Secular Sankofa Podcast: Black Humanist Voices from the Association of Black Humanists

Apples, Ancestors, and Anti-Fascists Marches, Akua's Amazing Life in Activism

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"Live out those principles of universal sisterhood and brotherhood and come together with your fellow human beings in a secular manner to make the world a better place for every single one of us seven billion. We are all of us, brothers and sisters... connected through our humanity and not through some superhuman force." - Akua Rugg

In this powerful conversation, lifelong activist, educator and humanist Akua Rugg reflects on her remarkable journey from Nigeria to Britain — from growing up in a deeply religious household to becoming part of the Race Today Collective, one of the most influential movements in Black British history.

At 79, Akua shares how her early experiences with colonial Christianity, racism, and resistance shaped her lifelong pursuit of justice, equality, and humanist values. She speaks about her work alongside figures such as CLR James and the Black Parents Movement, her memories of the New Cross Fire and the Black People’s Day of Action, and how humanism continues to guide her activism today.

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🎶 Music: Icy by Jeff Kaale

Audrey Simmons:

Hello everyone, welcome to the Secular Sankofa, the Association of Black Humanists podcast, where we speak boldly, think freely, and live consciously. In this space, we'll have real conversations about race, belief, power, and liberation from the black and godless point of view. My name is Audrey Simmons, and I'm your host for today. And I am joined today by my colleagues Lola Tonobu and Clive Arude. We are Association of Black Humanists. Now, we of the Association of Black Humanists like to start our podcasts and our gatherings with a libation. So for those of you who don't know, it's an African tradition of coming together, a kind of rich unified ritual. I am going to start that libration. It is usually a call and response. But as we're on the radio, what I suggest you do is I will say both parts. So when I say Unbuntu, I hope that all of you out there will be responding with, because of you, we are here. I pour libation an acknowledgement of the great migration out of Africa. Unbuntu because of you, we are here. I pour libation, an acknowledgement of our forefathers, our ancestors. Their DNA runs through our bodies. Their knowledge and their trauma is still within us today. Unbuntu because of you, we are here. I pour libation for all the sentient life and acknowledge that they too are the caretakers of this land. I acknowledge that they give us life and balance the universe to make it complete. Unbuntu because of you, we are here. I pour libation for the motherland Africa and all that she has been through. Her land is rich and her people are strong. They have endured much strife, but are still here, fighting, growing, living. Unbuntu, because of you, we are here. I pull libation in celebration of all that we have been, all that we are, and all that we will be in the future. Unbuntu because of you, we are here. Lola.

Lola Tinubu:

Today we are joined by Akua Rugg, a lifelong activist and a humanist. She was born in Nigeria and raised in Britain from the age of six. Akua went on to become a teacher. She's a voice in the struggle for justice. She was a member of the Race Today Collective. The Race Today Collective was part of an alliance of four black organizations: the Black Parents Movement, the Black Youth Movement, the Race Today Collective, and the Bradford Black Collective. Throughout her life, EQA has stayed true to her principles of equality, compassion, and raising. As part of her activism, she was a teacher in Black Supplementary School, Marcos Gabby School, at Shepherd's Bush. She was an administrative assistant to Professor Gus John, the director of Family Advice Center in Manchester, and she became trustee of George Padmont Institute. At 79, Ekua continues to inspire as both an activist and an outspoken atheist humanist. We are so honored to hear her story from childhood influences to her years of activism and beyond.

Akua Rugg:

It was a transition taking me from my old life in Africa to my new life in Europe. And I remember very clearly the smell in the corridors, and that smell was apples. Of course, in Nigeria, we didn't eat apples. We ate porpo mango and guava. So that smell and taste were so distinctive to me. And then the other thing is you would have the cabin crew in their starched shirts and shorts catering to our every need because we were traveling in first class. But in fact, they wore exactly the same uniform as our stewards back home in Nigeria. So there was a familiarity, but of course, they had white skins. And I remembered they used to entertain us all the time with descoids and also push us on swings. So you'd swing out. It was almost like if you were swinging out over the ocean. But of course, at that time, I wasn't afraid of the idea of white men in sailing ships of the Atlantic. And I wasn't aware of the Atlantic that I was crossing having any sinister connotations.

