Blanke, who Olusoga tells us, “may well have arrived in England in 1501, as part of the entourage of Catherine of Aragon”, had earlier petitioned the king for a pay rise, demanding and receiving pay equal to his fellow trumpeters. At London’s Royal College of Arms, he analyses the Westminster Tournament Roll, a 60ft-long illustrated manuscript that features a black royal trumpeter – John Blanke – on horseback regaling Henry VIII at festivities in 1511. Before you can say “there goes more than a thousand years”, Olusoga’s off to Tudor London, alerting readers to parish registers revealing the existence of “blackamore maids” employed by the alderman Paul Banning in 1586. Here he finds an inscription in abbreviated Latin carved into an altar stone, evidence of a unit of “Aurelian Moors” among the Roman occupying army at the fortress of Aballava. First stop is Hadrian’s Wall, and what is now the Cumbrian village of Burgh-by-Sands. This is an unpalatable and often horrid history, and for that it should be applauded – but it still feels attenuatedĭoffing his cap to Fryer, James Walvin and other pioneers in the field, Olusoga sets off at quite a lick. It builds on the need he felt back in the 1980s for an urgent “uncovering of black British history … because the present was so contested”. But as Olusoga demonstrates so forcefully in his admirable book, this is a shared history and a reclaiming of a lost past. Even 10 years ago, if such a mainstream work as Olusoga’s had been proposed it might well have been rejected at publishers’ acquisition meetings with the note: “no commercial prospects”. But forgotten by whom? The early black presence in Britain was not so much forgotten as suppressed – well, if not suppressed then at least untold. 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”.īlack and British, the new work by Olusoga, comes with the subtitle: A Forgotten History. The British-Nigerian David Olusoga has a head start on Fryer. 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”.
But it also elicits a flush of excitement and pride. 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. Three decades ago Peter Fryer offered a corrective, stripping off the historical bandage.
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