Black and British by David Olusoga review – reclaiming a lost past |
Black and British by David Olusoga review – reclaiming a lost past
The Guardian
2016-11-17
 David Olusoga at St Michael’s Church, Burgh-by-Sands. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/Des Willie |
Olusoga’s insightful ‘forgotten history’ amounts to much more than a text to accompany a TV series. Yet despite its many attributes, is it too temperate?
How do you make black British history palatable to white Britons? Actually, hold on a second. How do you make it palatable to black Britons? Let’s start again. How do you compose a history of Britain’s involvement with black people? The answer during my childhood was to accentuate the positive; to tweak the past, for instance, so that schoolchildren were left with the impression that slavery was somehow an abhorrent North American practice and that the British, through the good works of William Wilberforce, should be commended for their part in bringing about the end of the Atlantic slave trade.
Three decades ago Peter Fryer offered a corrective, stripping off the historical bandage. Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain was an excoriating book by a tireless Marxist historian skewering British imperial mendacity, which, when young black readers stumble across it, delivers a punch to the sternum, a remembrance real or imagined of tragedy and sorrow. But it also elicits a flush of excitement and pride. At last! A history that is not sanitised or sugar-coated; and one written by a proxy black man, namely a white man who in his own apologia aimed to “think black”. The British-Nigerian David Olusoga has a head start on Fryer. But whereas Fryer had an independent radical publisher (Pluto) at his elbow, Olusoga had to satisfy BBC managers – the book accompanies a TV series – who are largely petrified about “race”…
Read the entire review here.
Tags: Colin Grant, David Olusoga, The Guardian