All in all your typical West African is far more likely to have ancestral connections to the slave trade than your typical Brit. David Olusoga is a 49-year-old historian and presenter Credit: Getty - Contributor David Olusoga is a British Nigerian historian, broadcaster and writer. ", TV historian rejects 'nonsense' over keeping statues, What Black History Month is - and why it matters. "They were barely known even to historians. We aint paying no goddam reparations & no-ones gonna make us. Olusoga was born in Lagos to a White mother and a Nigerian father - who, I hate to say nautrally, did a runner. Sure. I generally reckon cant blame me, my distant relative was on your side arguments are pretty weak since relying on a doctrine of virtues of the fathers risks implicitly accepting sins of the fathers. He presents a one sided and biased picture of slavery which takes no account of the African participation in it. Olusogas stated purpose is to argue that black British history is not about migration and settlement, whether of black servants in the 18th century or black workers in the Windrush era. Well whats the point of pretending it doesnt also induce moral disgust in me, just in case someone mistakes it for guilt, or an admission of liability? But as someone who is damaged by slavery I have lived in racially mixed communities and I am happy to see Obama and Kamala pay up. It doesnt end with the parties saying Well that was pleasantly intellectually stimulating, now lets have a nice game of cricket Youre opponents are not playing by the same rules as you are. Oh man. Id agree that attitudes in the UK are approaching that situation, but theres still a long, long way to go yet. A fifty quid note in the hand of the first black bloke you encounter. Presumably there were normal times when food was cheap that you fed your workers and didnt seek to replace them in the way Olusoga means. David Olusoga Even discussing it gives your opponents arguments merit. I agree BIS. But any planter who deliberately starved his slaves to death would quickly go bust. @ Boganboy Pretty sure if you could, implausibly, trace my family tree through various not-very-literate eras youd pass through at least one Anglo-Saxon who owned a bunch of Britons. I learned the hard way. If Olusoga is looking for apologies or compensation for slavery, I am quite prepared to meet him, accept his apology, togehr with cash, cheque or even a postal order. It can be withdrawn. The novel became the bestselling book of 19th-century Britain; it was adapted for the theatre and generated mass-produced merchandise playing cards, jigsaws, tableware. Welsh slave-raids into England continued until early Norman times. Kyle Rittenhouse, unlike the rest of their sorry asses, did something. You may concede a point here, a point there. The point about slave descendants in Georgia being better off than descendants of slave sellers from West Africa is reasonably strong (though look back in everyones ancestry and youre likely to find, far back enough, a mix of slaves, owners and probably traders too). I am happy with Olusogo paying reparations to himself. It died out with the Romans leaving, and its non-legality repeatedly reaffirmed from the reign of the early Normans onwards.. It isnt going to happen anyway. We are told that an estimated 12.5 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the West Indies and elsewhere in the 18th century. Very little sugar on the mainland. Your email address will not be published. Then the second. They are now CM scum and couldnt care less about America. We could just cut to the chase, and impose a reparations tax on anyone who is descended from from anyone who did something, er, wrong. You lost those two. Whoever has the upper-hand in power political, cultural, economic, military or whatever other form is decisive at that moment. The best and brightest minds in the UK defended Stalins slavery. In 1787, they met in London and set up the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Olusoga has benefited from and added significantly to the work of Fryer and other historians such as James Walvin. What has Nigeria ever done for him? But morals are very transient things. H istorian and broadcaster David Olusoga has been the face of a decolonial turn in British broadcasting that, in recent years, with series including the Bafta-winning Britain's Forgotten Slave. He was a prominent figure in the campaign to abolish slavery. West Indians fought with the Allies more than a hundred were decorated. Over 1000 years in Britain. Prof Olusoga is not the only person who has been drawn to Equiano's story. You might have heard of a Romano-British chap called Patrick, got enslaved and nabbed to Ireland? In fact he is a biased political campaigner working to attack and do as much damage to Britain as he can. The answer is money. There is no reason to think one system was more or less brutal than the other. Rapidly promoted to sergeant, then second lieutenant, he led white British troops into action and died in 1918, having been mentioned in despatches and recommended for the Military Cross. Not a big fan of the odd human sacrifice Im afraid, even though I might just be of very partial Scandinavian descent myself. Olusoga is just getting even because he was attacked by the right when he was a teenager. Back in the heyday of blogging, perhaps ten years ago or so, there was a blogger calling him/herself The Heresiarch who enjoyed running against received opinions. Roman writers such as Pliny who chronicled or rather fabricated African life shaped perceptions of a continent populated by anthropophagi and other fantastic creatures, half-human, half-animal. That was when the Democrats were still Americans. This is a moral argument. * the legal institution and pretty much the practice A House Through Time returned to BBC Two in May for its third season, and