Seeking the Pioneers Kicks Off - Introducing Kwesi Ochosi: Heritage Development Officer

Earlier this year, Birmingham Race Impact Group announced the launch of Seeking the Pioneers - an exciting new project that will connect and inspire people and communities with the history of local race activism from the 1940’s to the present day. 

With the generous support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we will be recruiting a team of history detectives, researchers, curators and digital creatives to seek out and platform the racial justice pioneers whose shoulders we stand on today. 

Kwesi Ochosi is no stranger to the fight for human rights. He is an activist and organiser with a 10 year history of fighting locally and globally for social equality and reparative justice. 

He comes from a migrant family who made new homes in the hostile environments of Birmingham and London: His grandparents were Jamaican-Cuban and Ghanaian pioneers from the so-called Windrush generation. His parents were members of the homegrown Black Panther and Rastafari Movements that pioneered what it means to be “Black and British”. 

Kwesi hails from the Patmore Estate in Nine Elms, South London - one of the most resilient yet marginalised communities in Britain - where the majority of residents are “non-white”, and 1-in-3 heads of household are unemployed. His life experiences growing up working-class and Black in an institutionally racist society became the fuel for his later activism. 

• His community work began as Chair of the Queen Mother Moore School under the tutelage of Rev. Hewie Andrew, who founded QMMS in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Uprising.

• He has been a member of Edge Fund for the last 10 years, working to co-create equitable models of grantmaking to support grassroot groups organising for radical social change.

• He was a co-founder of 81 Acts of Exuberant Defiance, a community-led heritage project that used radical art in public spaces to celebrate the legacy of the 1981 Brixton Uprising.

• He served as Co-Chair of Global Afrikan Congress UK, the UK chapter of the international reparations organisation established after the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism.

• He is a civil society contributor to the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. 

• He was a member of the 2021 human rights mission to Colombia led by the International Coalition of People of African Descent to investigate the ethnocide of Afro-Colombians.

Kwesi is proud to be appointed as BRIG’s new Heritage Development Officer 

Seeking the Pioneers is an extraordinary 2-year project that will teach a new generation of creatives, activists and historians how to collect and present the oral history of the trailblazing pioneers who shaped modern Britain by challenging the structural racism they faced.

Here in Birmingham, we have a rich heritage of anti-racist activism and movement building. Using funding raised by National Lottery players, our mission is to preserve this powerful legacy while it is within living memory, and inspire others to learn from it and build upon it.

Two years in development, “Seeking the Pioneers” has finally been made possible with the generous support of The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage.

Thanks to National Lottery players, BRIG will be able to “PASS THE BATTON” to future generations, whilst capturing the collective history of Birmingham’s rich and meaningful heritage of race activism.