Jak Dodd created the Nubian Jak Black history board game in order to help young people gain knowledge of Black historical facts. He conducted the research for this, and subsequently wrote a book on the same subject. He has since created a deck of cards and a computer game, and is planning to host a TV game show on the Nubian Jak theme. I worked as a social worker with a lot of young Black men and women. I noticed that a lot of them had a very negative self-image. If you asked most of them how they would describe themselves or see themselves, or who they would identify with, they didn't have a lot of Black role models in Britain that they could readily identify with. So they would identify with African American achievers and Jamaican gun culture. We all want to have strong role models that we can identify with.
At the time - about 10 years ago - there were not many very strong role models in Britain. Our role models were [boxer] Frank Bruno; [athlete] Linford Christie was prominent around '94 - he had won his gold medal in '92 - but there weren't really many others. Most of them were sports figures and the young men needed someone they could identify with in terms of self-pride. A lot of those young men didn't have strong role models in their personal lives. I worked in a children's home, so they were from broken homes and single-parent families most of the time.
I tried to address that lack of role models by creating a game which highlighted prominent Black historical figures that the young people could access by playing the game. At that time in Britain, this had never been done before. It is still a world first. So that was the concept which gave birth to Nubian Jak.
I felt that most of the information was already in books and there was evidence to suggest that the information that I had put in my game had not been reaching the people who it could have an impact on. In fact, most Black history was available in particular forms that were preaching to the converted. People were stockpiling more and more of the same things, and the people whom I felt were disaffected were not getting this information.
Unfortunately, there is a reason for this which I am glad to say is becoming less and less so. There is an old adage, if you want to hide something from a Black person, put it in a book. And certainly, these young men and women were not interested in reading books to learn about their history. If anything, they would get their history from listening to rap records. That was their form of education and identification.
