A review of the book “Black And British” by David Olusoga
There are many way of presenting the history of a nation. One is through a series of great characters and, in the case of British history, this is typically kings and queens. Another is through a series of great events and, in the instance of British history, this could be characterised as ‘1066 and all that’.British-Nigerian Professor Olusoga takes an utterly different approach: he gives a narrative account of Black people in British history. His original work on this theme was titled “Back And British: A Forgotten History” (2017) and it is quite a tome of over 600 closely-typed pages. Conveniently he has created “Black And British: A Short, Essential History” (2020) which is only 200 widely-typed pages with lots of illustrations. This shorter work is aimed at children but is equally attractive to busy adults.
Olusoga explains that Africans first came to Britain with the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago. He then jumps around 1,500 years and tells us about Black characters such as John Blanke, a trumpeter at the court of Henry VIII, and the five men of Shama, visitors from the Gold Coast (now Ghana). But the Black story becomes huge with the advent of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1640-1807). England was the world’s biggest slave-trading country, shipping some 3.5 million Africans to America and the West Indies.
Olusoga explains how long and hard was the struggle to make slave-trading illegal by the British. Then it took another 30 years after the abolition of the slave trade before there was the abolition of slavery itself. Eventually 46,000 slave owners were well-rewarded by the state but former slaves received nothing.
The world’s first Industrial Revolution (around 1760-1840) took place in Britain and it was powered by the cotton industry located around Manchester (my home town), but this industry was so profitable for the factory owners in large part because the cotton came from the plantations of the southern United States where slavery persisted until the American Civil War (1861-1865). Olusoga tells us about the ‘Scramble for Africa’ following the Berlin Conference of 1884 and then explains the contribution of Black soldiers to the British military effort in the two World Wars.
In 1945, there were probably fewer than 20,000 Black people in Britain. Today’s British Black population stands at around 2 million, a little more than 3% of the national population, with London (my home for over 50 years) being “the most diverse city on earth”. Olusoga explains how and why this happened and brings this history up-to-date with references to the Black Lives Matter movement and the removal of the Edward Colston statue.
Of course, the story is far from over as, only now, are institutions from the British monarchy to “The Guardian” newspaper (on whose board Olusoga sits) beginning to research and acknowledge the role that they played in the exploitation of Black people and the need to make some kind of restitution for this. History shapes who we are, but it is not fixed and needs to be constantly studied and reassessed.