Not that there ever was, but if there were any doubts about the exceptional character of Constance Agatha Cummings-John, they were put to one side, when a few weeks before the unveiling of her plaque I got a message from a musician called James Walton Ingham. He introduced me to an artist called S E Rogie and a tune that still bounces around inside my head in joyous celebration of that glorious June afternoon. It was written in 1966 in honour of the great woman’s crowning achievement ‘Long Live Our Woman Mayor’ – the title says it all, an endorsement of Mrs Cummings-John encouraging listeners to ‘get behind’ the new Mayor of Freetown and support her in her efforts. But not only that. In his email James went on to tell me about how back in 1994 he’d been a young man in attendance at Rogie’s funeral wake in London. He said that he will never forget the buzz when word suddenly came through that Mrs Cummings-John was in a car and on her way to Catford from Tooting. When she walked in she quietly electrified the occasion and touched all who were there. Such was the personal integrity and charisma of this Krio leader who it has been such a great pleasure for me to learn about.
It was following the suggestion of a neighbour and a listen to the ‘Great Lives’ BBC Radio Four programme where she is championed by Nigerian author Chibundu Onuzo that first drew my attention to Mrs Cummings-John. I made a few local enquiries and it was clear there were memories of ‘an old lady who did some great work in Africa’ but it was all a bit hazy. She appeared to have quite a local connection but there was precious little online about her later years. Amma Poku had given a talk about her in Tooting Library so very clearly she had a fan base. I did the occasional ‘Black History Walk’ and had started to mention her when passing along Broadwater Road but I wasn’t even sure what house she had lived in. When I noticed that her image had been selected for a new Sierra Leone bank note it was clear the level of esteem she was held in was significantly higher than I realised. It was on one of these Walks, about a year ago that someone attending said that they could put me in touch with family. That lead me to great-nephew Hilton and then her grandson, Dennis who had also featured in the ‘Great Lives’ programme. They confirmed the location of her home and I immediately proposed that we should try and put up a blue plaque.
And on that fantastic day, that’s exactly what we did and the name of Constance Cummings-John; educator, activist and pioneer of women’s rights in Africa, has become known to a whole new generation of Tooting residents. Most appropriately given her key focus on education, it is fitting that the house is directly opposite a school where young people will be inspired on a daily basis by glancing up to read how she left her mark.
From the outset I was aware that Constance had in her later years published an extensive memoir, though getting my hands on a copy was proving difficult. Thankfully Dennis most kindly shared one with me. It was quite daunting and I wondered at first if I could make sense of it all – so many names and places, completely unfamiliar to me – political intrigues in a distant unknown country from so many years ago, how could I take it all in? Yet I found myself completely absorbed in the thread of her story and confused that I was only now finding out about her and the struggles of newly-independent African nations finding their feet after colonial rule. This indefatigable twentieth century girl who had lived an unimaginable life across a global stage. A person of privilege but because of her gender and the colour of her skin, someone who had to break through so many barriers. How many generations of young people, who are intrinsically a huge part of her story could have been similarly moved. Why is there no copy of this publication in any local library?
We just had to make the unveiling of Constance’s plaque part of an annual local event, one which sees throngs of Tooting folk come together, the much-loved Community Fun Day. By the greatest fortune it happens to take place on Broadwater Road with Number 20 very much right in the middle of it all. This was an opportunity for thousands of people to witness the occasion and find out about the remarkable African woman who lived in this street for three decades at the end of her life. The organisers were delighted to have this additional aspect to their big day and with our Member of Parliament, local councillors and community leaders present as well as numerous young people, we had a great opportunity to involve them all in the ceremony. Adding a key Krio representation to the day was historian Iyamide Thomas who used to bring her Mother over to Tooting to visit her old friend.
Iyamide was able to alert members of the Krio Descendants Union UK & Ireland who attended to witness what was happening. Constance was one of three Krio ‘trailblazers’ to be honoured with plaques in an unprecedented five week period this year. A number of Iyamide’s guests had even met the great lady and remembered her well. It was such a great privilege to meet them and see how absorbed they were in the ‘Africa in Tooting’ Walk we did prior to the unveiling. Then there was the Al-Risalah Trust School which I was able to visit beforehand to outline Mrs Cummings-John’s story to the students, some of whom also participated with readings at the ceremony. A story that was largely unknown in this country until that ‘Great Lives’ programme was now a fitting celebration at the heart of our year of Wandsworth being recognised as London Borough of Culture.
Born into an influential Krio family in Sierra Leone, Constance Agatha Horton’s father was the treasurer of the city of Freetown. The Krios were the descendants of freed slaves who had been settled in the area by the British in the 18th century. She came to London in 1935 and qualified as a teacher at Whitelands College, newly located in a leafy corner of Wandsworth.
This was an exciting time for young people with an investment in Africa and its future and she became involved in politics and Pan-African debates. She was influenced by the likes of CLR James and Isaac Wallace-Johnson and also a barrister from Sierra Leone called Ethnan Alphonso Cummings-John. This period particularly interested me and I’ve walked around the extensive Giles Gilbert Scott designed Whitelands estate site in Southfields trying to imagine what it was like for a young black woman to enter such a sheltered and rarified world. She was almost certainly the first African student to attend there but would have encountered a Trinidadian teacher called Amy Ida King (below), very likely the first black woman to study at Cambridge.
