Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

The girl who innocently brought her golliwog doll into our classroom plunged me into a day of humiliation and pain that I still find hard to recall, decades later. When, in recent years, I have been assured that such dolls, and the words ‘golliwog’ and ‘wog’, are in fact harmless and that opposition to them is a symptom of rampant political correctness, I recall another incident. It is difficult to regard a word as benign when it has been scrawled onto a note, wrapped around a brick and thrown through one’s living-room window in the dead of night, as happened to my family when I was a boy of fourteen. That scribbled note reiterated the demand that me and my siblings be sent ‘back’. In

the ‘seasoning’, a brutal period of punishments, beatings, cultural deracination and instruction designed to break the spirit. The ‘production line’ at Bunce Island moved from east to west. African captives arrived on a beach on the eastern side of the island. They were landed there by inland slave-traders who had brought them on river canoes. Some of these traders were Africans, others were from mixed-race Afro-Portuguese or Afro-English peoples, powerful coastal communities that were the offspring of European slave-traders and local women. By the time the captives arrived on the ‘slave beach’ they were already profoundly traumatized. Most had been seized in slave raids against their home villages. These typically took place in the early hours of the morning in order to capture people at their most disorientated. The old and very young, whose economic value was negligible and who might slow down the caravan, were murdered in front of their relatives. These killings were intended to shock those taken captive into meek submission. So effective was this tactic that European slave-traders on Bunce Island and elsewhere complained that the captives arrived in a stupor, a condition that was called ‘the lethargy’, but which modern psychologists would recognize as PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder. From the slave beach the silent, sullen captives were marched up a short pathway to the Sorting Yard, an open area located directly in front of the main defensive walls of the fortr...

Black Britons were to Powell and those like him a constant reminder of the lost empire and the connections and interconnections that had made Britain powerful. But more than that they profoundly undermined another idea that was sacred to Powell; that whiteness and Britishness were interchangeable, and always had been.15 The idea, already current in the early 1960s, that the nation should change, adapt to the presence of black and brown Britons, denounce racism and pass anti-discrimination laws, was counter to Powell’s conception of England. These ethnic outsiders, as he saw them, should not be accommodated but marginalized and ideally expelled; he called it ‘re-emigration’, and described them as the ‘immigrant-descended population’. If this was not possible then a new definition of Britishness and British citizenship had to be established, one that viewed Britishness in racial terms, something that English law had rarely done. With the exception of a couple of minor inter-war ordinances, the English common law had – in letter if not always in practice – been colour-blind. In one of his most emphatic and disturbing statements, made late in 1968 and several months after he had predicted that ‘rivers of blood’ would flow in British streets, Powell dismissed utterly the concept of integration and rejected the notion that it was ever possible for a non-white person born in Britain to become British in a true or meaningful sense. ‘The West Indian or Indian does not, by being bor...

a young black sailor not out of some nineteenth-century sense of ‘political correctness’ or as some gesture of ethnic tokenism. The black sailor is there in bronze because men just like him were there in flesh and bone, on the ships that fought at Trafalgar. The evidence for their presence can be found in the muster books of the ships of Nelson’s fleet held at the National Archives in London. These documents list the names, pay-book numbers, ages and places of birth of every man who did his duty under Admiral Nelson that day.22 Among them are men from across Britain but also others from India, Malta, Italy and the former American colonies. There are also eighteen men listed as having been born in Africa and another hundred and twenty-three in the West Indies. One African and six West Indians are listed as serving under Nelson on HMS Victory. Among the Africans at Trafalgar were John Amboyne, who was twenty-seven years old and had been born in Guinea. He served as a landsman on HMS Defiance. George Brown, also born in Guinea, was a boy of just thirteen at the time of the battle. He fought on HMS Colossus alongside two other African-born shipmates, the twenty-year-old William Cully and thirty-five-year-old Jean Moncier, who had been born in Sallee in Morocco. Ordinary Seaman George Butler was twenty-six in 1805 and fought on HMS Orion. John Ephraim, who had been born in Africa’s Calabar Coast, in what is today Nigeria, served on board HMS Temeraire, the 98-gun ship of the li...

