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

by David Olusoga

Thanks to their work it is today well understood that people of African descent have been present in Britain since the third century, and there have been black ‘communities’ of sorts since the 1500s.

on the plantations of the Americas during the ‘seasoning’, a brutal period of punishments, beatings, cultural deracination and instruction designed to break the spirit.

A handful have even been able to trace the names of their ancestors.

There it is possible to pick up the remnants of a bottle that was, perhaps, thrown into the sea two centuries earlier, by a man who traded in enslaved human beings.

In the 1990s the African American historian Gretchen Gerzina was informed by an assistant in a London bookshop that there ‘were no black people in England before 1945’.

The denial and avowal of black British history, even in the face of mounting documentary and archaeological evidence, is not just a consequence of racism but a feature of racism.

a little over a year after Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech,

‘There was this deep, this providential difference between our empire and those others’, he suggested. What was special was ‘that the nationhood of the mother country’ had, according to him, ‘remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her’.

Britain had somehow remained, in Powell’s word, ‘uninvolved’ in the whole enterprise.

This continuity had been preserved by Britain’s unique and uniquely ancient institutions: the law, the monarchy and particularly Parliament. These great constants had forged what he called the ‘homogeneity of England’, which he believed had survived the Age of Empire essentially unaltered.

But more than that they profoundly undermined another idea that was sacred to Powell; that whiteness and Britishness were interchangeable, and always had been.

There had been and still existed what Professor Hall called ‘an umbilical connection’ between Britain and the empire, and there could be ‘no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions’.18

Sir Francis Drake’s mission to circumnavigate the globe in 1577 was achieved with a crew that was what we today would call inter-racial.

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

it shows how the black African, perhaps in this case a black emperor, had become part of the visual culture of the age, a figure in the English imagination.20

Enoch Powell was right, there is some continuity in British history, but it is in large part the continuity of contact, globalism, empire, interaction, migration, alliance-building, travel, exploration, exploitation, slavery, trade and intermarriage.

As a result even today many people in Britain have a more vivid image of American slavery than they do of life as it was for enslaved Africans on the British plantations of the Caribbean.

As far as we can tell it seems that against the odds all the Africans identified in the muster books survived the Battle of Trafalgar. After that, and like so many of the black people in our story, they fade from the official record and disappear.

The guinea was so named because it was made from gold bought on Africa’s Guinea Coast. On one side of the coins was the head of the King and on the other the symbol of an elephant and castle – the trademark of the Royal African Company.

James II dispatched a representative to London to liquidate his shares, the former king’s profits amounted to £5,730,23 and were used to help fund his comfortable exile in Paris.

There the company initials – ‘RAC’ – were branded onto their chests. At other times the company preferred to brand Africans with the letters ‘DY’ – for Duke of York. Literally and figuratively these were the company’s ‘brands’ and they were intended to be indicators of quality.

This alternative origin story, being conveniently free from any association with the history of slavery and racism, has often been favoured.

The black men and women of the American South are the missing persons in the popular retelling of our industrial heritage. As we today lament the suffering of the Victorian mill workers we forget that many of them felt a comparable sense of sympathy for the slaves of the United States.

We are moving to an age in which the ‘black community’ could end up being smaller than the mixed-race community. We might, in decades to come, be a country in which black families in which all the faces are black will be rare, or they will be the families of recent immigrants.

Black British history cannot be understood solely as the history of the black experience. It has always also been the story of encounter.

Black British history is everyone’s history and is all the stronger for it.

it recorded that in the middle of the third century, at the nearby Roman fortress of Aballava, a unit ‘of Aurelian Moors’ had been stationed.1

The Beaumont inscription and the Notitia Dignitatum are among the small number of artefacts and inscriptions that between them record the presence of Africans at various Roman sites in Britain.

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.

Medieval Europe knew that not only had the Greeks and Romans reached sub-Saharan Africa, but black people from those regions had moved north and been part of Greek and Roman societies, as both free and enslaved people.

In the 1550s, just as the first English traders began to reach West Africa, a new popular edition of Pliny’s Summary of the Antique Wonders of the World was published in England.8

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville – Mandeville’s Travels, as it is more commonly known – was originally written in French, sometime in the mid-fourteenth century (some sources suggest 1356 or 1357).

(if plagiarism is the appropriate word for the way that medieval authors habitually took liberties with one another’s texts when compiling their own).10

Ethiopia’s Christians gradually became known to Europeans during the late medieval period, and it seems possible that the reality of Coptic Ethiopia at some stage fused with the legend of Prester John.

The medieval myth and the tantalizing prospect of a grand pan-Christian alliance lingered on until the seventeenth century.

In 1419 King Henry of Portugal, known as ‘Henry the Navigator’, ordered his captains to venture around the North African coast.

The trade in slaves did not count for much at this stage, although both African and Berber people were captured on some of these early ventures and enslaved in small numbers. The real lure of Africa was gold.

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.

Some of the kingdoms of West Africa had, like Benin, constructed cities, and there was no question of all their populations living in straggling villages prone to seaborne incursion.

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.

These were not people to be swindled, and they were quick to spot any attempt to cheat or defraud them. ‘When we have brought them things they did not like,’ de Marees reported, ‘they have mocked us in a scandalous way.’23

Centuries later, those brass reliefs were wrenched from the walls and doors of the palace and sold to defray the costs of the punitive British expedition launched against the city in 1897. They can today be found in museums across Europe and North America, with a large collection on display in the British Museum.

In 1564 and again in 1567 Hawkins embarked upon further slave-trading missions to the West African coast, attracting investors from the political elite of the Elizabethan court.

The coat of arms he had designed for him in 1571 included an image of a female African slave.

It was to be a century before it would be revived in any serious sense. In the interim, the English discovered themselves to be more adept at privateering – licensed and state-sanctioned piracy against the Spanish treasure fleets – than slave-trading.

To the modern observer one key feature of the Age of Discovery is that Europeans could continue to harbour beliefs in medieval myths even in the face of observed and verifiable reality.

What about children born to inter-racial couples: would they be black, white or some other hue? And what, if anything, did the black skin of the African signify?

30 If a mixed-race child conceived by an African man and an English woman was born with dark skin, then there had to be some other explanation for ‘the Ethiopians great blackness’, Best reasoned.

Up until 1492 there had been only three known continents, and upon each, it was believed, resided the three races of mankind.

From the sixteenth century onwards, the legend that Africans were the ‘sons of Ham’ was often invoked to explain their blackness.