[ The professor and broadcaster discusses writing black
Britishness back into history, the backlash this provokes – and why
he’s so proud of his heritage.] [[link removed]]

DAVID OLUSOGA ON RACE AND REALITY: ‘MY JOB IS TO BE A HISTORIAN.
IT’S NOT TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL GOOD’  
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Aamna Mohdin
June 7, 2021
The Guardian
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_ The professor and broadcaster discusses writing black Britishness
back into history, the backlash this provokes – and why he’s so
proud of his heritage. _

, "Make Me Look Like Sean Paul" by Kris Krug is licensed under CC
BY-SA 2.0

 

History’s purpose isn’t to comfort us, says David Olusoga
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the UK seem to think it is. “History doesn’t exist to make us feel
good, special, exceptional or magical. History is just history. It is
not there as a place of greater safety.”

As a historian and broadcaster, Olusoga has been battling this
misconception for almost two decades, as the producer or presenter of
TV series including Civilisations
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The World’s War, A House Through Time
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the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners
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His scholarship has been widely recognised: in 2019, he was awarded an
OBE and made a professor at the University of Manchester. (He is also
on the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group.) Yet
apologists for empire, in particular, like to dismiss him as a “woke
historian” in an attempt to politicise his work or flatly deny the
realities that he points out.

Now he can expect more flak, thanks to the new edition of his
book Black and British: A Forgotten History
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First published in 2016, and made into a TV series the same year
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the book charts black British history from the first meeting between
the people of Britain and the people of Africa during the Roman
period, to the racism Olusoga encountered during his own childhood,
via Britain’s role in the slave trade and the scramble for Africa.
It is a story that some of Olusoga’s critics would prefer was
forgotten.

Hostility to his work has grown since the Brexit vote, shooting up
“profoundly since last summer”, he says, speaking over Zoom from
his office in Bristol. “It has now got to the point where some of
the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and
unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing
them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is
that they know that this is not true, but they have decided that these
national myths are so important to them and their political projects,
or their sense of who they are, that they don’t really care about
the historical truths behind them.

“They have been able to convince people that their own history,
being explored by their own historians and being investigated by their
own children and grandchildren, is a threat to them.”

For Olusoga, 51, this hostility can in part be explained by ignorance.
“If you were taught a history that the first black person to put his
foot on English soil was stepping off the Windrush in 1948, then this
can seem like a conspiracy,” he says.

But there is a deeper issue at play. “If you have been told a
version of your history and that is part of your identity, it’s very
difficult when people like me come along and say: ‘There are these
chapters [that you need to know about].’ People feel – wrongly in
my view – that their history is being undermined by my history. But
my history isn’t a threat to your history. My history is part of
your history.”

When the book was published in 2016, it ended on a hopeful note.
Olusoga was writing just a few years after the London Olympics, in
which a tantalising view of Britain emerged – a country at ease with
its multiculturalism, nodding with pride to the arrival of the
Windrush generation in 1948. Black Londoners dressed up as their
ancestors for the opening ceremony
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“with long, baggy suits, holding their suitcases”, says Olusoga.
“You have to have a real tenure in the country to play your
ancestors.” That moment, he says, was profoundly beautiful.

But that upbeat note has begun to feel inaccurate – an artefact of a
more optimistic time. In the new edition of Black and British, which
includes a chapter on the Windrush scandal
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year’s Black Lives Matter protests, Olusoga describes that moment in
2012 as a mirage. The summer afterwards, vans bearing the message
“Go home or face arrest” were driven around London
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part of Theresa May’s notorious “hostile environment” strategy,
aiming to make the UK inhospitable for undocumented migrants.
Thousands of people who had lived legally in the UK for decades, often
people who had arrived from the Caribbean as children, were suddenly
targeted for deportation.

In 2020, protesters in more than 260 British towns and cities took
part in BLM protests
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thought to be the most widespread anti-racist movement since the
abolition of the slave trade. A statue of the slave trader Edward
Colston was toppled in Bristol
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a Guardian analysis suggests about 70 monuments to slavers and
colonialists have been removed, or are in the process of being
removed, across the UK.

But this movement for racial justice has been met with a severe
backlash. In January, Robert Jenrick, the secretary of state for
housing, communities and local government, said he would introduce
laws to protect statues from what he called “baying mobs”
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The government’s recent review on racial equality
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controversially that there was no institutional racism in areas
including policing, health and education, despite all the evidence to
the contrary.

“I’m really frightened about the future of this country, and
frightened about people using forces of race and racism for electoral
reasons and not being cognisant about how difficult it is to control
those forces after elections have been counted,” says Olusoga.
“I’m really frightened about the extent to which people are able
to entirely dehumanise people who they deem to be their enemies in
this culture war.”