Take the history of the Industrial Revolution. It is constantly replayed in our national imagination as a history of coal and iron, of factory towns and mines, and has rightly become a central feature of our national self-image. It is commemorated and perpetuated by a huge industry of working mills, heritage sites and recreated model communities, often replete with re-enactors and working steam trains and traction engines. At these sites and in our classrooms generations of Britons are transported back to those frenetic, dynamic and inventive decades when this small island became the ‘workshop of the world’. Central to this history is the story of the mills of Lancashire, and the great industrial rivalry that was fought between Liverpool, the great port of the Atlantic-facing empire, and Manchester, the world’s first industrial mega-city. Between them these two industrial giants dominated the global production of cotton cloth and cotton clothes and by the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign the cotton industry employed almost one and a half million people. Millions more worked in ancillary industries or were dependent upon the cotton economy. What is remembered today are not these startling employment figures, or the wealth generated by cotton, but the social history of Factory Acts, child labour, spinning jennies and water-frames. Yet this is a history that is usually silent about the source of the cotton that was processed in Lancashire’s 4,500 mills. The great bulk of that...

Over a millennium before the British people began their ‘years of distant wandering’ and empire-building the Beachy Head Lady – the first black Briton known to us – had lived and died in rural East Sussex, by the Channel coast with its white cliffs and green rolling hills.

From the sixteenth century onwards, the legend that Africans were the ‘sons of Ham’ was often invoked to explain their blackness. The legend was also to have far-reaching and dismal consequences, as it was later deployed as a justification for New World slavery. According to scripture, Ham had humiliated his father, and as punishment for his transgression Noah had placed a terrible curse upon Ham’s son Canaan. This curse was to be passed on to all of Canaan’s descendants in perpetuity. In the relevant passage of Genesis, Canaan was condemned to become ‘a servant of servants . . . unto his brethren’, and that same status was to be passed down to each generation for all time. Although neither race nor skin colour is mentioned within these passages from Genesis, at some point the story of the Curse of Ham became racialized. George Best stated that Noah had intended that all the children of Ham ‘should be so black and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the world’. Best believed that it was from ‘this black and cursed’ line of humanity that ‘all these black Moores which are in Africa’ had sprung.33 How fast and how far that idea spread is difficult to determine, but George Best was not alone in interpreting the black skin of the African as the marker of the curse of endless servitude that Noah had imposed upon the sons of Ham. In an age in which scripture was the highest source of knowledge and explanation, this biblical story – obscure and bizar...

Nathaniel Wells, the favourite son of a prominent St Kitts plantation owner. Educated in Britain, in 1794 he inherited a fortune worth around £200,000 on his father’s death, which included three sugar estates and the slaves who worked them. Among the slaves was his own mother, an enslaved woman who had remained the legal property of his father. Wells freed his mother and a handful of other relatives but continued as a slave owner, despite his own racial heritage. As a mixed-race man he understood that his presence in the Caribbean would be unwelcome and so never returned to St Kitts. He used his great fortune to buy a country home, the grand Piercefield House, near Chepstow, and there he played the part of a country gentleman, becoming High Sheriff of Monmouthshire.

Granville Sharp. Thin-faced and punctilious, he was a descendant of Yorkshire Puritans and he looked the part. But this bookish, pious civil servant, who spent his spare time playing the flute, was the man who was to take on the slave owners of the so-called West India Interest and force the reluctant lawmakers of England to make a final and begrudged determination on the legality of slavery in Britain. He was to influence the lives of more people than he could possibly have imagined.

James Somerset, the man whose personal freedom had become the subject of this epic trial, disappears from written records, his later life lost to us. His name, of course, linked for ever to those of Lord Mansfield and Granville Sharp, lived on, but the Somerset judgement for which he is remembered was not what most people at the time understood it to be and not what many historians subsequently reported.

