"He was the voice of somebody who wasn't speaking about the past as a historian, but was living it. This ignorant fellow should study historical facts, rather than believing and repeating lies and half-truths. Check out the trailer for Peter Pan & Wendy, an upcoming live-action movie directed by David Lowery. And, of course, being half white, he is only entitled to half the reparation payment. Hey, we do not even have to go that far. Whoever has the upper-hand in power political, cultural, economic, military or whatever other form is decisive at that moment. His dad met his mom at the city's university in the 1960s. If you are wracked with guilt, ashamed of your forebears, do it! Shouldnt Olusoga be writing in Ubangi bantu-language? Olusoga was born in Lagos to a White mother and a Nigerian father - who, I hate to say nautrally, did a runner. The publication in 1852 of Uncle Toms Cabin, by the American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, swelled national sympathy for the plight of black slaves. I assume these were usually killed before Europeans turned up and bought them. But Muslims were enslaving white Europeans into Africa long before the Atlantic route, usually castrating the males. Quite possibly slave-raiding Gaels before that. And the transatlantic slave trade? Indeed in many cases, whose ancestors didnt even live in France or England at the relevant time. The reason why Equiano is not a national name is because slavery is not a part of the history that we teach when it should be because I don't think you can understand the 18th century in particular but also the 19th century without reference to slavery.". "They're not looking to history only to make them feel good and give them comfort, but they're looking to history to tell them things about truths about their society that we have traditionally edited out of British history.". I suspect that whether records could prove it or not, its overwhelmingly likely to be true, especially since high-status individuals tend to make a bigger contribution to the gene pool. It does not take people long to starve to death and slaves were paid for. Theres no point pretending Europeans who profited from either the transatlantic slave trade or the use of slave labour in the Americas were somehow doing a favour to the slaves involved, even if, as it happens but their owners could not have predicted, their surviving descendants ended up financially better off on average than the counterfactual of remaining in Africa. Thats what I dont like about the angle of Tims header. And this of course neatly addresses MBEs arguments. Those who grew rich on slavery and the slave trade were not neutral and no achievement or act of philanthropy justifies airbrushing their involvement from history. He talks about slavery because YOU care. So this race baiter can try his guilt trip on someone else. Would also apply even if down a different family line there had been beneficiaries of the slave trade. Like I said before, tolerance is in the gift of the powerful. 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. Would the good professor really be so different if genealogical records could prove he had African ancestors who owned African slaves? The New Statesmans global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. One person who had a huge impact on Britain was Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved man who bought his freedom and wrote compellingly about his experiences. Two men managed to escape and were rescued, but not before my great, great, grandfather was beaten, starved and worked to death, his body thrown into the jungle for the animals and insects to dispose of. By this logic, we ought to sue the African American community. Its extraordinary success rested upon the foundation of sympathy laid down during the previous 70 years of abolitionist activity in Britain. Might, in this case, being 100% of the debating point. The problem with slavery is that it left us with their descendents and weak minded White populations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr_Gide, Less flippantly, Western countries are not of one mind when it comes to the age of consent sex with a 14 year-old is legal in some countries, criminal in others (yes yes, paedophilia versus ephebophilia etc, you got me). Was never entirely sure which bits were believed and which bits were just a fun bit of intellectual muscle-flexing couldnt all have been intended seriously since so many posts contradicted each other. The Russians do not have these problems because they are not ashamed. No other race / culture was willing and able to do that. Eventually, 11,000 separate British slave-trading expeditions resulted in the trafficking of three-and-a-half-million Africans to the New World plantations, the greatest forced migration in modern history until the 20th century. if he wants to be an historian he should present a fair and realistic picture of what happened, Your email address will not be published. How would Nigeria treat a foreigner like him? Forbes magazine's extraordinarily arrogant contributor Tim Worstall Jeremy Corbyn. * the legal institution and pretty much the practice No. Prof Olusoga, the presenter of the A House Through Time TV series, calls it an act of "historical salvage" to bring to the fore the black British figures who had been "lost in the archives, completely forgotten". If more African-Americans started to vote Republican and the Democrats felt they needed something radical to boost their offer, and had enough support from liberal whites and other groups to risk further losses among blue-collar whites, for example. Yet theyre so many centuries and generations removed from the crime, everybody involved with the decision-making is long-dead and while the responsible state still exists, in practice compensation comes from taxes paid by citizens who had no part in it all. David Olusoga's Family David Olusoga, age 49 was born to a Nigerian father and a British mother. The many African-American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, who visited Britain from the 1840s onwards, were well received and, again, thousands of people greeted them and raised money to support their cause. Tim says there might be some truth to them for the Caribbean. Pope Nicholas V gave his blessing, so long as the Vatican benefited. Some were sold to other African tribes and the rest kept as slaves. Nevertheless, we live in a society that generally regards slavery as an absolute and eternal wrong, and a grave one at that, yet which has historically (at least certain people and places, and including the state itself) benefited from imposing slavery on others. The Benin Dialogue Group announced it had brokered an agreement that will see "some of the most iconic" of the bronzes returned to Benin City, Nigeria, where they will be housed in the soon-to-be-built Benin Royal Museum. I assume he is not very bright and Race Hustling is very lucrative. In the UK its not white people enslaving blacks anymore, but Asians enslaving other Asians, as in Leicesters clothing sweatshops. If someone from Portugal or France wants to explain why their country has done a better job of getting the balance right, Im open to hearing it. It was far too real to her. I brought up paedophilia to demonstrate that there are things not worth my time. Wrong ?!?! It happened. Looking at what happened in Haiti or Jamaica or chunks of Latin America, I dont find either well, could have been much worse or what do you expect, Early Modern West Europeans, how could they have known better? to be particularly convincing responses. It was the first of the slave narratives that I'd ever read and I found it astonishing.". Needless to say they should pay us reparations for this too. So he calls himself a Geordie. 