Ancestral Frequencies

Nunhead Cemetery lies to the south east of London, 52 acres of woodland and winding pathways stretched between quiet Southwark streets. There is a crypt and a chapel and a formal avenue of limes; the graves of actors and cricketers and war correspondents; a bus tycoon, a Mayor of London.

Alongside the more celebrated Highgate and Brompton, Nunhead numbers among the capital’s Magnificent Seven - the stately Victorian graveyards that once formed a ring around the outskirts of the city.

The broadcaster and writer Zakia Sewell lives not far from this spot, having relocated to south London after a number of years in the city’s north. The cemetery has become a regular destination for her - resplendent in any season, but especially at this point in the year when, in Zakia’s words, “everything is particularly popping off … there’s all the meadowsweet and the bluebells and everything suddenly comes into bloom.”

Zakia occupies a very particular position in British broadcasting, a prototype national treasure, beloved by both those who tuned in to her NTS shows to hear her play everything from Beverly Glenn-Copeland to Fairport Convention via Sons of Kemet, and by those who have relished her documentaries for Radio 4, including the series My Albion, in which she explored the songs, stories and symbols of British folk culture. Her work is characterised by a curiosity and a kind of strange alchemy, by a willingness to let worlds collide.

“I suppose what connects everything is storytelling - weaving disparate threads together and trying to make sense and meaning,” she says. “Whether that’s with my radio show, drawing on lots of different musical traditions from around the world, or with the Albion series, where it’s like, ‘Let’s bung all these stories together that don’t on face value have loads to do with each other and find some shared meaning.”

Much of her work, she points out, has to do with finding a sense of ancestry. “And I wonder if that’s also partly to do with my heritage - feeling like I belong to quite different worlds. It’s almost written into my identity - a desire to forge and unite or find a common ground.”

Zakia grew up between Wales and West London, living primarily with her father, at a distance from her mother, who has schizophrenia, and was unwell for many years. “It gave me a doubleness,” she says. “This very urban experience, living under the flight path near Heathrow in the council flat with my dad, and then going to Laugharne, and the mystical magical world of Wales with my grandma’s quite bohemian hippy community.”

As she grew older, she also became more conscious of racial heritage - Caribbean on her mother’s side, while her father’s family were white and British. “Because of my mum being ill, I was quite disconnected from her and her family,” she says. “A lot of my first experiences of black culture were actually through my dad.” It was her father, she says, who first took her to Notting Hill Carnival, and to taste Trinidadian rotis and whose record collection she mined for jazz and reggae.

“I sort of experienced it through his eyes. So there’s been this process of rediscovering and piecing back together these aspects of my identity as I got a bit older,” she says. “And as my relationship with my mum has healed and improved it’s becoming an initiate into my own Caribbean culture again.”

Her mother’s family hail from Carriacou, an island under seven miles long in the south eastern Caribbean. The island was colonised by both the French and the British, and its people enslaved, “but I think it wasn’t like the big islands like Jamaica where there was systematic unravelling and deconstructing of the preexisting communities and cultures,” Zakia says. “In Carriacou a lot of that folk memory and tradition was able to last a lot longer. So a lot of people in Carriacou have a really strong sense of African identity.”

Zakia visited a few years ago to make a radio documentary about the island’s Big Drum tradition - “specific rhythms and dances that pertained to particular West African tribes,” she says. “And that was when I realised Carriacou had something special going on and I found out more about other traditions.” She learned how the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax had recorded a great deal on Carriacou in the 1960s, drawn by its unique combination of folk customs. “So there’s a quadrille and a fiddle tradition, and a part of the island that is basically Scottish - all the people there have Scottish last names and they’re all much lighter skinned than the people on the rest of the island. So there’s all this fiddle music then interlaced with African drums.”

The island also holds an annual tradition called the Shakespeare Mass, something like a mummers play, where during carnival season elaborately-costumed revellers armed with big sticks go house to house reciting Shakespearean monologues. “It’s probably more of a hangover from the colonial education system than from folk,” Zakia says. “But when you see the outfits it really looks like something you might see at May Day in Hastings or at Jack in the Green or whatever.”

She has come, too, to reappraise the traditions of the Welsh wing of her family. “There were lots of things that happened in Laugharne that I wouldn’t have recognised as a folk custom,” she says. “Only now that I’m a bit older and I’ve been researching these things I’ve been able to see them in that way.”

In particular, she recalls the Common Walk that took place every three years. “It was a big walk around the perimeter of Laugharne,” she explains. “And it would be hundreds of people, eating and drinking along the way and stopping off at all the pubs. From my perspective as a kid, it was pandemonium - all the adults were getting drunk and the kids could just run free.”

“Now I see it’s a version of beating the bounds, which has been practiced since pre-Christian times. It’s said to be all about the people of the town knowing the boundary of the area, a kind of navigational tool - knowing, before maps, exactly where you were.”

Next year will bring the publication of Zakia’s first book. Finding Albion is an extension of the Radio 4 series, an attempt to unravel the connections between folk traditions. As a former English Literature student, she has relished the experience of writing and research - “drawing on those skills that I’d left behind a little bit” and once again finding unexpected connections between cultures. “It’s knowing two things exist and I can look at them alongside one another, and there’s something fizzy and exciting about feeling like these things haven’t really been brought together before.”

It’s not a wildly different experience to finding a common thread between two apparently disparate records on a radio show, or indeed finding the deeper connections between parts of her own self.

Zakia graduated from Oxford feeling “Really top heavy - my brain had gone through this gruelling bootcamp but all the other parts of my being had been totally neglected.” Anxious, and unsure of what she might like to do with her life, she took a job in a record shop and began DJing in earnest. This in turn led to a job at NTS. “Then I suppose there came a point five years after my degree where I realised maybe I want to find a way to bridge these worlds a little bit.” An internship at an audio production company soon turned into a job as a radio researcher, and so to making her own programmes for Radio 4. Last year, she jumped ship from NTS to 6 Music, where she now presents the regular Dream Time slot, bringing her eclectic musical tastes to an even wider audience.

Back in Nunhead cemetery, Zakia is trying to fathom why this location means so much to her. “I think it’s because I feel curious about those who’ve gone before us” she says. “I think we’re really disconnected from that in Britain and I think part of the work I’m doing is looking for this sense of wisdom that’s been lost or forgotten. It’s the need to heed the warnings of those who’ve gone before us.”

On Carriacou, she was introduced to the idea of the ongoing relationship with ancestors and their spirits. “The need to connect with them and appease them and remember them, otherwise they’re going to come to you in a dream and do something bad,” she explains. “There’s a tradition called All Saints, where you go to the gravestones of your family members and leave offerings.”

It is part of a wider offering culture in the Caribbean, she says. “So you lay a plate full of food when you’re getting married, or if you’re building a new house, or at a funeral. It’s called ‘the parent’s plate’. It’s about when something lovely happens to us or we celebrate or we embark on a new adventure there’s a sense of having to give something back. We can’t just endlessly take.”

It has made Zakia keenly aware of our reciprocal relationship with nature. “If you think about these traditions in connection to our relationship to land or each other, it’s really a message and a warning about exploitation and extraction,” she says. “So I think of these rituals as offerings to something greater - whether or not you’re spiritual or religious, I think there are messages and warnings in there. We have to give back.”

Zakia wears the TOAST Cotton Poplin Sun Dress and Gingham Cotton Linen Dress.

Words by Laura Barton.

Photography by Ellie Smith.