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.

Black british history david olusoga