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

by David Olusoga

In the year of my birth the Conservative Party’s General Election Manifesto contained a pledge to encourage voluntary repatriation of immigrants.

people of African descent have been present in Britain since the third century, and there have been black ‘communities’ of sorts since the 1500s.

Until a few years ago the ground of the Sorting Yard was littered with tiny glass beads and fragments of pottery that had been dropped and discarded by both buyers and sellers centuries earlier.

When in later decades the Jamaican-born British intellectual Stuart Hall explained to his British readers that the immigrants ‘are here because you were there’, he was seeking to remake the connections that Powell and others had sought to break.

In all sorts of ways relationships with Africa and Africans appeared critical to England’s survival in her existential struggle against the Catholic superpower that was Spain under Philip II.

Africa and her people were not only the focus of enormous excitement and curiosity, the continent came to represent a sense of limitless possibility and perhaps destiny to that expansive, mercantile, piratical, heretical England, as it exploded across the oceans during the reign of the Virgin Queen. The black face on the Drake Jewel was in that sense a perfect symbol of the age.

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 line immortalized thirty-three years later by J. M. W. Turner, who painted her being solemnly towed up the Thames by a steam-powered tug on her way to the breaker’s yard. Ordinary Seaman John Cupide was a twenty-year-old African who served on HMS Minotaur while twenty-three-year-old African William Hughes faced the French fleet from the decks of a British warship fittingly named HMS Africa, which had served in the American Revolution, another war in which black men fought for Britain. We know from his service records that William Hughes was discharged from the Royal Navy’s Haslar Hospital in Portsmouth on 14 January 1806, three months after the battle in which he presumably received his wounds. As far as we can tell it seems that against the odds all the African...

The involvement of the British monarchy in the slave trade is little known today yet the Stuarts were not unique in this respect. Queen Elizabeth I had invested in the early English slave-trading expeditions of Sir John Hawkins in the 1560s, and both the pirate Hawkins and his queen profited greatly from his successful slaving missions to the coast of West Africa.

The more educated and radical of the Lancashire mill workers were well aware that the hands which had tied the bales of cotton that arrived in their mills were those of black men and women who were the legal property of others. Any honest, comprehensive and full-blooded retelling of the history of the Industrial Revolution cannot fail to acknowledge their plight.

Olaudah Equiano, James Gronniosaw, Ira Aldridge, John Blanke the trumpeter at the court of Henry VIII, Francis Barber the servant and surrogate son of Samuel Johnson, George Africanus the eighteenth-century black entrepreneur – all of them intermarried. Knowingly or unknowingly their mixed-race ancestors carry on their blood-lines.

The mobility that was a feature of the late Roman Empire may well have meant that parts of third-century Eboracum may well have been more ethnically and racially diverse than parts of York today in the twenty-first century.

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.

Our mental image of the British in Africa is so firmly fixed in the so-called Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century that we struggle to recall that when Englishmen first arrived in Africa they came not in pith helmets and khaki uniforms but in doublets and hose. The English traders who infiltrated the Portuguese trading zones in coastal West Africa in the sixteenth century did not come as colonizers but, like all other Europeans, as traders.

The African peoples with whom they hoped to trade were members of societies that were neither inward-looking nor primitive. Centuries of contact with the Islamic states of North Africa and the Middle East had bound the region up with the wider world and trained its rulers in the profitable arts of long-distance trade and negotiation.

The leaders of these kingdoms tended to welcome the English as new customers, and to such militarily powerful and administratively competent African societies the English, in these early decades, must at times have looked unimpressive – few in number, often sickly, and plainly inexperienced.

He had also shown that buying and selling human beings could be as profitable as the trade in gold.

Queen Elizabeth was clearly pleased with the return on her investment, as soon afterwards Hawkins was knighted. The coat of arms he had designed for him in 1571 included an image of a female African slave.

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.

Most appear to have lived ordinary lives, marrying and raising families, and while the majority of these black Tudor Africans were domestic servants they appear not to have been enslaved.

