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

by David Olusoga

The revolution of the ‘Black Jacobins’ lasted until 1804 and was one of the most profound events in the history of Atlantic slavery. It was the largest slave rebellion in history and the only one that was successful. The Haitian Revolution ended slavery on that island and led, eventually, to the creation of the first sovereign black state in the Western hemisphere. The causes and consequences of the Haitian Revolution are too many and too complex to discuss in detail here but to the gentlemen of property in Britain it was a deeply troubling event, mixing as it did French revolutionary ideology with potent and ancient fears of supposed black savagery.

Abolition was portrayed as something that was to be given to the enslaved by the British people rather than seized by them. Yet when the enslaved rose up against their brutalization and commoditization, whether on a plantation or a slave ship of the Middle Passage, and demanded freedom through physical force there were many in Britain who found this alternative picture of the African profoundly disturbing. This discomfort about black agency was repeatedly seized upon by the growing pro-slavery lobby and channelled into propaganda that played upon the well-established racial caricature of Africans as savage people whose innate capacity for violence necessitated brutal suppression and justified slavery.

Like Samuel Johnson before her, Elizabeth Heyrick was radical enough to be openly sympathetic towards slave rebellions, seeing them as legitimate rejections of tyrannical rule. Heyrick was a product of the second wave of female abolitionism that was concentrated in women’s abolitionist committees and societies across the country. Again women became the proselytizers of the sugar boycott and the organizers of abolitionist meetings and petitions. But in the 1820s female abolitionists appeared more radical than their male counterparts. In the city of Sheffield there was something approaching a schism, with the women’s abolitionist society demanding immediate abolition and the men’s committee advocating gradualism.

A rebellion broke out in the west of Jamaica. It was led by Sam Sharpe, a slave who was both literate and a Baptist deacon. What Sharpe had in mind was a form of strike. The rather modest demand he and his followers made was that they should be paid for their labour and they pledged to refuse to work after Christmas unless they were offered wages. So the most deadly slave rebellion in Jamaican history began as a sit-down strike in the cane fields, an almost Gandhian act of non-violent civil disobedience. The planters were already on edge and had been expecting some form of disturbance and they met the appeals of the strikers with bullets and bayonets.

The government recognized that it would have to foot the bill: twenty million pounds was raised and set aside to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners. That sum represented 40 per cent of all government spending for the year 1833 and is the equivalent of around seventeen billion pounds today, making it then the largest pay-out in British history. The eight hundred thousand slaves were to be freed, but not immediately. They were to be compelled to pay some of the cost of their own manumission. All slaves who worked the fields were to continue their labours for an additional six years, unpaid and for the same masters. Domestic slaves were to work for a further four years.

But Clarkson was just one among a long list of historical casualties. The contributions of the black abolitionists, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Ottobah Cuguano, the Sons of Africa and others were also redacted, and a similar fate befell the female abolitionists, like Elizabeth Heyrick and Hannah More. The pro-slavery men of the West India Interest are rarely discussed and nor is their leader George Hibbert. The slave rebellions that had nudged the nation towards final abolition were likewise forgotten; the black men and women who had led those uprisings, perished in them or who had been executed in the retribution that followed were reduced to footnotes or expunged entirely. The notion that the enslaved people had played a role in their own emancipation, that liberty had been demanded and fought for, rather than simply given, was for the most part forgotten.

‘I had risen as it were from the dead’, Brown later wrote. He came to Britain in October 1850 and went on tour. A year later he published an English edition of his Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. Brown and others presented his astonishing escape as proof of the desperate desire for freedom among the slaves, who Southern propagandists often claimed were content to live in a state of bondage.

Others elected to put an ocean between them and the armies of slave-catchers, kidnappers and bounty hunters who were unleashed upon people of colour by the 1850 law.

During the nineteen months from his arrival in 1845 to his departure in April 1847, Frederick Douglass, by his own estimation, lectured on slavery on three hundred occasions, meaning that he spoke publicly against slavery on more days than he was silent.

