For as long as David Olusoga has been writing and broadcasting on black British history (almost two decades), he has received infuriated letters from the public. Nowadays, there are tweets too, which employ the same fulminating tone. “The number of people who say, ‘I’m sick of hearing about slavery’, or ‘black people are always talking about slavery’. My response to them is ‘Name a British plantation. Name a slave trader. Name a British slave ship.’ Normally they can’t, because we don’t know that much about slavery. It’s not a central part of our national story.”
Olusoga’s new book, “Black and British: A Forgotten History”, is not about slavery as such, but it is a radical reappraisal of the parameters of history, exposing lacunae in the nation’s version of its past. Domestic history cannot be separated from the vast former empire building, he argues, which was inextricably bound to the economics of global slavery. Joining up history at home and abroad makes it harder to gloss over Britain’s part in the slave trade.
It also becomes harder to ignore the legion of black Britons who have lived on the Sceptred Isle since Roman times, rarely acknowledged in mainstream textbooks, but whose presence proves that there was never a “year zero” or a lost idyll of ethnic purity to which modern day nativists can hark back. “Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history,” he says. “I’m trying to put those bits back in.”
Olusoga, 46, who started out at the BBC in 1998 as a researcher on Radio 4, is surely a “celebrity historian” in the making. He arrives in the hotel lobby for this interview fresh from Delhi, on his way to Mexico, in a sharp suit and with luggage in tow. He has an easy eloquence that is made for TV, speaking in perfectly formed, modulated sentences. His second book, “The World’s War”, won a Political Book award for “World War One Book of the Year” in 2015, no mean feat for a book published in the previous, centenary year (his first, “The Kaiser’s Holocaust”, looked at Germany’s colonial rule in Namibia). Meanwhile, his BBC2 series, “Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners”, earned a Bafta this year. Having just finished book three, he has put the next one (about the global history of slavery) on hold in order to co-present “Civilisations” alongside Simon Schama and Mary Beard. It is a 10-part remake of Kenneth Clark’s landmark documentary series on the history of Western art and thought, due on our screens next autumn.
There has not been much sleep in the past four months, the time it took to write “Black and British”, in between filming the tie-in TV series. It was first conceived two years ago, when former BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow approached Olusoga. He could not have known then how the national climate would change. “Is the TV series and book being delivered in the same country that it was commissioned for?” he wonders. “I’m not entirely sure.”
It is, he agrees, a fortuitously timed post-Brexit vote book. In it, Olusoga lists the flash points in modern black British history, from the unrest in 1919 when thousands in the country’s ports targeted local non-white communities, to the Cable Street riots attacking black sailors in London’s docklands, to the Notting Hill riots of 1958, and beyond. On each occasion, white communities turned on their black minority counterparts. Are we heading towards another flare-up of this kind? “I think we have the strength and the resourcefulness to confront parts of our history that are difficult and painful, but there’s also a dark side to British history and there was a flash of it this summer. We don’t know how deep or how serious it is yet.”
The change in tone, and chill in the air towards people of colour, has certainly been felt by him. “I’ve received tweets that I suspect people wouldn’t have sent in 2015. Is that a changed country or is that people who are unpleasant feeling emboldened to speak? We don’t know at the moment. As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.”
Olusoga was born in Lagos to a white British mother and a Nigerian father who met in Newcastle as students. His parents separated when he was two years old and his mother returned with him and his three siblings to her home town in the north-east, to work as a linguist. A mixed-race family was a rarity in Newcastle in the early 1980s, and Olusoga felt under attack every day, at school, on the streets: “People used to shout ‘National Front’ at us. And ‘wogs out’. It was routine, ubiquitous. There were men who would spit and shout. When we came out of school, we’d go to the bus stop and if there wasn’t a white person waiting, we’d walk to the next one because we knew the buses wouldn’t stop for black people. Sometimes we’d end up walking all the way home.”
But one summer, when he was 14, the violence went off the scale. A brick was thrown into the family’s home wrapped in a note telling them to go back to Africa. A police officer had to be stationed outside their door for protection, until the family was eventually rehoused. “It was the summer from hell,” he says. “Afterwards, I think we did that thing you do when you’ve been through something together as a family — we stopped talking about it, because it was over, we’d got through it.”