Lola Tinubu:

That's so deep that you know it's a bit difficult to want to move on from there. But what kind of household did you grow up in? Were your parents religious?

Akua Rugg:

Oh, ultra religious. My mother's grandfather had been a clergyman in Banjul in Bathers Gambia, and my great-grandfather had been captured, put into the hold of a slave ship, but 10 days into the middle passage, he was rescued by white men who, of course, he saw as his saviors, and these white men were Christians, and he married my great-grandmother, who was a domestic in the local mission school, which meant that her children had Christian names, they dropped their Yoruba names, and so my father and his siblings all went to the CMS schools, CMS being Christian Missionary Society, and of course, so did all of me, myself, and my siblings. And then the other thing, when we arrived in England, we went to an Anglican British public school. Every weekday morning, started with a Bible reading. And then on Sundays, if you were confirmed, you would go to church three times a day. It was a Christianity on steroids.

Lola Tinubu:

And what were your family values and traditions, and how did this shape you as a child in Britain?

Akua Rugg:

The central value in my family was for people to have an education, because as a chattel slave, you were not even considered a human being. So education was seen as a way of reclaiming your humanity. But this, of course, was a Western education, but of course, the education meant that you had a means to amass and accumulate resources. So that's what I would say that first of all, education was the number one priority, but we were also taught to have respect, especially for elders. So that, for example, we were not allowed, we had to respect greatly the domestic staff who were older. So the cook was Baba Cook, no way you were going to call him by his first name. We weren't allowed to ring bells to summon servants, and we were taught that to be, how can I say, to be upstanding and upright. You didn't steal, you didn't rob, you didn't indulge in alcohol excessively, and if you were a girl, you kept yourself pure a virgin until you married. So it was a thing of first of all, education was a priority, and afterwards you lived an upstanding and respectable life.

Lola Tinubu:

And did you ever feel tension between Nigerian cultural expectations and life in the UK?

Akua Rugg:

Yes, because I felt that white children, my peers, had a very easy life. They weren't under the lash of having to do well at school. And the other thing, they were very free. I was astonished at how cheeky they were to adults. If I had said some of the things my white peers said, I wouldn't have lived to tell the tale. And for example, if, say, a white child got 60% in their end-of-term exams, their parents would congratulate them. My goodness, if you got 98% in exam, my father would want to know where the 2% had gone that you were slacking. So we were under enormous pressure to succeed academically. And I just felt that my the white children had a very easy life compared to ourselves.

Lola Tinubu:

Yeah. Audrey.

Audrey Simmons:

Thank you. That is so interesting, that journey, that big those beginnings. Now I want to just ask you about your path to activism. How did you first become involved with the Race Today collective? And what drew you to that mission?

Akua Rugg:

