The Emperor’s Babe, Bernardine Evaristo’s comic verse-epic or novel-in-verse, told in erratically un-rhyming couplets, pays heed to Britain’s long history of cultural mixing and colonization on home ground.

Evaristo tells the feisty tale of a third-century African-British woman in Roman London, ‘Illa Bella Negreeta’, ‘whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on [an un-Shakespearian] barge’, making it to their west, to Londinium, on a very biblical donkey. As this knowing or ‘sautéed’ mélange of iconic motifs suggests, the conjunction of peoples in a teeming city produces powerfully transformative mixes and encounters, which for the spirited, punning Zuleika take the particular shape of her passionate if doomed affair with the Emperor Septimius Severus, himself of North African descent.

Context and history

Diverse Roman Britain

From David Olusoga, Black and British:
A Forgotten History

In a 2001 interview with Alastair Niven in Wasafiri, Bernardine Evaristo said of her motivation to write The Emperor’s Babe:

The Romans were travelling all over the place and they were also going backwards and forwards so why is it so difficult for people to think that black people could be in London 2000 years ago. […] I like the idea of exploding the myth of Britain as monocultural and pure until 1948 […].

Historians agree. Peter Fryer notes that ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here’. Mary Beard, responding to a recent social media controversy on the subject, observes:

One thing is for sure, the Roman empire – Britain included – was cultural and ethnically diverse, from the Syrians in Bath, to Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the Ethiopian who met Septimius Severus on Hadrian’s Wall and the wonderful couple from South Shields, Barates and Queenie (‘Regina’), he from Palmyra, she an Essex girl.

Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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As Tina Steiner argues in her examination of the divergent pulls of space and time in the novel, Black Mamba Boy can be read as both ‘an adventure tale and as a historical novel’. In addition to the lyricism of Mohamed’s prose and the gripping account of her father’s history, the novel has drawn praise for providing alternative perspectives on world historical events. For example, it shows the pervasive impact of the Second World War beyond the battlefields that tend to dominate the accounts of history books: Jama witnesses the many casualties of Mussolini’s occupation of Eritrea, and later joins a ship transporting Jewish refugees from German concentration camps denied entry to Palestine and seeking safety in Britain. These scenes are some of the most difficult, and most moving, in the novel.

Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke and Wallis, Kate. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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At heart, this collection is an exploration of an identity crisis. Modern British icons – Dulux, Sugar Puffs, Hilda Ogden – jostle for room with chapatis, saris and sitars, creating a patchwork landscape that mirrors the incoherence of the immigrant’s experience. The nations unite uneasily but vibrantly under the umbrella of Nagra’s ‘Punglish’, a freewheeling hybrid in which syntax is protean and parts of speech dynamic.

—Sarah Crown

Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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The works are inspired by what D-Empress describes as a ten-year initiation into teachings and practice of the ancient West African Mandinka badjenne tradition. This tradition is an intergenerational practice where elder women, the badjenne sages, are revered and honoured as the keepers of specifically female traditions who help to shape female identity through rites of passage of the girl child into womanhood. Though vibrantly alive today in different forms amongst Mandinka regions of West Africa and beyond, these traditions are increasingly becoming contested ideological and practice spaces. This becomes particularly pertinent as African women grapple to find belonging and liberation within often contradictory global narratives of femininity, feminism and the idealism of liberation in a globalised world.

D-Empress invites us to look again at the badjenne through a series of unfinished sculptures that create a space to unfold the complex, alchemic crucible of communion, culture and co-creation with the audiences. Believing that no act of creation is ever complete, D-Empress offers the unfinished works as an invocation to those sharing in the performance to move beyond merely receiving to sharing and co-creating.

The immersive installation, she suggests, may be an African-anchored pathway to a re-enchantment of romance, of seduction, of living, leading us away from a world bent on equality of the sexes into a space where we may ask different questions of ourselves. In such a space, the possibility arises of crafting futures that move beyond the binary bastions in which we so often become entrenched.

D-Empress Dianne Regisford

D-Empress Dianne Regisford is a multi-sensory, contemporary artiste invested in artistic enquiry, which creates spaces for cultural and poetic acts of encounter. Her artistic practice includes the visual arts (painting, sculpture), poetry and performance, and pivots around ideas of voice, participation and representation of women in the African-Caribbean diaspora.

Inspired by cultural and spiritual systems of Africa and her diaspora, D’Empress’s creations ‘churn the soul soil of identity, heritage, mythology and humanity, excavating narratives as pathways to social renewal’. She works with the socio-cultural fabric of diaspora voice, (re)constructed identity and sense of place in urban spaces, and is also particularly interested in the experiences of African feminist perspectives of gender, sexuality and sensuality.

D-Empress’s works weave sensory narratives that evoke, tie and sometimes knot threads of the cultured, the indigenous and the contemporary in the social fabric of urban spaces across the African-Caribbean diaspora.

Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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NW (2012), Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, documents the lives and experiences of four people who come from the same area in north-west London: Leah Hanwell, Felix Cooper, Natalie (née Keisha) Blake and Nathan Bogle. The narrative is divided into five sections, each told through the perspective of a different character. Their various life experiences and personalities are represented not only through the content, but also in the structures, of their narration. What emerges is a complex portrait of NW6 and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, the intersecting lives of those who have grown up in it.

Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 15 April 2026.

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