Patrick Henry, famous for his great patriotic call to arms, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, was horrified to discover that several slaves had escaped from his Leatherwood plantation, seizing their own liberty and rejecting the ‘living death’ that was the existence of a plantation slave.13 Many factors motivated the rebellion of

On 25 November 1783 George Washington, mounted on a grey horse, marched the Continental Army down the length of Manhattan. At 1 pm a cannon was fired to signal the departure of the last British soldiers. Among the very last to leave were the black auxiliaries of the Royal Artillery and the Wagon Master General’s Department. General Washington did not find his slave Harry Washington in liberated New York; he was among the three thousand who had sailed for Nova Scotia. Of the twenty thousand black loyalists who escaped, most were sent there, and Birchtown became, for a while, the largest free black settlement in the Americas. Some of the loyalists who settled there eventually moved again to a settlement just a few miles from Bunce Island; others were sent to the West Indies – Jamaica, Nassau and St Lucia. A few hundred who had mainly been evacuated from New York crossed the Atlantic to Britain.

Half of all the Africans who were carried into slavery over the course of the eighteenth century were transported in the holds of British ships. Some estimates put the total shipped by the British at around three and a half million.

The traffic in enslaved Africans was never more detestable than in 1783 when the details of what took place on board the Zong became known in Britain. The basic facts are simple and shocking. In September 1781 the Zong, a Liverpool-registered slave ship, sailed from Accra in Ghana with four hundred and forty-two slaves on board, around twice the number a ship of that size could reasonably expect to transport without catastrophic loss of life. By early December, after a series of amateurish and baffling navigational errors, the ship was running out of fresh water and disease had broken out on the slave decks and among the crew. To preserve supplies and protect their profits by ensuring that at least some of the slaves reached market in Jamaica alive, the crew of the Zong cast a hundred and thirty-three of the most sickly slaves overboard. This was not done in a single moment of murderous haste but gradually and systematically, over the course of three days. The victims were selected from the decks below by the captain, Luke Collingwood. It was a clinical massacre of innocents but it had stemmed from a strange mixture of callous self-interest and professional incompetence, for when the Zong arrived in Jamaica just three weeks later there were still 420 gallons of water on board. Just two hundred and eight of the four hundred and forty-two Africans who had been packed into the Zong in Accra were still alive. This terrible incident was brought to wider national attention only ...

In 1787, four years after the Zong affair and the year in which the black poor of London departed for the new colony of Sierra Leone, the abolitionist movement was formally born. Its place of birth was a printing shop at 2 George Yard, London,

and pioneered the use of the mass petition as a campaigning tool. They harvested millions of individual signatures from the British public and delivered to Parliament hundreds of petitions. Historians have calculated that between 1787 and 1792, 1.5 million people in Britain signed petitions against the slave trade, when the national population was just 12 million.9 The first anti-slave-trade petitions had been presented to Parliament even before the formal establishment of the anti-slavery movement in 1787. The abolition movement also deployed the boycott as a political weapon. Abolitionists were encouraged to eschew the use of rum and cane sugar produced by slaves and instead use sugar produced in India by free labour, or else add lemon to their tea.

John Wesley read the Interesting Narrative on his death-bed and it was reviewed by Mary Wollstonecraft.

the women of Britain. Denied the vote or any meaningful role in politics – which was regarded as being an entirely male preserve – women were, to some extent and in some quarters, permitted to become active participants in individual causes. Significantly, it had long been deemed socially acceptable for women to raise petitions, which were then delivered to Parliament – an assembly which, of course, was then entirely male. Propriety set limits on how active and how vocal women were able to become in their chosen cause but the humanitarian nature of the abolitionist crusade, with its emphasis on mercy, compassion and the preservation of the family, was deemed fittingly feminine. The energies and compassion of women were thus given an outlet and female abolitionists formed their own organizations and committees. They held abolitionist events, wrote pamphlets, tracts and poems, gathered signatures for the petitions and raised campaign money. At certain times and in certain places they were the engine room of the movement. Traditionally confined to the domestic sphere, women brought anti-slavery politics into the home via the sugar boycott. It was women who did the most to promote and propagate that campaign which drew the mocking scorn of journalists and the engravers of satirical cartoons. The abolitionist movement, especially in its campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s, could not possibly have achieved what it did without their involvement.

Newton was also the author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. As the words of that famous hymn hint, his conversion from slave-trader to abolitionist came about after his moral epiphany – ‘I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see’.

1 January 1808. The British slave trade, begun in the 1660s under King Charles II, had, by this act, been ‘utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful’.21 It has been estimated that between 1789 and 1807, the two decades in which the political battle to end the slave trade was fought, 767,000 Africans were transported to slavery in British ships.22