hello and welcome back to Codexly my
name is Lee and this is a channel all
about books
so today i am going to focus on a book
called Black and British: A Forgotten
History by David Olusoga
and this is based on his uh bbc tv
series that aired a few years ago
the first thing to note about this book
is that it spends a lot of time focusing
on
pre-war uh black british history that is
to say black british history prior to
the second world war
and this points to two of the central
themes of Olusoga's book
the first being that there were black
communities living in britain prior to
the arrival of the
Empire Windrush the place of black people
in british history is sometimes thought
of
as a story that begins with the arrival
of the windrush in reality the windrush
is just
one chapter in a much longer history
Olusoga
also talks about the fact that the
windrush myth quote perpetuates the
notion
that black british history is
exclusively a history of black
settlement in britain
rather than a global survey of britain's
interaction with africans on three
continents
and this is one of the eye-opening
points about this book is it spends
as much if not more time outside of
britain
than it does within britain looking at
this particular history
because he's trying to show that the
history
of black people of black britons
is as much about people living in
countries that were affected by the
actions of the british
as it is concerned about uh black people
living in the british isles
so really um just as the history of
black people in britain doesn't begin
with windrush um sadly the history of
british white supremacy doesn't end with
the abolition of slavery either Olusoga
actually opens the book talking about
his own experiences growing up as a
mixed-race child
in britain in the i think 1960s or 1970s
and being subjected to racism being
basically his family basically driven
out of their own home
because of racist attacks and i think
that this perspective
is is really valuable because it reminds
us that white supremacy continues to
affect the lives of so many growing up
in britain
in recent years and to today to this
very day
and emphasizes how Olusoga's history as
a black man in britain
is a part of the wider history that he
proceeds to narrate
the history of slavery of british
the british involvement in slavery has
focused too much on the abolition of
slavery as opposed to the horrors
of the slave trade itself and britain's
involvement in that trade
i'm quoting from the book here half of
all the africans who were carried into
slavery over the course of the 18th
century were transported in the holds of
british ships there are many many
stories that he
discloses in this book um some of them
might be quite well known but
they weren't very well known to me to my
shame um for example the shocking case
of the Zong
this was a slave ship where um supplies
the
the ship got lost it was carrying
hundreds of slaves it got lost
supplies were lower than was ideal
and in order to deal with the situation
the captain of the ship decided to
throw sick slaves overboard
i think in the end over 100 slaves were
thrown overboard
and this wasn't some kind of um sudden
event this was done
systematically over the course of
several days uh and on the point about
the horrors of the slave trade the book
um actually opens
uh with Olusoga describing the um the fort
at bunce island in sierra leone through
which so many
countless africans passed on their way
to a life of slavery
um in the americas he describes in
particular a brick building at the fort
um which has mystified um historians
they haven't been entirely clear what
was the purpose of this
um this brick building Olusoga
describes it as in all probability
a rape house uh we can't be sure that
was its purpose but
it's highly likely that many of the the
enslaved women
were sexually assaulted and that there
may have been a purpose-built
facility to carry this out it's really
horrific it's one of many horrific
facts that he relays that it is
important to read about
so that we stop telling ourselves
that the history of
slavery in britain is really all about
the abolition of slavery
this was the true horror of what was
happening he actually stays in sierra
leone
for quite some time he spends a lot of
time talking about sierra leone
and it helped me to appreciate the kind
of real british roots of freetown the
modern capital of sierra leone
and really how the founding of freetown
it really begins
with the black loyalists um so these
were
i think mostly previously enslaved um
black people
in america who fought on the side of the
british during the american wars of
independence
and they were told that you know that
the british would guarantee their their
freedom
um but they weren't they were treated
quite poorly um
many of them were sort of shipped up to
nova scotia
in canada and then from there many of
them were shipped
on to sierra leone where the idea was to
start a new
town a new colony of um freed black
slaves so they basically they were
they were brought to to sierra leone to
Bunce Island
where they were packed into a slave ship
taken to the americas
and then descendants of these people um
then returned to sierra leone to set up
their own community and this was
encouraged and um
supported to an extent by the british
and even by some british
abolitionists who really wanted to see
this thing succeed but predictably
most of these people died from disease
and starvation um but there were um
successive waves of black british
uh people who were brought they were
they were very
poor black british people who lived in
london many of them were homeless
and people didn't like to see these
homeless black british people many of
whom had fought on
behalf of the british so they were
shipped off
to sierra leone as well and it speaks to
the very inauspicious beginnings of the
very as i said the very british roots of
the modern
city of freetown um if you just look at