It is significant that the testimony of Francis was admitted into an English court. He was a foreigner, a non-Christian, and an African marked out by difference in skin colour. Furthermore, he was enslaved. Yet his testimony was accepted and his humanity acknowledged by the court at a time when the testimonies of thousands of white English villeins (bonded serfs) would not have been admissible in court.

The Atlantic slave trade had taken Africans from numerous and widely differing cultures and ethnic groups and defined them en masse as ‘negroes’.

Within a decade of the Royal African Company’s formation, the English share of the Atlantic trade had increased from 33 per cent to 74 per cent, mainly at the expense of the Dutch and the French.30 Over the whole of its existence the Royal African Company dispatched into slavery around a hundred and fifty thousand African men, women and children.

the cane sugar that in two generations went from a frivolous extravagance – added to the food of the rich in tiny quantities – to one of the main sources of calories for the poor.

The social mobility that underwrites the incredible lives of the most famous of the black Georgians – Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Francis Barber and Bill Richmond – owed much to the education and opportunities opened up for them by the well-connected families within which they were ensconced, as well as to their own remarkable talents.

A former slave known as Black Harriott who, one report patronizingly claimed, ‘had attained a degree of politeness, scarce to be paralleled in an African female’, became a famous courtesan before her untimely and tragic death.

In 1701 Thomas Papillon of London left his son an enslaved man, ‘whom I take to be in the nature of my goods and chattels.’9 That Papillon felt the need to assert his claim to this enslaved man as chattel hints at some understanding on his part that the laws of England were unclear on the exact status of slaves, as they were to remain for at least another seventy years. In October 1718 the Bristol merchant Beecher Fleming evidently felt more confident about his right to leave ‘my negro boy, named Tallow’ to Mrs Mary Beecher, presumably his widow.

One of the most remarkable cases was that of 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.

In 1756 Mathew Dyer, a goldsmith on Duck Lane in Westminster, offered collars for sale as well as ‘silver padlocks for Blacks or Dogs’.

The practice of importing Negroe servants into these kingdoms is said to be already a grievance that requires a remedy, and yet it is every day encouraged . . . the main objections to their importation is, that they cease to consider themselves as slaves in this free country, nor will they put up with an inequality of treatment, nor more willingly perform the laborious offices of servitude than our own people, and if put to do it, are generally sullen spiteful, treacherous, and revengeful. It is therefore highly impolitic to introduce them as servants here, where that rigour and severity is impracticable which is absolutely necessary to make them useful.

The scene that followed starkly demonstrated the legal uncertainty over the status of slaves in Britain. The Lord Mayor could have viewed Jonathan Strong in one of two ways: as a man who despite having committed no crime had been kidnapped and imprisoned; or as an item of property who had been stolen from his legal owners by Granville Sharp.

In 1769, he published his book, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England. Arranged across four parts it weaved together case law with notions of natural law and Sharp’s deeply held Christian morality. In it he argued passionately against what he called the toleration of slavery, warning that, ‘If such a toleration would ever be generally admitted in England, (which God forbid!) we shall no longer deserve to be esteemed a civilized people’.16 Sharp predicted that any toleration of slavery in Britain would allow the cancer of unfreedom to spread and undermine the liberties of other groups, ‘when any part of the community, under the pretence of private property, is deprived of this common privilege [rights under the law], ’tis a violation of civil liberty, which is entirely inconsistent with the social principles of a free state. True liberty protects the labourer as well as his lord’.17

Granville Sharp’s campaign harnessed an interest in the issue of slavery that already existed and that was building within sections of the public. Here was an institution that raised difficult questions about the limits of the freedoms that Englishmen increasingly valued. Slavery was built on violence; it ripped families apart, separated husbands from wives and children from their mothers. All of this played on late Georgian notions of sentiment and tragedy. Much of this sentimentalism was paternalistic, and fixed the black African very much as a passive victim, but the emotions it elicited were real and powerful. The slow rise of a new Christian philanthropy, the same spirit that had provided both Jonathan Strong and James Somerset with white godparents from the churches in which they had been baptized, inspired a moral and religious fervour in people who, in later years, would be called abolitionists. To them the potential of the Somerset case was clear and unambiguous.