once again is fronted by historian extraordinaire David Olusoga. The exception is Tim Worstall, who is truly the Ron Jeremy of blogging. As he states, The oral history of 20th-century racial violence has never been collected or collated, but it is thereand it is shocking.. So 10.416 were sold by the Africans every month for one hundred years, There will be no peace on this issue until black people acknowledge their own responsibility for the trade. Societies have had a long history of treating minorities harshly. Prof Darity and Ms Mullen outline that to eliminate the existing Black-White wealth gap an allocation of between $10 trillion and $12 trillion, or about $800,000 per black household, should be paid. John Mandeville, whose travelogue (circa 1356) was one of the most widely translated books of the later Middle Ages, presented Africans as naked savages living amid heaps of gold to which they gave no value. Sloane witnessed and later became part of a system ruled by terror. No other race / culture was willing and able to do that. Thy did not try to grow or raise the next generation. Note, hes a renowned economist. (As the first person to mention the Sokoto Caliphate ahh, forget it.). Quite possibly slave-raiding Gaels before that. And the transatlantic slave trade? Its entirely possible to think something was awful without feeling the slightest twinge of guilt or personal responsibility. Under English law, damages are assessed as being that amount needed to restore them to the position they would have been, had the event claimed against not occurred. In 1860, cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports. He updates Fryer, citing radioisotope analysis of skeletons and craniometrics, which support written documentation of Aurelian Moors guarding Hadrians Wall and settling in places such as Yorkshire. I have a peeve about the BBC genealogical show Who do you think you are? which I dont know whether has been inflected upon the Left Pond. Would, say, Huguenot-descended South Africans suing France over the 1572 St. Bartholomews Day massacre, or Cornish people suing HMG for the suppression of the 1497 Rebellion, deserve compensation?. Whether they are too stupid to think of that remains to be seen. Olusoga has written stand-alone history books as well as those accompanying his television series. Vikings took slaves, including exporting Anglo-Saxons (you must have heard the quote Non Angli, sed Angeli about the English slaves being sold in Italy? During the Second World War, thousands of black American soldiers stationed in Britain were befriended by white Britons who opposed efforts by the white military to segregate them. That someone did something 200 years ago means double ought nothing.. But slaves were more valuable, so the British fought the Spanish for a share in the trade and eventually came to dominate it. Different people can argue the toss from different viewpoints and perspectives but in many ways their arguments pass each other like ships in the night, because they havent all got nobodys got an absolute frame of reference to judge things with respect to. If we went down this route thered be goodness knows how much fun and games to be had with legal claims over the treatment of Irish by Cromwell, the clearing of the Highlands and so on, before you even get on to the globe-spanning imperial stuff. Would probably have taken your suggestion as a challenge. I imagine few do. If you want to pay more tax, just write a cheque to HMRC and send it off. Id say the same to the Black Lives Matter people. Intellectually more convincing anyway for practical and political purposes, demolishing a straw-man often makes a better video or audio clip while simultaneously making your opponents position sound stupid. Anti-black riots broke out in Liverpool that year. But those were in those long-lost days when democrats and republicans could talk to each other and agree to disagree while both leaving the conversation a little the wiser.. Abolition was the first mass philanthropic movement in Britain, and it ended the slave trade in 1807. They are pretty much airbrushed from history, whereas the transatlantic slave trade seems to be wall-to-wall on our TV screens and in our school textbooks. Nobody will stop you, honest. Olusoga brilliantly reveals such contradictions in British society. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. It's against this backdrop that Black British History Month was created. If we look back history is just an unending series of atrocities. To me personally, this is the thing. Then a young teenager, he was driven out of his council home, together with his grandmother, mother, two sisters and younger brother, by a sustained campaign of nightly stoning of their windows. The stars are out as Dr Pete Olusoga explores the psychology of stage and screen with the wonderful British actor (and Coronation Street veteran), Shobna Gulati. I cant see this one surviving people being expected to dig into their pockets for a few trillion. Rather the constitution banned the slave trade and so it become economically worth it to make sure slaves lived longer. A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. "We are on a journey in this country and other countries are on similar journeys to try and reconnect to parts of our history that had traditionally been edited out," adds Prof Olusoga. I was uncomfortable using it. No? The agreement is being touted as a . This is because forgetting slavery means forgetting its victims. He presented the recent series of A House Through Time on BBC 2, and Black and British: A Forgotten History. How does importing new labour from West Africa solve the food shortage in the West Indies? The evidence of this is that seasoned slaves, those exposed to the environment, sold for up to 50% more than new ones. 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