Chineke! orchestra’s Chi-chi Nwanoku is finally getting a seat at the top table

One image has stuck in Chi-chi Nwanoku’s memory. In 1884-85, the Berlin Conference met to settle issues raised by the colonisation of Africa. An image shows the heads of Europe seated at the table, while the map of Africa waits to be divided up between them. “If you are not around the table,” she says, “you end up on the menu. That is why I want a seat at the table.”

This story starts when Nwanoku was called to a meeting by Ed Vaizey, minister for culture in David Cameron’s government in the early 2010s. He wanted to know why she was the only black player he saw regularly at concerts in London, playing as principal double bass in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She says she was taken aback, because she did not know the answer, and went off to do something about it.

The result was the Chineke! Orchestra, founded in 2015, the UK’s first (and only) majority black and ethnically diverse orchestra. In the blink of an eye, Chineke! was made an associate orchestra at the Southbank Centre in London and it has been getting better year on year. For Nwanoku herself, a former sprinter and effervescent campaigner, it has led to widespread recognition, including a CBE, which she says she accepted in the face of hostile emails for one reason: she needs that place at the table.

A lot of people I know were nervous because they thought we were coming to take their jobs away

Orchestras, too, have top tables and the Lucerne Festival is one of the most prestigious. This year’s theme is diversity and Chineke! has the honour of bookending the programme, the Chineke! Junior Orchestra at the start and the main orchestra at the end, joined by soloist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the young British cellist seen by millions playing at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

“It’s a big deal that we are [in Lucerne],” says Nwanoku. “It will be something fresh and new in more than one way, as this marks the first foreign tour of our Junior Orchestra.” Michael Haefliger, artistic and executive director at Lucerne, has taken a knocking from people who say he is making a token gesture with a diversity programme, but Nwanoku has the answer. He simply needs to invite Chineke! back next year.

He will need to be quick. This summer’s tour will take the main orchestra to Hamburg and Helsinki before Lucerne, while the juniors go on from Lucerne to Berlin and Amsterdam. Australia was ticked off earlier this year. The US follows in 2023.

The big question is why nobody thought of starting up Chineke! 10 or 20 years ago. “Even players in the orchestra have asked me that. I don’t think people were ready 10 years earlier. In 2007, I played in [a service] for the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade at Westminster Abbey, which was a very emotional occasion. The Queen, Tony Blair and many politicians were there, and in the middle of it a man started shouting at Blair and the Queen, ‘You have not said sorry yet,’ and calling to the black musicians, ‘Get up and leave this building because they haven’t apologised to us.’ It was still very raw then.”

Nwanoku says that, although she had been a founder member of the OAE for 30 years, she had never asked herself what her colleagues thought of having a black player in their midst (“I am not a chip-on-the-shoulder person”). It was easier for her not to have the conversation.

“Now I haven’t stopped talking about it. The door has been flung open. A lot of people I know were nervous because they thought we were coming to take their jobs away. No, we aren’t. Calm down. I created Chineke! for all the right reasons and in fact we are creating jobs with our two new orchestras. We are here to amplify this industry, to which we are just as committed as you are.”

A further commitment is to promote black composers past and present. Nwanoku says that when the 62 members of the orchestra walked out for their first concert in 2015, not one of them had previously played any music by the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: “He was a wonderful composer and just inserting music by him in our first concert made us feel that we belong.” There have already been 14 commissions of new works by black composers. Other organisations, such as the BBC, are following in Chineke!’s footsteps and the Last Night of the Proms this summer will kick off with 1922 by James B Wilson, a composer previously commissioned three times by Nwanoku.

None of this means that Chineke! has silenced its naysayers. Some people complain that a black and ethnically diverse orchestra goes against the very principle of being open to all and that Nwanoku is creating division. What does she say to that?

“We have waited 400 years! There was no sign of anything happening. Fourteen per cent of people in the UK identify as black, Asian or ethnically diverse, but only 1.7 per cent are represented in our orchestras across the country. The survey was of 17 orchestras, but plenty have none at all. I also suspect the figure of 1.7 per cent is an exaggeration.”

During the pandemic, when it was impossible to hire black players from outside the UK, Chineke! invited white musicians to take their place. Some of the new recruits were nervous at first, but said afterwards they had never felt more welcome. “We know about history,” says Nwanoku. “We don’t want to replicate what happened to us going into the future. We will be judged by our actions today, which is all about inclusion and belonging.”

And it seems the message is spreading. “The chair of the conservatoires said they have had four times as many people of colour applying since Chineke! started. The worst point [for a young black musician] is when you become conscious of where you might be going, and you look at the Proms or other concerts and can’t see where you might fit in. That is when teenagers give up. It is such a fundamental thing to see yourself represented. Belonging is a basic human need. If you can see it, you can be it!”

The Chineke! Junior Orchestra plays at the Lucerne Festival on August 9 and the main Chineke! Orchestra on September 11, lucernefestival.ch