Humanity was an indivisible brotherhood and ‘when any part of that brotherhood is trampled into dust,’ he proclaimed, ‘all should spring at once to the rescue, and for their instant deliverance’.

In part because it was written by an American and set in the United States, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not usually thought of today as a Victorian novel, and its impact upon Britain and British culture has largely been forgotten, yet after the Bible it was the best-selling book in Britain during the entire nineteenth century. It went on to become the best-selling book of the century across the world.

From the 1830s to the 1850s white men in blackface delivered anti-slavery speeches from the stages of British theatres and music halls, in the same acts in which they rolled their eyes and crudely imitated black dancing, during their high-speed comic routines. Thomas Rice’s first performances as Jim Crowe in the Surrey Theatre were a mixture of singing and dancing, racial lampooning but also anti-slavery statements.

The Saro were members of the Yoruba tribe, and so were not ethnic outsiders, but culturally and religiously they were a hybrid people. They were Africans but also – despite very few of them ever setting foot in Britain – in a sense black Britons, laying claim to such an identity several decades before the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and a century before the emergence of Britain’s post-war black communities.

The wedding of two wealthy, highly educated and well-connected British Africans, one of whom had strong links to the Queen, was of huge interest to the press and the public. Hundreds of people – some reports say thousands – turned out on the streets of Brighton on the day to cheer the couple.

Three decades after abolishing slavery and half a century after abolishing the slave trade Britain was, economically speaking, up to her neck in Southern cotton slavery. Here the barriers between black British history and mainstream history break down. The Africans who grew and picked the cotton that landed in enormous bales on the docks of Liverpool, although they never set foot on British soil, are as much a part of our story as any black migrant. They were as much caught up in British power and the Atlantic economy as the West Indian slaves who just two decades earlier had been freed from bondage on British plantations. When Karl Marx looked at Britain as she was in the early 1860s, he saw the nation dependent upon two systems of slavery. ‘As long as the English cotton manufacturers depended on slave-grown cotton,’ he wrote, ‘it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic’.

For all her ‘moral prestige’, post-emancipation, anti-slavery Britain had ignored the calls of abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson and remained economically complicit in American slavery. In the 1860s the poor people in the English North-West paid a heavy price for that hypocrisy.

The intellectual movement that became known as Social Darwinism – of which Darwin himself was not an advocate – offered potential explanations of the mechanisms that were at work behind phenomena that others had identified. For example, many of those who supported Carlyle’s views on the inner nature of Africans had begun to suggest that black people were uniquely suited, or adapted, to labouring in the tropics. Long before the publication of On the Origin of Species it had been suggested that Africans were natural slaves because they were supposedly stronger and more vigorous than other races yet lacked the gifts of intellect and invention that might have made other forms of work appropriate. Others contended that black people felt pain less acutely than other races, which was surely a trait that further demonstrated their unique suitability for slavery. Slavery was also a fitting institution for Africans as they supposedly would only work when compelled to do so. Slavery was therefore a system appropriate to both their physical make-up and inner nature.

If the natural and inevitable fate of the Tasmanians was their extinction at the hands of British farmers and convict settlers then the evident and unavoidable destiny of the African was perpetual slavery.

‘The thickness of the skull of the negro had been wisely arranged by Providence to defend the brain from the tropical climate in which he lived. If God had not given them thick skulls, their brains would probably have become very much like those of many scientific gentlemen of the present day.’

What to modern eyes seems incongruous is that in the age of the scientific racism it was not the scientists but the novelists and poets who defended the massacres in Jamaica and the pseudo-scientific racism that was deployed to defend Eyre’s actions. On the Eyre Defence Committee were some of the most eminent of the Victorians: Charles Dickens, the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and Westward Ho!. Also supporting Eyre was John Ruskin, the critic and virtual arbiter of artistic taste in mid-Victorian Britain.

