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

by David Olusoga

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...