For this book, he opened up that conversation again and found some catharsis. It is heartening for him that his youngest siblings, born much later, can barely believe what it was like to be black and British then. “At my lowest moment, I wanted to leave the country. But it is no longer 1984. There has been too much integration. I was on a beach a few years ago, in the south of England, and I saw this guy who had bulldog tattoos, England flag tattoos — the sort of person I’d be really frightened of as a child — and he was with this mixed-race child who was clearly his granddaughter. It was such an amazing sight.”
That summer didn’t scar him, Olusoga reflects, because his was a strong, close family and his mother pushed them hard to succeed at school, and at life. They moved to another council estate (which appears briefly in the film “Get Carter” — “I saw it many years later when I was a student, I was amazed to see Michael Caine wander past my bedroom window”) and their lives returned to normality.
He later realised how the study of world history could help him make sense of that personal experience. He had always loved “great stories”, but over the years history “began to explain why things had happened to me and my family. It had answers. It made sense of the world and not just of my experiences but also why the north-east was the way it was, why those industries were there, why people felt the need to drive you out of your home, why some people could never accept the idea that I could be of this country, and be British.”
He went to Liverpool University and then to Leicester for a master’s degree before rejecting the idea of a PhD — “becoming an academic, doing a PhD, felt to me like never leaving school”. He joined the BBC instead, met his partner in the canteen (she is a producer at the Natural History Unit), and wound up in the job of his dreams. “I only ever wanted to do history, and make documentaries.”
Now, Olusoga wants to do more than rehabilitate lost or forgotten individuals. “I was trying to look at black British history beyond just biography,” he says, arguing that historians in the past have focused on the lives of black “heroes”, who remain on the margins. These exhumed figures need to be incorporated into mainstream history.
One excavation that resonates with him is an image of a black sailor, on the south-facing bronze relief panel at the bottom of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square. The panel shows Nelson mortally wounded and the sailor standing close by, musket in hand.
“He’s been there since the 1840s,” says Olusoga. “Think of all the things that have happened in Trafalgar Square since then — the mass union meetings, Keir Hardie’s speech, the CND marches, the poll tax riots. He was there to witness all that history and he’s there because he’s a representation of a norm — black sailors in the British navy. I think about what he’s witnessed, looking out at the changing world, watching Britain change.”
He is indelible proof for Olusoga — carved into a monument to heroic nationalism — that black Britons belong inside British history, not on its side-lines. There are other memorable figures, such as the third century’s sub-Saharan African woman who grew up in East Sussex, and John Blanke, a trumpeter at Henry VIII’s coronation. He hopes one day that TV dramas or documentaries on the court might incorporate, even incidentally, the black Tudors we know were there. As part of his TV series he places plaques in various locations to commemorate moments or figures in black British history, including a plaque at Bunce Island in Sierra Leone, which was used as a slave fortress, and in Samuel Johnson’s home in honour of his Jamaican manservant, Francis Barber.
The way that history is taught in schools and universities is telling half a story, Olusoga believes. What happened inside Britain cannot be separated from its global identity. “We were the biggest empire the world had ever seen. The idea that you can have a domestic history apart from it doesn’t make sense. Take the industrial revolution: the stories about spinning jennys and water frames are all part of our heritage. But where does the cotton being spun in those machines come from? At school, we went to mills and factories and nobody at any point in my education pointed out that the cotton processed in those mills was made by enslaved black Americans. When we talk about the history of the industrial revolution, the missing people in that revolution are the 1.8 million enslaved people who made that cotton. It was our biggest export and almost all of it came from the American deep south.” To fail to tell the story of these black Americans is, he thinks, “to tell a lie”.
So should we talk about the historical guilt and shame of the coloniser and colonised, passed down through the generations? “No. I want to excise the words ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ from the conversation. There is no one alive today who is a slave trader or a slave owner. I don’t think it’s about people feeling guilt or shame. It’s about acknowledgment, and it’s about truth and reconciliation. But I don’t even think we’ve done the truth bit yet.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
“Black and British: A Forgotten History” is published by Macmillan.