Well, Audrey, to tell you the truth, I hadn't realized it, but in the 1930s, my father, his sister Stella Thomas, and his brother Peter Thomas were all members of the League of Colored People, which was the British version of the NAACP. And they had been involved in pan-Africanism and in anti-colonial struggles. My auntie Stella Thomas very famously called out Lord Lugard himself of Nigeria at a public meeting, called him out for his patronizing and disrespectful attitude towards Africans. And also, Audrey, don't forget a Nigerian born in my era, just after the war, when colonies were being decolonized, imbibed politics with them at with their mother's milk at their father's knee. My father taught politics morning, noon, and night. And I was very surprised that white people, A, seemed so apolitical, and B, that politicians were considered to be respectable people. I never heard anything from my father except for how um corrupt, venal, and usually illiterate Nigerian politicians were. And because my father was uh Tafawa Balewa's most senior judge, I was very immersed in the world of politics. Oh, and another thing, when I was 13, I read Anne Frank's diary and I saw incredible parallels between her life as a so-called assimilated Jew and my life as a so-called assimilated African, to all intents and purposes, no different from my white schoolmates. And I thought, hmm, I see. One minute you're sitting down eating your shredded wheat and poached eggs, and the next minute you're starving in an extermination camp. So I became completely anti-fascist. So I started even before I joined Race Today, I was a teacher in a black supplementary school fighting against discrimination of children in the educational system there. And also I joined a feminist collective to look after, to fight for the reproductive rights of women. And also in Manchester, together with a young Caribbean woman called Pochi, we started an organization called Daughters of Harriet Tubman, and we had a zine called Wap and Sister, where we took local news, we had Caribbean and African recipes, and everybody contributed to see what was going on. I was in my mid-twenties then to see what was happening to young black women in Manchester. So I was already primed, I was looking for a political organization that shared my values. And I found that in Race Today. And I think that before I joined Race Today, I had just been doing political activity praxis, but without an underlying theoretical base. And as the mentor of Race Today was CLR James. So therefore, to have a mentor like that meant you were given this theoretical framework that was based on Marxist theory. And the young people who had set up Race Today were highly political. They were members of the Black Unity and Freedom Party, which was a Maoist organization, and of course the Black Panthers, which was Marxist. So when I met them, I felt a bit like when I met people from the ABH, my tribe.

Audrey Simmons:

Thank you for that. I'm just thinking, can you recall a moment or a campaign that you were involved in Race Today that has Earth had a lasting impact on the Black community, especially in the UK?

Akua Rugg:

I think that as everybody in the main business of Race Today was producing the campaigning fighting journal, Race Today, which was produced for 15 years with something like 106 editions. But one of the things which was an abiding principle was that we just couldn't work on a magazine and think of ourselves as being journalists. We had to belong to a mass organization. And so we belonged to the black parents movement, and the younger ones belonged to the black youth movement. And one of the campaigns, and the oh, and the other thing is we couldn't just be pronounced as journalists. We had to belong to a mass organization. So older people like me became members of the black parents movement, and the younger people became members of the black youth movement. And everybody in Race Today was a member of either the black parents movement or the black youth movement. And one of the campaigns that the black youth movement and the black parents movement spearheaded was the campaign to get justice for the bereaved families and friends of the New Cross massacre, where 13 young black people were killed because the house in which they were living, and in fact it was a birthday party, was firebombed by the National Front. And everybody, every member of Race Today became involved in the organization of the Black People's Day of Action in 1981. And I think that my involvement as a member of Race Today and Race Today's involvement as members of the younger ones, the Black Youth Movement or the Black Parents Movement really made a huge difference to the political climate in Britain. People could see the government, the general population, that the black community would come together and demand their civil rights. And for me, the Black People's Day of Action was the prime example of black people coming together and fighting for their civil rights in this country.

Audrey Simmons:

Thank you, Akua. I remember it well. I'm old enough to remember those days. I'm gonna hand over to Clive now, who's going to ask you some questions.

Clive Aruede:

Thank you, Audrey, and uh thanks, Icoa. You have really lit up this podcast, and um you actually take me back a bit because I too came on a boat, on a ship from Nigeria, and I remember when we went through a place called the Bay of Biscay, how rough the weather was. I don't know if that was the same for you, but anyway, I can't forget those days. So now back to your storyline. With your parents' religious background, did you ever grow up religious yourself?

