“Our history is global, transnational, triangular, and much of it is still to be written”: David Olusoga’s ‘Black and British’

“This book is an experiment. It is an attempt to see what new stories and approaches emerge if black British history is envisaged as a global history and – perhaps more controversially – as a history of more than just the black experience itself.”

Black and British is, I think, the most informative book I have ever read.

It’s a book of lost connections, unwritten chapters, and silenced voices that has quite literally taught me more history than I learned in over a decade of such classes in primary and secondary school in Virginia, Germany, and Scotland combined, which was entirely focused on heavily skewed and condensed whistle-stop tours of the World Wars, the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea, and the revolutions in Russia, amidst paltry smatterings of Roman and Viking Britain. Olusoga’s tour de force, on the other hand, offers 600 pages of meticulously researched history spanning two millennia and three continents that comprehensively strips the ugly facade from the deeply rotten face of that most dire and destructive of imperial institutions: the United Kingdom.

“Black history is too often regarded as a segregated, ghettoized narrative that runs in its own shallow channel alongside the mainstream, only very occasionally becoming a tributary into that broader narrative. But black British history is not an optional extra. Nor is it a bolt-on addition to mainstream British history deployed only occasionally in order to add – literally – a splash of colour to favoured epochs of the national story. It is an integral and essential aspect of mainstream British history. Britain’s interactions with Africa, the role of black people within British history and the history of the empire are too significant to be marginalized, brushed under the carpet or corralled into some historical annexe.”

It’s impossible to overstate just how much ground this book covers: the legacy of empire and Bunce Island, Powell’s revisionism, royal complicity, Black Britons in 3rd-century York, 14th-century memoirs laying the groundwork for imperialism and colonisation by stoking English imaginings of the rich cornucopia of resources in the sun-scorched continent to the south (from diamonds big as houses in a savage egalitarian land of warring elephants and dragons to a mythical Black Christian kingdom promising a potential alliance that could quell the vast power of Islam), the first voyages of the 16th century and the devastating significance of Henry VIII breaking from the Catholic Church (annulling the papal bull that declared a Portuguese monopoly on the Gold Coast), the Black Tudors, the Black Georgians, Granville Sharp and the 18th-century legal battle against the slave trade, the American Revolutionary War, the Sierra Leone resettlement, the entire saga of abolition, the early Victorian era and the abolitionist literature that would define the next century, the anti-slavery mission, the colony of Freetown and the Recaptives, the cotton kingdom and how deeply entwined it was with Lancashire, the ramifications of the US Civil War, the brutal reality of Victorian Jamaica and the Morant Bay Rebellion, Victorian exhibitionism, the royal African delegations who travelled to Britain to campaign for the protection of their kingdoms (including that of King Khama of the BagammaNgwato people, Sebele I of the Kwêna people and Bathoen I of the Bangwaketse, which saw them visit every major city in the country from London to Liverpool, Enderby to Edinburgh, and became one of the most effective public-relations operations in British history), the colonial mission into the interior and the Scramble for Africa, WWI, WWII, the Empire Windrush, and beyond.

There are far far too many mind-blowingly interesting, appalling, devastating and/or enraging discoveries to list here, but I literally have a document with just under 25k words of notes and quotes – which officially takes the cake for my longest set of annotations (and that’s a tough list to crack).

“Our history is global, transnational, triangular, and much of it is still to be written.”

One of the most surreal elements of the reading experience was suddenly stumbling across familiar names like Wilberforce then having those so deeply embedded preconceptions utterly dissected and exposed for the egregiously perfunctory distortions they are.

“The sheer speed of the Scramble for Africa was breathtaking. In 1870, 10 per cent of Africa was under European control and 90 per cent of the continent was ruled by Africans. By 1900 that situation had been reversed. Ultimately only Ethiopia and Liberia resisted the European onslaught. Within three decades, nine million square miles of territory were added to the empires of Europe, one-fifth of the land area of the globe. Britain had, by some criteria, won the Scramble. One in three Africans became British colonial subjects; forty-five million people, more than the entire population of the UK at the time.”

This is a story of encounter and erasure, but also of reclamation and the restoration of “the presence of black people in parts of the British story from which they have been expunged – the world wars, the history of seafaring, the world of entertainment and many others”. I cannot even begin to process the enormity of my ignorance going into this book, but with the ever ongoing and relentless national denial of British institutional racism and the recent publication of the international disgrace that is the Sewell report, I’m very much of the opinion that it is quite simply essential reading.

Organisations to follow and support: The Black Curriculum, Impact of Omission, Fill in the Blanks, Kids of Colour, Reroot.ED, The Anti-Racist Educator, The Diverse Curriculum Charter.

If anyone ever reads this and would like a copy but can’t afford one – whether it be paperback/ebook/audiobook – message me, please. It’s on me.

“Black British history is everyone’s history and is all the stronger for it.”

“Knowing this history better, understanding the forces it has unleashed, and seeing oneself as part of a longer story, is one of the ways in which we can keep trying to move forward.”