the names of many of the streets and
suburbs of freetown on google maps
today
you will see what i mean by this so that
was a fascinating and troubling part of
history that i just knew nothing about
of course
um we shouldn't forget that you can that
you could have been an abolitionist at
this time
uh but still be racist i'm quoting from
the book here
no matter how difficult it is for us to
understand the fact remains that many
millions of victorians who like their
famous author
charles dickens passionately opposed
slavery saw no contradiction between
that
opposition and an unshakable belief in
black
inferiority um so as i said earlier we
can and
should push back against the narrative
that um
centralizes britain's abolition of the
slave trade at the expense
of the facts about how it dominated that
trade for so long some of the facts that
i've already talked about
but equally we should recognize the
british efforts
that went into disrupting that trade
once it was no longer a participant
um for example um the black joke this
was a former
slave ship that was captured by the
british navy
and then they then used that ship to
later
liberate black slaves and it famously
liberated 466
africans from the hold of the spanish
slave ship
the almerante in 1829
and these 466 africans but those who did
survive
um they were noted down in what was
called the registers of liberated
africans
um which noted their names and and
sort of i think where they came from and
some of the um
physical characteristics and this is a
book which Olusoga
argues restored individuality to the
recaptured slaves who populated freetown
because many of them
they couldn't or wouldn't go back to
where they were taken from they stayed
in freetown
and added to the existing population who
had
been taken there by the british from
nova scotia and from the streets of
london
moving on he then talks about the
remarkable story of sarah forbes boneta
she was an african girl who was given as
a gift to a british diplomat when she
was just a child
he brought her back to britain and she
met queen victoria
and she was actually brought into the
under the care of queen victoria
she then resides and marries in brighton
and she had a daughter who she named
victoria
um and this daughter was provided for by
the queen
after her mother's death a really
interesting figure there are so many
interesting individuals in this that he
talks about that i'd love to learn more
about
and sarah forbes boneta is one of those
now moving on to the end of the 19th
century i really enjoyed reading about
Khama Sebele the first and
Bathoen these were three kings of what
is today
botswana and they toured britain in 1895
because the imperialist cecil rhodes
was um conquering large parts of um
the southern part of the african
continent and they were
their land was their kingdom was
basically next in line
as part of rhodes's colonialist exploits
so they toured Britain in order to go on
a sympathy for
um retaining um if not their
independence then at least
um to come under the um
the quote-unquote care if you like of
the british in any case they succeeded
uh and as Olusoga puts it the
protectorate remained under direct
british administration until 1960
when it became the modern state of
botswana uh
and this is a narrative and Olusoga
doesn't talk about this but this is a
narrative that extends into the life of
Khama's uh grandson who was
actually exiled by the british um from
his homeland
uh i think during the 1950s because
he married a white woman an english
woman and the british didn't like this
so they exiled him
and he but he did later become the
first president
of um the freed country of botswana
and there's a film that was made about
this which i think was called a united
kingdom
which i haven't seen but I'd really like
to queen victoria
the man who negotiated for her
protection of Bechuanaland
he was my grandfather a king
i am his heir
oh i see so this this whole history
um that spans many decades uh botswana
is really fascinating and then we came
up to the 20th century um so there are
incidents that occur
both in 1919 after the end of the first
world war and in 1948 after the end of
the second world war
and the black communities in liverpool
in 1919 and in 1948
came under organized attacks from mobs
and these mobs
sometimes numbered in the thousands
which just beggars believe
the response was that the victims of
this violence so these black
members of these the black community
were themselves
arrested and sometimes the consequence
consequences of of these arrests was
that some of these people
were later killed by uh by the mobs one
of these being charles wooten
um the lynching of charles wooten in
1919 is described by Olusoga in this book
it's shocking and it led to
uh as he puts it into intergenerational
distrust of the police by the black
community that lingered into the 1980s
um this is one of the legacies of the
the actions of not just these um white
communities who
um you know perpetuated this violence
but the response from the authorities as
well which made it even worse
and britain in a way is you know is
still dealing with the legacy of these
actions
uh to this day so there you go those are
just some of the things i took from this
book and some of my responses for it
it's a brilliant book um
this there's just far more um histories
of people and events in this than i
could possibly um
discuss in this video i highly recommend
that you read it i hope this has given
you a good
sense of what was included this is
undoubtedly a five-star book
for me time and again over and over
again
the story of africa and africans have
been very central to british history
so black british history isn't a
marginal subject
that is only about and only of interest
to black people
it is british history it's at the center
of our story
and most importantly of all it's a
shared history
it's a story of interaction and it's a
story that belongs to all of us
