Pioneer Mental Health Practitioner, comrade and friend

Returned to London from Leeds today, with a view to going to visit Aggrey in Kingston Hospital but was told by the hospital that he passed on this morning.

A stalwart in our struggle, a founder trustee of the George Padmore Institute and a valued member of the Alliance of the Black Parents Movement, the Black Youth Movement, New Beacon Books and Race Today Collective.

At one point, Aggrey and Dr Farrukh Hashmi at Winson Green Hospital in Birmingham were the only two Global Majority psychiatrists in Britain and of course he later had his historical battle with St George’s Hospital in Tooting over their discrimination in the recruitment of black medical students and employment of black doctors, a struggle which he won at great cost to his career. He became the first Black consultant psychiatrist in Britain and placed himself firmly at the service of his community.

I first met him when we formed the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association in the west Indian Students Centre in Earls Court (1968) and was greatly assisted by him when I worked for the Runnymede Trust in Handsworth, he having just graduated from the Queen Elizabeth Teaching Hospital in Edgbaston.

He joined Maurice Andrews, Bini Brown and others of us in establishing the Saturday/Supplementary School we

ran at Westminster Road Primary School in Handsworth in that period, as did a number of other undergraduates and postgraduates from the University of Birmingham.

In 1976, I was privileged to work with Aggrey, Farukh Hashmi, Professor Phillip Rack and others in organising the groundbreaking International Congress on Transcultural Psychiatry at Bradford University, a congress that focused particularly on the limitations of western psychiatry in understanding and treating the manifestations of trauma experienced and externalised by oppressed and minoritised communities, especially those marginalised by systemic racism, stripped bare by erasure of social and spiritual traditions and constructed as fodder for the embedding of colonialism and the advancement of capitalism. Aggrey’s work in this regard, both in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and among Britain’s growing Caribbean population was second to none.

Aggrey had a particular concern about the condition of being young and black, especially young, Black and male, in British society and about the contours of the relationship between Black young people and the state and its control apparatuses, including schooling, policing and the criminal justice system. For this reason, he was repeatedly called as an expert witness in both the magistrates court and the crown court.

He was the ‘go to’ person for advice and guidance on the provision of counselling and therapeutic services in the wake of traumatising events such as: the New Cross Massacre (18 January 1981); the subsequent mass uprisings in the summer of that year; perennial police killings (so-called deaths in custody); the Theresa May pogrom and the 67 cases of state manslaughter that resulted from the ‘hostile environment’ which was ushered in by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts.

There is not a Global Majority Community anywhere in Britain which has not had the benefit of Dr Aggrey Burke’s intervention, directly or indirectly, as one of the most esteemed mental health professionals in the country. His guidance in and support for the development of Black Mental Health services is widely recognised across the country.

He clearly belongs in the pantheon of African heritage pioneers in British medicine, including better known names such as:

• Risien Russell
• John Alcindor
• Harold Moody
• George Busby
• David Pitt

May his story be ever told as he enjoys perfect peace in the realm of Ancestors.

Professor Gus John