Akua Rugg:

I think the problem was that my school was a church school, it was an Anglican school. Every five minutes we were doing something religious. For example, we started every morning with a Bible reading. So all the children would come together, we'd read a passage from the Bible, and then the matron would give some kind of explanation from it. So I go from Bible reading, then to the morning service at school, and on Sundays, if you were confirmed, first of all, you get up, you go to early morning communion, then you would go to morning church, and then in the evening you'd have another church service. So this for me was overkill. And the other thing is, I found the school very racist in its practices, so I could see a disjoint between what this Anglican school preached. For example, every Sunday night at the evening service, which was held in the school hall, the morning service, you went to a church in the town. We'd have a missionary who would be telling all the white girls how naive and how stupid Africans were. Now, I and my sisters were beating all the white children academically. Yes, we were beating them on the sports field. So we were a real force amongst our peers. And then on Sunday, here was this person coming and saying how stupid Africans were, which completely contradicted what our peers could see as actually living Africans. We were very academic, come prize giving, we'd be trotting across the stage to collect academic prizes. And in fact, our white peers were actually very fed up with us. So they were really glad when they went to the evening church service to find the, and it was usually a missionary telling them how stupid Africans were. I decided that I found white Christians very hypocritical and very racist.

Clive Aruede:

Thank you so much, Ikua. We just have one last question, if you like, and Lola will take you through that. So over to you, Lola.

Lola Tinubu:

I want to ask, as a black atheist humanist, have you faced challenges about being open about your atheism within African or Caribbean communities?

Akua Rugg:

Oh, yes, my family were very tedious about going to church. In Nigeria, everybody went off to Lagos Cathedral. And so I could see that the Christian practice was actually had nothing to do with a spirituality and had everything to do with showing how westernized you were, and in that way, also how rich you were, which I thought in terms of you know Jesus and his vow of poverty, there seemed to be a bit of a disjunct there. So I felt that Christians, white Christians, and also black Christians, did not practice what they preached, and that was too wide a gap. I just went along with it until I was an adult and I could dump all of that, but I never had any, I just thought that the white Christians I met were nothing like the Christians in the Bible. They were extremely racist, they were extremely classist, and I just felt that I had to fight them every step of the way and expose them for the hypocrites they were, for the racists they were. And I'm afraid that I think that my Nigerian family's idea of Christianity was to, you know, put on your best clothes, go off to Lagos Cathedral. And it wasn't a spiritual thing, it was a way of showing how westernized you were, and therefore showing probably showing your wealth as well. So I never had any great respect for religion because I found the people who practice religion were very hypocritical. And as my sister wrote in her memoir, the one Christian tenant that my grandfather did not follow was one man, one wife. And so you could see very much the hypocrisy between what they purported to believe in, but how they actually behaved. And, you know, what about the saying, you know, it is harder for a rich man to get into a kingdom of God than for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle? So I felt that my Nigerian relatives did a lot of pick and mixing with the principles that they followed.

Lola Tinubu:

I want to connect you being an atheist, being a humanist. What role did you think humanism played in your activism and worldview today?

Akua Rugg:

I was very aware, as a child being from one of the leading capitalist families of Nigeria, that there was a huge hypocrisy between what the Christian message was that we are all equal and that we should help each other as brothers and sisters. I didn't see that. I saw a huge class divide between the wealth and the power of my family and the mass of Nigerians. So I just did not buy that and determined that when I was an adult, I would not follow that very materialist view that I felt Christianity, the Puritan work ethic, that if you worked hard, you were entitled then to have a good income. So I felt that Christianity, in fact, undermined the spirituality of indigenous African religions. But by this time, I wasn't interested, not only was I not interested in European religions, I wasn't interested in African religions, I wasn't interested in religions of any sort because I could see that they were very exploitative, that people could use the Christian church to enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else, after all, or the slave masters, or professed Christianity. So I just thought that Christians were just a pack of and without actually any morality and without any ethics. And I wanted to live a moral and an ethical life. And I certainly wasn't going to find that in Christianity.

Lola Tinubu:

Thank you. What advice will you give to young black people who are questioning religion or searching for their own philosophies of life?

Akua Rugg:

I would say look at The Christian tenets of a brotherhood, the brotherhood of man. And then look actually how Christianity has dealt in a very racist way with Africa. Look how Islam has also dealt in a very racist way with Africans. And that actually you should live out those principles of universal sisterhood and brotherhood and come together with your fellow human beings in a secular manner to make the world a better place for every single one of us seven billion. That we are all of us, brothers and sisters, that we are all connected, but we are all connected through our humanity and not through some superhuman force.