Quite what she made of the ‘May Queen’ rituals we don’t know but hopefully electing ‘the likeablest and the loveablest’ was a welcome distraction from training to be a teacher. The gigantic main college block, almost a prototype for Scott’s work on Battersea Power Station, its Chapel infused at the time with Willam Morris and Burne-Jones detail, all set in dappled woodland, evoked learning, progression and tranquilty in a world that was getting increasingly turbulent. Mussolini’s fascist Italians invaded Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie sought refuge with the Heligmans in nearby Wimbledon. Racists were also on the streets of London where Moseley’s black shirts had taken over the old Whitelands site in Chelsea and renamed it ‘Black House’.
Negative attitudes in Britain to her colour shocked Constance but a formative six month period in the United States sponsored by the Colonial office saw her exposed to a viscious new level of racism which intensified her interest in politics and civil rights. With Ethnan’s blessing she had decided to go on an American study tour at the end of 1935. From dining separately to the white passengers on her voyage on the Queen Mary, to not being allowed into certain Churches and the ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws in the south, she encountered a hostility that left a lasting impression. There was a conception amongst many Americans that Africans were barely human and she was frequently questioned about her hair and even if she had a tail. She wasn’t even allowed to eat in the canteen at Woolworths. The last straw was when she was ordered to the back of a bus in Montgomery. But she rose above the hate and through meeting the likes of WEB DuBois and Paul Robeson and reading George Padmore, the desire to do something to challenge these misconceptions fired her up on her return to London.
Ethnan Cummings-John (above) was a radical lawyer involved in the League of Coloured People based in Aggrey House on Doughty Street. Here Constance would meet people like Sylvia Pankhurst, Dr Harold Moody and Jomo Kenyatta. Having been deported from Nazi Germany, George Padmore set up the International African Service Bureau and Constance rubbed shoulders with Amy Ashwood Garvey and Isaac Wallace-Johnson. Ivor Cummings, Ethnan’s cousin was the first warden at Aggrey House. A colourful character who grew up in Croydon, he went on to work for the Colonial Office and a decade or so later took responsibility for the Windrush arrivals, for which he was awarded an OBE. His choice of the Clapham Common air raid shelters as accomodation lead to the establishment of Brixton as a centre of the African Caribbean community in Britain.
This wonderful photo above, courtesy of Andrew Taylor-Cummings was probably taken around this time. Left to right; Ivor Gustavus Cummings OBE, Ethnan Cummings-John (standing), Constance Cummings-John and Dr Eustace Henry Taylor-Cummings CBE (Chief Medical Officer and six time Mayor of Freetown, the first black Doctor to graduate from Liverpool University), who was a cousin of Ivor and Ethnan. In her memoir, Constance recalled how shortly after her return from the US, she was horrified by Ethnan’s ‘colonial’ top hat and tails dress style and refused to join him and some pals, one of whom was Ivor, on an invitation to an event at Buckingham Palace. ‘Why can’t you wear agbada like Africans?’ she told them! In July 1937, after he had completed his law studies Constance and Ethnan were married at the Church of St John in Finsbury Park. After the wedding, Major Vischer her Colonial Office sponsor and old family friend invited the couple to dinner and announced ‘It’s the best thing you could have done marrying a man like Ethnan. Now Constance, you must go home and be quiet. Ethan is a lawyer and will look after you.’ Politically-charged Constance had no intention of doing that when they returned to Africa the following year. She was now ready for action!
She might have had many advantages in her early life but Constance possessed a burning desire to do her best for people less fortunate than herself. Offered a job by the colonial government as inspector of schools, she chose instead to set up a school and with Isaac Wallace-Johnson worked towards the formation of the West African Youth League. On their ticket in 1938, at the age of twenty, Constance incredibly now became the youngest and first woman ever to be elected as a councillor on the continent of Africa. She threw herself into the plight of the long-suffering ‘market women’, championing a group that had long been exploited and undermined. Showing her strength of character, she disregarded encouragement to back away from the leftward-leaning Wallace-Johnson but this was an early sign of cold war influences pressing on emerging African nationalism.
With the coming of WW2 she turned her hand to business and made a huge success of a quarrying enterprise, the profits of which were later to be used to build another school. Even with a growing family her energy seemed boundless. But having lost her council seat and under pressure from the colonial government, she decided to go back to America. Ethnan might have stayed behind but with her went not only her two small sons but two adopted daughters. Despite the help of her well-known dancer brother Asadata Dafora who was based in New York, Constance was unable to secure a teaching position and worked at a hospital in Brooklyn.
