A Somali Village in Colonial Bradford
From May to October 1904, 57 Somali people lived in a walled compound as part of Bradford’s Great Exhibition in Bradford’s Lister Park.
348,550 visitors came to view them, making it one of the most profitable attractions of the Exhibition. Now Dr Fozia Bora, former Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies, is leading a project, which has received funding from the Cultural Institute and the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, to uncover the history of these people and their role in the Exhibition. Crucially, the project will centre British Somalis in the public reinterpretation of this history, engaging the local contemporary arts and culture scene in a co-curated approach.
This project focuses on modern history project, but Dr Bora applies to it the archival approach she has used in her work on medieval Arabic historical texts, to piece together fragments of the archival trail to build a fuller picture of Somali histories and epistemologies, then and now.
Dr Bora is working in collaboration with the Anglo-Somali Society, Bradford City of Culture 2025, the University of Bradford, Bradford Literature Festival and others on this project. Through this work, especially in the interdisciplinary use of written, oral, and photographic sources, the project will bring the past into the present, and help to flesh out the identities and biographies of the Somali individuals who were exhibited in this way, allowing their stories to be heard and their histories to live on.
Image credit
A waterfall in Lister Park in Bradford. Photograph © Paul Glazzard at geograph.org.uk/p/336567 via cc-by-sa/2.0 license.