At the conclusion of his final prosecution the Spectator made a stark admission as to how little value some in Britain had come to place on the lives of black people. In an article entitled ‘The End of the Jamaica Prosecution’, it summarized the three years of the Morant Bay scandal and concluded that Britain had been willing to ‘pardon him, because his error of judgment involves only negro blood’, his actions would have ‘otherwise been in our nation’s eyes simply unpardonable.’48

Summing up, Reade’s advice when dealing with black people in Africa or the West Indies was this: ‘if you must fight with natives, kill them down. Kill them down not only for self-protection, but from a philanthropic principle. It seems paradoxical to say so, but there may be mercy in a massacre . . . had not Governor Eyre shown such prompt severity, we should now be sending out troops to save white men’s lives, instead of a Commission to sit upon black men’s carcases.’54

The misery that Reade sought to avoid and the blood he was determined to safeguard was that of white settlers, no massacre of the Africans was too extreme and no war of extermination too vast if it was undertaken in the spirit of ‘self-protection’ of the white race. In the closing chapter of his long and rambling book Reade called upon Europeans to accept his assertion that as the white race expanded across the African continent the African peoples themselves ‘may possibly become exterminated’. This process might be the result of philanthropic murder but deeper forces were also at work. The extinction of Africans would come as it was in accordance with the ‘beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong’.

The sheer speed of the Scramble for Africa was breathtaking. In 1870, 10 per cent of Africa was under European control and 90 per cent of the continent was ruled by Africans. By 1900 that situation had been reversed. Ultimately only Ethiopia and Liberia resisted the European onslaught. Within three decades, nine million square miles of territory were added to the empires of Europe, one-fifth of the land area of the globe. Britain had, by some criteria, won the Scramble. One in three Africans became British colonial subjects; forty-five million people, more than the entire population of the UK at the time.

It was a hectic, inventive and brilliantly stage-managed tour that turned three unknown African kings from minor southern tribes into national celebrities and unleashed a great torrent of press coverage in which Rhodes and the British South Africa Company were largely vilified. The three kings and their missionary allies ensured that every positive aspect of their characters and back stories was emphasized and publicized, and that the people they ruled over were portrayed as the innocent victims of Rhodes and his limitless ambition.

You speak to us as if you had taken our land in war and we had to beg it from you. The land is ours, not yours, and we cannot speak of giving the best parts to you. We occupy the waters with our cattle and our gardens, and we cannot remove our people for the sake of letting you sell our country.

On 20 November, at Windsor Castle, Khama, Sebele and Bathoen were finally granted an audience with Queen Victoria, who they knew as MmaMosadinyana – ‘the little woman of many days’.35 They returned to Bechuanaland in 1896 and the protectorate remained under direct British administration until 1960 when it became the modern state of Botswana. Khama, Sebele I and Bathoen I are recognized by Botswanans as founders of their nation. Had they not embarked upon their tour of Britain it is probable that Cecil Rhodes would have annexed the protectorate and incorporated it into what became Rhodesia.

Among the first black doctors in Britain were John Alcindor from Trinidad and the Jamaican Harold Moody, who studied medicine at King’s College but was denied a hospital position on account of his race. In the 1930s Moody formed the League of Coloured Peoples, a civil rights movement aimed at advancing the life chances of black Britons by attacking the inter-war colour bar and improving what later became known as race relations.

John Richard Archer was born in Britain but from West Indian stock; his father came from Barbados and his mother was Irish. Archer attended Coleridge-Taylor’s funeral and was politically active from a young age, becoming one of the first Africans to win public office in Britain and becoming a councillor for Battersea in 1906. In 1913, after a campaign marked by racial aspersions and questions over his nationality, he became mayor. As well as municipal politics he was active in Pan-Africanist and Labour politics, and corresponded with black political leaders in the United States.

J. A. Horton and W. B. Davis, both from Sierra Leone, became commissioned medical officers in the British army in the late 1850s. Horton was the son of an Igbo man who was liberated from a slave ship, landed at Freetown and later married a woman who was descended from the Nova Scotian settlers. Horton wrote four medical books, based on his experiences serving as a medical officer in West Africa, but is better remembered for his greatest political work, West African Countries and Peoples, British and Native: A Vindication of the African Race (1868). This eloquent denouncement of the pseudo-scientific racism of the Victorian age is a forgotten classic.