Lola Tinubu:

Thank you for that. Thank you so much. At 79, you witnessed huge changes. What gives you hope about the future of Black activism, humanism, and community building?

Akua Rugg:

I can see that the younger generations of people, no matter from what ethnic group they come from, are challenging the traditions of their different ethnic groups. So I think that young white people and young Asian people are not racist in the same way as their elders are. And I think that the fact now that people are challenging everything, they're challenging concepts of capitalism, they're challenging concepts of gender, challenging concepts of racism, is really something that makes the future bright. And look how people are now looking at how capitalism, for example, is destroying the earth on which we live on. So young people now are interested in ecology as well as sociology. And I think that young people now look how everybody has now come together to fight for the rights of the Palestinians against the capitalist American empire. If you go on a pro-Palestinian demonstration, there are people from all ethnic groups of all different sorts of belief. So I think that when people come together to fight against things like the degradation of our environment, and I think now, for example, people have really risen up against Trump in America. People have now said, actually, the Labour Party, you're just as rubbish as the Tory party, and people are looking for different avenues. So I don't know what's going to happen with the Jeremy Corbyn Zara Sultan affiliation. But I think that everybody is moving towards a more humanist way of looking at the world, and they're looking to give themselves agency for making their lives better rather than thinking that somebody with angel wings and a halo is going to come and save them.

Lola Tinubu:

It has been a privilege to hear your story and we honor the parts you've worked and the doors you've opened for others. Thank you so much.

Akua Rugg:

The thanks come from me because to tell you the truth, I feel a bit like the ugly duckling. And then I feel that when I encountered Lola at the humanist demonstration against her sister dying, I felt I turned the corner and I found my swans, beautiful black swans who shared my humanist principles. And honestly, meeting Lola and then Clive and then the Black Humanist Organization and the Pan-African Book Club has actually changed my life. Let me tell you, you are far better than all the antidepressants that were prescribed for me over the years by various doctors. Meeting the Association of Black Humanists has not only changed my life, but I'm not exaggerating when I say it has actually saved my life. In the way that religion was meant to save so many lives, and I haven't found any solace in what organized religions had to give me. But in the Association of Black Humanists, here is where I have found the brothers and sisters and family and brotherly love that religions purport to give people. So I want to thank you. And it's a great honor and a great privilege to have been accepted into your bosom.

Lola Tinubu:

Thank you so much.

Akua Rugg:

And I feel that had they chosen like me to follow the path of humanism rather than religion, that they might now, like me, still be with us here. So that's how important meeting ABH has been. For me, it has been life-saving, and I'm not exaggerating.

Clive Aruede:

Thank you very much. That is, what can I say, the best thing anybody has ever said about the influence of ABH, Association of Black Humanists. So I just like to say that join us and you can see for yourself. We do meet face to face on the last Saturday of the month. And we also have a Pan African book club, and all our activities are pretty much set out on a website called meetup.com. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, using the at symbol Association of Black Humanists. So please share this episode, leave a comment, and tell us your story. Thank you.

Audrey Simmons:

Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I want to thank Mike's co-host today, Lala and Clive. This has been Association of Black Humanists, our Secular Sankofa podcast. Join us for other episodes, and we hope to speak and see you soon.

Humanise Live:

Secular Sankopha is produced by Humanize Live for the Association of Black Humanists. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and a review. It helps more people discover us. For more from the Association of Black Humanists, find us on Meetup or at L B Humanists on all social media platforms. Humanize Live creates world-class podcasts, videos, and events for purpose led individuals and organizations. If you're ready to start your podcast, visit humanize.live to learn more.

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Audrey Simmons

Host
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Clive Aruede

Co-host
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Lola Tinubu

Co-host
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Akua Rugg

Guest

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