Olusoga was born in Lagos in 1970, to a white British mother and a
Nigerian father, moving to his mother’s home town, Gateshead, at an
early age. As one of a handful of mixed-race families on the council
estate where they lived, they were regularly terrorised by the far
right. The violence culminated in a brick being thrown into the
family’s home, wrapped in a note demanding they be sent “back”.
He was 14. Eventually, the family had to be rehoused.

His early experience of education was also distressing. “I
experienced racism from teachers in ways that are shocking if I tell
them to young people at school now,” says Olusoga. He was dyslexic,
but the school refused to get him tested until he did his GCSEs: “It
was the easier story to believe that this kid was stupid because all
black kids are stupid.” When he finally got his diagnosis and
support – thanks in large part to his mother’s fierce
determination – Olusoga went to study history at the University of
Liverpool, followed by a master’s degree at Leicester.

Olusoga was confident about having two identities, despite the
prejudice he had encountered. He was proud of being a black Nigerian
of Yoruba heritage and was perfectly happy being part of his
mother’s white working-class geordie tradition. But he has always
had a third identity.

“I’m also black British – and that had no history, no
recognition. It was presented as impossible – a dualism that
couldn’t exist, because whiteness and Britishness were the same
thing when I was growing up. So, to discover that there was a history
of being black and British, independent from being half white
working-class and being half black Nigerian, that was what was
critically important to me,” he says. His book does its best to
uncover that history, exploring the considerable presence of black
people in Britain in the age of slavery, as well as the part played by
black Britons in both world wars.

He says that some of the aggression shown towards black historians who
write honestly about Britain’s past comes from people who think
“this history is important because it gives black people the right
to be here”. They hold on to the belief that the UK was a “white
country” until the past few decades and refuse to accept evidence
that shows the presence of black people goes back centuries. But this
is to fundamentally misunderstand what drives him and also why this
history is important for black people.

“I don’t feel challenged in my right to be proud to be British,”
he says. “I’m perfectly comfortable in my identity. I’ve looked
at this history because it’s just exciting to be part of a long
story. This comes out of wanting to enrich life, not seeking some sort
of needy validation of who I am.”

He found it refreshing to see the UK’s history of empire and
colonialism acknowledged in last summer’s anti-racist placards, with
one popular slogan stating “The UK is not innocent”. “A
generation has emerged that doesn’t need history to perform that
role of comfort that its parents and grandparents did,” he says.

As for black people’s experiences in Britain, he says, there is a
“hysterical” level of anger if you point out that many have lived
in some form of slavery or unfreedom. Recently, historians have
uncovered notices of runaway enslaved people or advertisements for
their sale. This adds to the evidence that thousands of black people
were brought to Britain, enslaved as well as free.

“It brings slavery to Britain and therefore undermines the idea that
it doesn’t really matter because it happened ‘over there’,”
says Olusoga. “It short-circuits an idea of British exceptionalism.
And there are a lot of people for whom that idea of exceptionalism is
a part of how they see themselves. I’m really sorry that the stuff I
do and that other people do is a challenge to that, but my job is to
be a historian. It’s not to make people feel good.”

Olusoga is often accused of pursuing a political agenda. He is asked,
for instance, why he doesn’t speak about the Barbary slave trade of
the 16th to 18th centuries, in which Europeans were captured and
traded by north African pirates. He has a simple response: that he has
been trying to get a programme made about it for his entire
career and it is finally happening
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He gives another example: “I have been accused literally hundreds of
times of ignoring the slavery suppression squadron that the Royal Navy
created after 1807.” Its task was to suppress the Atlantic slave
trade by patrolling the coast of west Africa. “I think the chapter
in Black and British about that is 30,000 words, which is as long as
some books.”

What his more extreme critics fail to understand, he adds, is that he
is loyal to history and not a political agent. He remains committed to
one goal: to uncover the stories of those who have long been deemed
unimportant. When he wrote his first book on the 1904-08 Namibian
genocide
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he went to mass graves where he saw bones sticking out of the ground.
“We promised the victims of that genocide that we would be their
voice, we would fight for them and we would tell their story – and
we use every skill we have to do that.

“I care deeply about people who were mistreated in the past. I care
about the names on slave ledgers, I care about the bones of people in
Africa, in mass graves in the first world war and in riverbeds in
Namibia. I care about them. I think about them when I read the
letters, when I look at their photographs and their faces. No one gave
a damn about them. That’s my job – to care about them. And I will
be ruthless in fighting for them.”

_An updated edition of Black and British: A Forgotten History, with a
new chapter, is published on 10 June (Picador, £12.99). To support
the Guardian, order your copy __at guardianbookshop.com
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Delivery charges may apply._

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