In early December, Emily Zobel Marshall completed her mountain leader training for the walking group Black Girls Hike: a two-night expedition in Snowdonia that involved wild camping at -6C and night-time navigation.
Speaking just before she left, Zobel Marshall, an academic from Leeds Beckett University, insisted she was thrilled by the challenge ahead.
“Putting up a tent at night, in driving rain and strong wind, could be seen as admirable or bonkers – but I’ll be taking my lipstick with me too, so it can’t be all bad!” she said, laughing. “But in all seriousness, we really need to get more black women leaders out there, so it has to be done.
“Black women can face rural racism when they go walking in the countryside,” she added. “While there’s rarely the ‘You don’t belong round here’ type of direct racism any more, you’re often the only black woman and often made to feel you don’t belong in so many direct and indirect ways: being stared at, aggressively asked if you’re lost, or repeatedly asked why you’re there.
“This is why black walking groups that specifically support black girls to feel that the outside is a safe landscape, are so important,” she said.
Rhiane Fatinikun set up Black Girls Hike (BGH) in 2019. Initially intended for a few women in her local area, the organisation now has more than 5,000 members and runs national and international walks, weekend trips and holidays. For younger people of ethnic minorities, it offers the Duke of Edinburgh award and youth walks.
Fatinikun recently published her first book, Finding Your Feet. In January, the group will have its own exhibition space at Manchester Museum as the winter partner for its Wild exhibition, addressing institutionalised racism and its impact on access to green spaces.
“We wanted people to understand and reflect on how white a lot of climate and environmental action groups are,” said Chloe Cousins, the museum’s social justice manager. “These action groups aren’t overtly exclusive but if you’ve got a group that’s predominantly white and is run by white people, then how welcome will black people feel?”
Fatinikun created BGH to challenge this status quo. “I wanted to create a safe space for black women to reconnect with nature so that we could explore the countryside together free from prejudice,” she said. “I want to diversify the countryside and let other people know that it is a place for everyone to enjoy.”
But, she said, the group is more than that. “It is a support system, a sisterhood where we can just be,” she said. “Many of us live with the pressure of constant code-switching, often being the only one in our working lives. In the outdoors, among people who look like us, BGH provides a place to breath.”
BGH is not the only walking group for ethnic minorities: Mojo Collective, the East Midlands African Caribbean Women Walking Group, Muslim Hikers, Wanderlust Women’s Group, Ebony Hikers, Bristol Steppin Sistas and Wild in the City, are just a few of the others.
Maxwell Ayamba, of another hiking group, Kinder in Colour, said he thinks walking groups are key to raising awareness of the “history of the countryside’s rootedness in colonialism and exclusion”.
“With just under 1 per cent of minorities accessing the countryside, issues of inequality and accessibility remain ever present,” he said. “These problems have to do with the erasure of the historiography of the black presence in Britain which continues to be fed into prevailing narratives of English rural culture.”
Ayamba agreed that no one stops black and people of colour from visiting the countryside. But, he said, the historical narrative of the English landscape as “white space”, “results in some form of internal control by some rural folk and other walkers which can be interpreted as racist, and which makes specific groups feel they cannot engage with such spaces”.
Ayamba points to the Muslim Hikers who went up Mam Tor in the Peak District national park on Christmas Day in 2021, and were described as a “migration of the Serengeti wildebeest”.
Julie Cordice, a volunteer leader with BGH, agreed with the need to challenge the myth – sometimes subconsciously held – that the countryside is not for black people.
“Whenever we have new people on our hikes, their reason for not coming out before is that they thought the countryside was where white folk lived and so they wouldn’t be welcome,” she said. “The only reason they had the courage to face this deep, embedded cultural thing was because they knew they would be in a group of other black women, all doing it together.”