Among the ordinary soldiers who served in the Victorian army was Jimmy Durham, who was found as an infant by soldiers of the Durham Light Infantry abandoned on a battlefield in Sudan, in 1885. Renamed and brought to Britain he became an informal regimental mascot, then a bugle boy and finally, at fourteen, a boy soldier, his application being approved by Queen Victoria herself. He served with the Durham Light Infantry in India and after returning with his regiment to the North-East of England married a local woman. His mixed-race descendants lived in County Durham until the 1990s.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers originated in Nashville, Tennessee, then in the early 1870s introduced the British public to black American gospel music, bringing new songs into British churches, including ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. Their tour of Europe was one of the greatest musical events of the century. Lord Shaftesbury arranged for them to perform in London for six hundred specially selected guests and in 1873 they sang for Queen Victoria, who was said to have been affected by their rendition of the song ‘John Brown’s Body’.

What is striking about the surviving advertisements and reviews of Pablo Fanque’s circus is how few of them make mention of his race. The Caledonian Mercury in November 1838 described him as ‘a gentleman of colour’ but dedicated far more column inches to describing his various ‘feats’ and ‘leaps’ than his complexion.41 Neither Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine nor the Illustrated London News in 1847 saw any difficulty in describing this black British entrepreneur ‘as a native of Norwich’.42

Fanque gave numerous benefit performances in aid of local charities or even individuals who found themselves in distress, including an 1843 performance in Town-Meadows Rochdale that was billed as ‘BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE’. Despite the fame he enjoyed in the mid-nineteenth century, Pablo Fanque would be almost completely forgotten today were it not for a bizarre, chance happening. In 1967 a poster advertising the 1843 Rochdale performance of ‘Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal’ was bought from an antique shop in Sevenoaks, Kent, by John Lennon, who was there to film a video for the Beatles’ songs ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Lennon and Paul McCartney took the text of that poster, which listed the various acts due to appear alongside Pablo Fanque, and transformed them, sometimes verbatim, into the lyrics of the song ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ which appears on the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Pablo Fanque himself is mentioned in the song.

That day, far from the battlefields of France and Belgium, Lance Corporal Alhaji Grunshi of the British West African Frontier Force became the first soldier in British service to fire a shot in the land war. Ten days later Edward Thomas, of the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards, became the first white British soldier to fire his rifle in anger in Europe. The First World War began in Africa and it was to end there on 14 November 1918, when the last German units surrendered, three days after the armistice in Europe.

What became of them afterwards is difficult to ascertain, but for three of them we have Royal Navy service records. They tell us that Eric Blakely from Trinidad survived the war. The last record of him was in April 1920. Arthur Ford, another Trinidadian, also survived and at the end of the war both he and Blakely received the Mercantile Marine Medal, awarded for service in hostile waters. Albert Goppy also made it through, but died young, at only thirty-two.

Despite relying so heavily upon Indian soldiers in 1914 and 1915 and despite having at their disposal vast reservoirs of potential manpower from Africa and the West Indies, the generals and politicians remained determined that war on the Western Front was to be ‘a white man’s war’.

However in 1915 Andrew Bonar Law, Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a secret memorandum in which he concluded that the recruitment of Africans would pose too great a threat to British rule in Africa after the war – particularly in South Africa as there ‘a large body of trained and disciplined black men would create obvious difficulties, and might seriously menace the supremacy of the white.’

A number of men from the West Indies made their way to Britain and – unlike the West Ham stowaways of 1915 – successfully enlisted in British army units. Among them was Lionel Fitz Herbert Turpin from British Guyana, who rejected the opportunity to serve with the BWIR and joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Turpin fought in France and survived the war, although had to endure the effects of exposure to poison gas for the rest of his life.