Not allowed to rent a house, she just went out and bought one. She stayed much longer than intended, continuing to develop her political interests and connections. She assisted the many Nigerian students in the US and through this met Eleanor Roosevelt. Whether they discussed that a key aspect of both women’s education took place in Wandsworth is anyone’s guess but Eleanor’s plaque at the site of Allenswood school was unveiled last year. Constance gave countless speaking engagements and liased again with Paul Robeson. Before she left she adopted another child when a medical student whom she knew became pregnant.
Back in Freetown in 1952, Constance opened the Eleanor Roosevelt School for Girls, offering free education at a time when the education of women was a low priority. The vocation-focused school which even offered free meals for those who needed it, was inundated with young women who wanted to study there but her detractors still claimed it was ‘communistic’ in outlook. Elected to the new House of Representatives, Constance was now one of two women in government. She next turned her attention to women’s role in society through the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement again with a primary objective to help the market women but to make women generally more politically aware. With many people in Sierra Leone economically disadvantaged but now aware of their rights due in part to Wallace-Johnson and Constance, industrial action around this time lead to violence and another excuse to bait Mrs Cummings-John. Her work became known internationally but attempts to connect with the Soviet Union were thwarted.
As her Sierra Leone People’s Party’s slogan of ‘One Country, One People’ spelled out, loud and clear, Constance was on a mission to help everyone including those from the rural ‘protectorate’ region not just the Krio elite. This situation, a legacy of British ‘divide-and-rule’ raised further hackles and reminded her of what she had faced in America. She was accused of electoral malpractice and even sentenced to six months imprisonment which was later overturned.
Very tellingly a record of a ship’s passage she and Ethan made in 1959 from Liverpool to Sierra Leone lists his profession as a ‘magistrate’ whilst Constance is a ‘housewife’. This was a woman about to participate in planming the details of ending British rule in her country! In spite of all this, as independence loomed, her confidence restored by her 1958 re-election to the Municipal Council, Constance still had the energy and desire to push to be among the delegates travelling to London for the negotiations. Alongside Mrs Etta Harris, the only two women in the group of 28 Sierra Leone representatives, she played a crucial role in finding compromise after a walk-out and power was handed over on 27 April 1961. Sadly there was more fractious political in-fighting about how this should proceed and come the glorious day, Wallace-Johnson was detained when the Union Jack came down and the new green, white and blue flag of independent Sierra Leone was raised.
Ethnan meanwhile had been appointed ambassador to Liberia in yet another attempt to clip Constance’s wings. It failed to thwart her but resulted in lengthy commutes from Morovia. She abandoned national politics shortly after this when her driver confessed that he’d been financially induced to take her to a spot in the bush and leave her to the mercy of political opponents. But she was still popular on the Freetown municipal scene and became Mayor on 7 January 1966, the first black African woman to govern a modern capital city on the continent. With Ethnan still on ambassadorial duty, her sister-in-law Oni was Constance’s ‘mayoress’.
Using her position to try to unite the people of the city and to elevate the standing of women, she embarked on a dynamic programme, initiating a sanitation campaign and schemes to help a growing number of street children. Street traders were regulated and a municipal secondary school was set up. But with political instability now sweeping across Africa as the continent sought to throw off the colonial yoke, the country drifted into a state of emergency and following a military takeover Constance faced accusations of squandering public funds and embezzlement. Invited to speak at a Congess in Canada in June 1967 it was clearly wise for her not to go back to Sierra Leone. She went briefly to the US before returning to London and taking up residence with the rest of the family at 20 Broadwater Road.
With so many obstacles thrown up against her you would have thought this was when Constance would opt for the quiet life. No chance of that. She involved herself in her local community, was an active supporter of CND, a member of the Labour Party and Co-operative Society and a school governor at Garrett Green (Burntwood), Broadwater and Fircroft. Many African and West Indian migrants lived in the area at a time of racial intolerance and she was there to offer support. Her disarmanent work and continued involvement in matters relating to women’s rights entailed travel to Europe. Keen to clear her name, Mrs Cummings-John tried to re-settle in Freetown again in the mid-seventies but it was not an easy time. From London she maintained links with her old party (the SLPP), the women’s movement and her school. In 1996, she went to Nigeria to attend the launch of her memoirs, an invaluable resource put together with the help of LaRay Denzer. Sierra Leone remained unstable and a devastating 11 year civil war was still raging when she died in St George’s Hospital on 21 February 2000.
At last there does appear to be some proper appreciation of her in her homeland with the 2022 introduction of the Sierra Leone banknote featuring her image. She was in the news again a few years later when her granddaughter Dr. Constance Cummings-John also made history as Sierra Leone’s first female general surgeon. And now the dust has settled on Broadwater Road and the 1950’s house beside the church where Constance and Ethnan came with their family carries a splendid blue plaque. Young people in the school opposite can read the name of someone whose ‘education for all’ mantra benefited the lives of thousands of people. What a life, what a woman. Just how extraordinary a person was Constance Cummings-John and what a privilege its been to take her remarkable story to a wider audience.
Thanks to the Cummings-John family for sharing photos used here. Thanks also to Balham and Tooting Community Association (BATCA) and Al-Risalah Educational Trust for their support for the plaque initiative and allowing it to be part of the Community Fun Day.
