Our ancestors’ wildest dreams … (fictionalisation)

Summary

The following account you are about to read is a fictionalisation. Inspired by the accounts of this text, Cyrus Rose represents an imagined future that centres the Black British higher education experience within a broader African diasporic educational framework, and sees higher education take on a new form. This is a snapshot of what a future Black academic's journey to success could look like.

Cyrus Rose – for my Bibi

Yesterday, I had the opportunity of a lifetime.

I find myself writing this in a hotel room overlooking a setting sun on the coast of the Dar es Salaam.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in a beautiful room filled with faces, flanked by some of the most brilliant minds of African and Caribbean descent. Invited by a good friend and colleague, I came to sit on a panel to discuss: What does the future of collaborative African- Caribbean research look like in an era of artificial intelligence?

Like myself, all the other panellists are experienced academics and communicators across multiple fields from epidemiology, water science, education and theoretical physics. I, Cyrus Rose, am a marine biologist who has been studying the impact of Islamic East African indigenous ecological practices in reclaiming sea life on the Tanzanian coast.

As a young boy, I used to go back to Tanzania with my family to visit my grandparents. It was my favourite time, especially when my grandmother took me and my sister fishing just off the coast. I loved to hear her speak about all the fish she would catch and fry for dinner, to help her pull in the net and watch the way the fish danced in the boat. It's one of my most treasured memories – by the time I was doing my A- levels the waters of Dar had suffered and my grandmother could no longer fish. The more I think about it, the clearer it is to me that those memories made me the marine conservationist I am today.

I chose to study biology at my university in the north east of England because they had great teachers and were a sister university to an institution in Dar es Salaam. This provided me with opportunities to study in my country of origin.