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

by David Olusoga

Freetown was never a dumping ground for unwanted black people. Although the establishment of the Province of Freedom went disastrously wrong and although the treatment of the Nova Scotian settlers was never free from racial bias these schemes of settlement were relatively well funded and for the most part well meaning – in the mind of Granville Sharp they were intended to be almost utopian. The descendants of those early settlers, who form portions of the Krio population, are a people whose identities have been profoundly shaped by British slavery and by popular British opposition to slavery, a political and moral impulse that became one of the defining issues of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Living in their colonial-style wooden homes, imported from another lost British colony or gathered in the Maroon church they are a people who are as much a part of what we term ‘black British history’ as any community in Brixton, Toxteth or St Paul’s.