David Olusoga is a serious and very respected academic historian. He is Professor of Public History at Manchester, where, on appointing him, the University described him as "one of the UK's foremost historians". His Black and British: a Forgotten History won both the ‘Longman–History Today Trustees Award’ and the ‘PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize’. His other books include The World’s War, which won the ‘First World War Book of the Year’, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism, and Civilisations. He has contributed to the Oxford Companion to Black British History, been awarded the ‘President's Medal’ by the British Academy and is an OBE. He is also a favourite of the BBC and the Guardian. (And if he hasn’t yet been declared ‘a national treasure’, he will be.)
The title of Black and British asks, “Can you be both black and British?”; and the book answers, “Of course.” And it is right to. Who could doubt that its author, born in Lagos and with a Nigerian father, is British? Its every sentence declares it.
But you don’t get to be a favourite of the BBC and the Guardian for nothing -- and definitely not a seat on the Board of the Scott Trust, which publishes the Guardian. You belong -- however informally -- to a Party and you advance -- without being able to help yourself -- the Party’s cause. So it is not surprising to find that Olusoga has blind spots that do advance the cause.
One blind spot in his book is the part played in the slave-trade by Africans themselves, the other that any consideration might be owed to the white British who never wanted the racial demographics of their country so emphatically changed by the mass immigration of non-Europeans. Race is bound up with culture and it is a falsity to think the connection can be ignored as if it didn’t matter -- as if race were no more than the colours of our skins
Not just Enoch Powell but DEI, BLM, the law and Olusoga himself think it matters, and so should we all. Olusoga himself may be as British as the fairest-haired, whitest-skinned, purest-blooded Anglo-Saxon, and so may Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak but they no more make the mass immigration so many white British (including myself) object to than one swallow makes a summer.
In Black and British Olusoga describes the Atlantic slave-trade as a three-part system: (1) transporting black slaves from West Africa to the West Indies and North America (2) using them there to produce cheap cotton and sugar and (3) delivering the cheap cotton and sugar to Britain. All three parts, run, self-evidently, by whites for the benefit of whites and at the expense of blacks. It is racist, isn’t it? What else could it be?
But wouldn’t you think that the most ignorant layman, let alone one of the foremost historians in the UK, would wonder how so many Africans (seven million or more), in order to be transported from Africa’s west coast, got to it in the first place? They didn’t walk there of their own accord. Someone captured them somewhere else, took them there and delivered them up to the white slavers and ships’ captains? Who could it have been? Did European ships’ crews disembark and go hunting in an African wilderness for Africans to enslave? And find them just hanging about, like so many docile Galapagos turtles?
Over the course of the eighteenth century, seven million were transported; and that couldn’t have been done without a first, African stage being as highly organised as any other. How else to obtain, transport, store and deliver 1,400 living human beings every week for a hundred years? And, in that stage, white Europeans could have played no part. The geography of the coastline, an impenetrable inland forest belt, tropical diseases and the cultural and military power of West African empires made it impossible. Which is something Olusoga himself acknowledges without acknowledging its significance, which is that, in describing the slave trade as having three stages, he has left a stage out. It had a fourth or, rather, an indispensable first, in which Africans captured fellow Africans inland and transported them to the coast to deliver to European slavers -- a stage run exclusively by blacks for the benefit of blacks at the expense of blacks. (Conrad has a short story, “An Outpost of Progress”, set 300 miles from the coast, in which a raiding party of one African tribe enslaves villagers of another.)
And if the slave trade wasn’t a matter of whites enslaving blacks but of whites and blacks together enslaving blacks -- the blacks doing it before the whites arrived and continuing to do it and refusing to stop doing it after they left (Black and British, pp. 328-9) -- it takes on a very different, as it were, moral complexion; it looks less like that contemporary bugbear, racism and more like a partnership in crime. It looks, one might say, less black and white.
And Olusoga has no sympathy to spare for white objections to the scale of black and brown immigration which has transformed large parts of British towns. He never says that, because evidence of Africans in Britain goes back to Roman times, Anglo-Saxons can't reasonably object to their immigration now but he might as well have. And although he says nothing about, for example, Pakistani Muslim immigrants, I cannot believe that he would deny to them – or probably any other immigrant group – rights he claims for those of African descent. The logic of his book must apply to the entire immigrant population: ‘If one, any; if any, all.’
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad's narrator, Marlow, calls the Europeans he meets in the Congo a “fantastic invasion”. If lots of whites look upon the scale of the changes to many of their towns in the same light, that perhaps deserves some sympathy, even from a Guardianista whose childhood was blighted by the National Front.
Duke Maskell
A longer version of this essay can be found at https://dukemaskell.substack.com/p/black-and-white