Another group who were even better placed were West Indians and Africans who were resident in Britain at the outbreak of the conflict. When the mixed-race Jamaican brothers Roy and Norman Manley, who were studying in Britain in 1915, attempted to join the Royal Flying Corps, they were refused. However, both were later accepted into the Royal Field Artillery. An Oxford Rhodes scholar, Norman Manley manned guns on the Somme and was promoted during the war. He was, however, appalled by the routine racism and prejudice. Roy Manley was killed near Ypres in 1917. Norman went on to become Jamaica’s first chief minister and never forgot his experiences during the war. He is recognized today as one of the National Heroes of Jamaica.

In May 1917, Walter Tull won his commission as second lieutenant. Not only had he been permitted to fight in Europe against a European enemy, he was now to lead white British troops into action. Later, in 1917, Second Lieutenant Tull took part in operations on the Italian Front, for which he was mentioned in dispatches. He was also recommended for the Military Cross. In March 1918, during the German spring offensive, he was killed in action near the French village of Favreuil. His body was never recovered from the battlefield, despite attempts by men of his unit to do so. He is listed as one of the missing, among the 34,785 names engraved into the Arras Memorial in Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

Within weeks of the end of the war white sailors who had served alongside black seamen during the conflict had begun to inform their employers that they were now unwilling to work with them.

Alongside the lynching of Charles Wootton, this was perhaps the most heartrending of the many tragic spectacles of 1919; the sight of four hundred black people, men, women and children, being marched through the streets of Liverpool under police escort – some of them made refugees in their own city.

The Aliens Order of 1920 and Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of 1925 further required all black seamen domiciled in Britain, including British subjects, to register with the police and then prove their nationality. An initiative of the Home Office Aliens Department, this legislation has been described as ‘the first instance of state-sanctioned race discrimination inside Britain to come to widespread notice’.

In Cardiff in the 1920s, men with passports, discharge papers from war service in the army or navy and even birth certificates, all demonstrating their status as British subjects, were forced by the police to register as aliens. One seaman who had his passport confiscated and issued with an Aliens Card was threatened with arrest when he refused to accept it.72 These restrictions and the spread of a colour bar in inter-war Britain meant that in one narrow sense the mobs of 1919 had succeeded in their efforts to strip black people of their status as full British citizens.

In December 1943 George Orwell noted that ‘The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.’8 A pub in Bristol displayed a notice that read ‘Only blacks served here’ and when the landlady in another bar was confronted by white Americans who were angry that coloured customers were served their drinks and treated as equals, she responded, ‘Their money is as good as yours, and we prefer their company.’

They were fine words, but black Britons who could recall 1919, or who had experienced the colour bar and the prejudice of the inter-war years, knew that they offered a highly idealized view of Britain and British race relations. Yet the attempts – both official and impromptu – by the Americans to enforce racial segregation, and the unabashed and overt prejudice that the US Army brought with it to Britain, allowed the press and public to adopt a position of moral superiority on the issue of race, as their ancestors had done over the issue of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. Racial prejudice was considered an American vice that the more civilized and culturally sophisticated British rejected.

Few politicians believed that large numbers of non-white people from the ‘new commonwealth’ would make use of their new rights to reside in Britain, yet that is exactly what they did. Quite unintentionally, the post-war government that had been busily discouraging immigration by non-white people from the West Indies had signed the warrant for exactly the sort of mass migration they so vehemently opposed.

When the violence began in 1948, the hostels in which black sailors lived were once again targeted. When, on the second day of the disturbances, a mob two thousand strong attacked one hostel, the police responded exactly as they had done thirty years earlier during the disturbances in Great George Square that led to the death of Charles Wootton: they raided the hostel and arrested the black men trapped inside. What followed in Liverpool was intergenerational distrust of the police by the black community that lingered on into the 1980s.

In 1954, during lunch at Chequers with the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, Churchill expressed his concern that if West Indian migration continued ‘we would have a magpie society: that would never do’.23 A year later Harold Macmillan reported in his diary, with some incredulity, that Churchill thought ‘Keep Britain White’ might make an appropriate slogan with which to fight the upcoming election.24 In the aftermath of the Second World War such appeals to racial sentiment were widely regarded as unacceptable.