‘The power of a master over his slave has been extremely different, in different countries. The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.

In 1775 Samuel Johnson, writing from the London town house he shared with Francis Barber, asked, ‘how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’

In a public parade against the imposition of the Stamp Tax, Lee had a number of banners unveiled which denounced how that most hated of taxes had placed ‘chains of slavery’ around the necks of white American colonists. Lee felt no embarrassment in having his banners carried on the parade by his own slaves and there are no reports to indicate that any of Lee’s fellow Virginians felt any discomfort at the spectacle.

For all their talk of ‘Liberty to Slaves’, the British forces were largely racially segregated and some of the punishments to which black recruits were subjected, even for petty offences, were at times extreme and excessive. They had escaped slavery but not necessarily the whip.

Those who fought for the patriots must have hoped that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence would, some day, apply to them, but more American slaves concluded that King George was likely to confirm their freedom than George Washington. Yet while George Washington was a slave owner, King George was monarch of a nation that in the 1770s and 1780s was the most prolific slave-trading power in the North Atlantic. That Britain, with her fleets of slave ships and her sugar islands carpeted with plantations, was regarded as the best friend of the slave shows how desperately short of friends Africans in the New World were.

Fear of losing enslaved property and livelihoods built on the foundations of forced labour motivated some loyalists to turn patriot.

Yorktown was the Stalingrad of the Revolutionary Wars, a desperate siege that became the critical battle of the conflict. It was a battle fought by black men on both sides. The American army that besieged the British contained around fifteen hundred black soldiers, around a quarter of the entire force.

Around eighty thousand Africans were carried across the Atlantic to lives of slavery each year during the peak decade of the 1780s.

The puritanical, fanatical aspects of Sharp’s nature that had made him such an effective and belligerent campaigner against slavery in England in the 1760s and 1770s now blinded him to the deadly calamity that was being played out three thousand miles away in a doomed settlement named in his honour.

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.

Between that moment in 1618, when Richard Jobson recoiled at the mere suggestion that he or any Englishman would engage in the buying and selling of other human beings, and the passing, in 1807, of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain became the dominant slave-trading nation in the North Atlantic. 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.

They wrote and published thousands of tracts and pamphlets 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.

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. In his Address to the People of Great Britain of 1791, the abolitionist William Fox wrote, ‘If we purchase the commodity we participate in the crime. The slave-dealer, the slave-holder, and the slave-driver, are virtually the agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity . . . In every pound of sugar used . . . we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’.10

Cugoano’s shocking book was distributed among the great and the good; even George III was reportedly given a copy. Cugoano is another of the many notable black Britons who left us their words and experiences only to later disappear from the historical record. It’s believed he married an English woman and laid plans to open a school but nothing certain is known. If he has descendants they carry his blood line unknowingly.

Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano formed the Sons of Africa, a group of men who had known slavery themselves or who were descended from enslaved parents, and who met to fight against that institution. They included Boughwa Gegansmel, Jasper Goree, Cojoh Ammere, George Robert Mandeville, Thomas Jones, William Stevens, Joseph Almze, John Christopher, James Bailey, Thomas Oxford and George Wallace. The Sons of Africa were just as energetic as the white abolitionists, writing letters and making speeches, although the records of their activities are far from complete and much about them remains unknown.

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.

In 1797 he concluded that Britain’s ‘African trade is a national sin, for the enormities which accompany it are now generally known; and though perhaps the greater part of the nation would be pleased if it were suppressed, yet as it does not immediately affect their own interest, they are passive.’

In March 1792 the Danish government abolished the importation of enslaved Africans into the Danish colonies. Denmark was only a minor player in the Atlantic slave trade but she was the first to abandon it, a little-remembered historical detail about which the Danes remain rightly proud.