child the hiss of contempt when a neighbour called her a Fenian b*stard. She too feels the pain of the Oluwale story deep in her heart.

The David Oluwale Memorial Association (DOMA) is a charity registered in 2012 which started as a working party in the Community Partnerships Office at Leeds Met (now Beckett) University in 2007.

It was set in motion by Caryl Phillips, the internationally acclaimed writer who was born in St Kitts and grew up in Leeds. Leeds Met’s Cultural Studies School hosted Phillips speaking about his 2007 book Foreigners: Three English Lives.

Oluwale’s is the the third life in that book, and Phillips, who had visited the area of Venice that is dedicated to its expelled Jewish population, said there should be a memorial to David Oluwale in Leeds.

In my Community Partnerships role I formed a working party which included Arthur France, MBE from the West Indian Centre, and Dr Hector Abiye-Goma from the Nigerian Community Leeds organisation, Martin Patterson from St George’s Crypt and representatives from the offices of both Bishops of Leeds.

The “memorial” idea became a memory garden featuring a sculpture — and we agreed with Mahalia France’s idea that it should be attractive to children.

Cllr Keith Wakefield, Leader of Leeds City Council at the time, endorsed these suggestions and said it should be in the new Aire Park that he and City Architect John Thorpe were planning. Leeds City Council has backed us from the start.

It’s taken 15 years to implement the Hibiscus Rising sculpture that the world-class British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA has designed for David Oluwale.

It was the big thinking of the Leeds artist Pippa Hale that led us to reach out to Yinka, and he quickly accepted DOMA’s brief that the sculpture should express the colour, vitality, joy and sheer hard work that migrants bring to the city of Leeds.

Thanks to huge support for LEEDS2023 Year of Culture, Yinka’s hibiscus flower has been opened in the Meadow Lane section of Aire Park for two days. It is almost ten metres high, painted in the brilliant colours and designs originating in Indonesia and embraced across West Africa that are Yinka’s signature.

As you cross the new David Oluwale footbridge you will gasp in awe. You will see how the disgraceful story of David’s exclusion is promoting a renewed commitment in the city to eradicating the afflictions he endured: racism, mental ill-health, homelessness and police malpractice.

DOMA has always utilised the arts in remembering David and campaigning for social justice. Leeds’s Peepal Tress Press is about to publish a follow-up to our 2016 anthology. This one is titled Oluwale Now. Edited by Emily Zobel Marshall and Sai Murray, it includes poetry, prose and artworks reflecting on David’s story.

Max Farrar is co-secretary of the David Oluwale Memorial Association.