Black and British: A Forgotten History

by David Olusoga

The same publication claimed that while ‘The revolution in Jamaica has come like a thunderclap upon the English people’, it had not surprised ‘those who have made even a partial study of the psychological character of the negro’. To the authors of the magazine the ‘Negro Revolt in Jamaica’ had perhaps finally woken the British from their long-held misconceptions about the nature of the African. ‘For the last half century’, the magazine asserted, ‘the negro has been an idol to the masses of the British public, and all classes of society have refused to listen to any depreciation of this chosen race . . . Nearly all classes in England have . . . agreed that the negro is a being very little (if at all) inferior, either mentally or morally, to the European. Men of science, even, have joined in the same chorus, and . . . come forward to defend this fashionable idol from any assaults his dignity may have sustained at the hands of the few who have declined to swell the strain of adulation.’ Finally, however, in the members of the Anthropological Society of London and their supporters there was ‘a small party in England, which within the last three years . . . has done something to stem this current of popular delusion’.51 During those three years since its foundation they had attracted a growing list of members, including Governor Eyre himself. As the Morant Bay scandal expanded, and the Royal Commission investigated the governor’s actions, Dr James Hunt and the society rushed to...