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. His exposure to Nigerian culture seems quite limited. How does importing new labour from West Africa solve the food shortage in the West Indies? We are told that an estimated 12.5 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the West Indies and elsewhere in the 18th century. I still find arguing the toss, or watching others doing so, interesting partly because it shows how the viewpoints are divergent, how many arguments are self-interested, what social, cultural and economic forces are at work behind it all. Dont know if I would rule it out entirely because the demographics are different but it might need a change in the voting dynamics. If one disproves his assertions would slavery then be okay? Anybody can do this. Cheap ass presentism. 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. He also studied at the University of Liverpool and so benefits from slavery as much as anyone else. BZZZTT!! Like I need to hand my cash to the next lass of Rus descent I see, lest she remind me of some unlucky slave-girl that may or may not have perished at the hands of my maybe-ancestors? He presents a one sided and biased picture of slavery which takes no account of the African participation in it. Particularly as nowadays anyone who dares even look at someone a few days below the age of consent is believed to be an incorrigible nonce who deserves hanging, castration, or castration by hanging. Re putting the argument for paedophilia they actually gave Gide the Nobel prize for literature didnt they? BurningEars August 30, 2020 at 3:07 pm Theres a flaw in arguments of the form frankly you should be glad I murdered your sister. Everyone was. Grew up in Quedlinburg. It was, I believe, the first book I ever bought for myself with my own money. It was such a brilliantly organised programme of mass protest that slavery was declared abolished in 1833: 46,000 slave owners were given 20m in compensation (17bn in todays money), the largest payout in British history and 40 per cent of all government spending that year. The historian and producer said he wanted to. MyBurningEars August 30, 2020 at 3:31 pm Deliberately shipping that many people that far in order to participate in a newly-created society whose economic system was designed, pretty much from the ground up, around slave labour?, True that unlike certain other examples of slavery, you werent likely to be killed as part of a religious sacrifice or as part of your owners funeral., But there have been other societies with slavery where slaves had more autonomy and a greater chance of buying their freedom.. Shipwrecked off the coast of Africa, he, and other survivors, were taken by an African tribe as captives. "The way history is viewed is changing. They are now CM scum and couldnt care less about America. That involved killing the adult men. There is plenty of slavery about we just do not call it that. She wasnt interested in my academic pursuit. Fair point. Giles Terera, the Olivier award-winning British performer who starred in the popular theatre production Hamilton, has recently staged a play called the Meaning of Zong about the massacre of 132 enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 and the impact it had on Equiano. Thats why when the question is raised, I always point out that they owe me lots and lots of money. Although the bottom line is that no Black person remembers slavery. Societies have what morals suit them. Britain should be proud of helping to stop (African to America) slavery, like the Republican Party and unlike the Democrats. I cant see this one surviving people being expected to dig into their pockets for a few trillion. I had a girlfriend whose mother was a Nazi. 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). David will . His rhetoric is to inflame the reader. Mans a loon. 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. You can pay all the reparation for historical slavery related wrongs, real or imaginary, you want. Cest de la trs bonne dialectique conomique. This year, return to Neverland. 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. He is the undisputed King of the Internet Pedants and Lord of the Unnecessary Snark. So wherever the wealth came from, it wasnt just slavery (or even mainly), Olusogas an alright presenter but a class A race hustler, Edward Lud August 30, 2020 at 9:12 am 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.. 5 quotes from David Olusoga: 'On a peninsula protruding into one of the great highways of the Atlantic slave trade, a few hundred refugees from British slavery in North America were attempting to recreate the social structures of Northern Europe in the Middle Ages.', 'Time and again events and phenomena that we think we know and understand contain within them lost or camouflaged connections to . (I suppose it makes a point about blame not being distributed homogeneously, or that a certain group of people shouldnt be guilted just because they share the same colour of skin with another bunch of people you do think are guilty. Nobody will stop you, honest. He has discovered new and exciting research materials in African archives, among them the Register of Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, which list names, bodily details, ethnicity and origins, thus putting a human face on people otherwise treated as fodder and statistics. The South Sea bubble, the greatest financial crash of the 18th century, was intimately connected to Britains dealings with Africa, though this is rarely acknowledged by historians. Kyle Rittenhouse, unlike the rest of their sorry asses, did something. Supported by African authors of slave narratives such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottabah Cugoano, they held meetings all over the country, attracting huge crowds. But that is not the argument I am making. is that the extra demand distorted the market, led directly to more armed slave-raiding expeditions against rival tribes and so on.. I think it's an astonishing achievement.". Id say this to Mr Olusoga. I hadnt gotten far when she stopped me cold, pointing out that her best friend, a 15 year old girl knitting beside a window in her house, was machine gunned by an American P-51 pilot. . "Incorporating the stories of people like Equiano is merely part of a process of looking at all of British history; not just being selective, not only going to the chapters that make us feel good about ourselves or proud.". Young people - such as Lavinya Stennett who founded the Black Curriculum campaign group - have been calling for change. arguments are pretty weak since relying on a doctrine of virtues of the fathers risks implicitly accepting sins of the fathers.. Prof Olusoga says statues, such as those of slave traders . You lost those two. It died out with the Romans leaving, and its non-legality repeatedly reaffirmed from the reign of the early Normans onwards. As for the future, the University of Manchester professor says younger generations give him hope. Id say theres enormous dangers in treating this as if it was some public school debating society gig. And yet anti-black race riots broke out in 1948 in Liverpool and in 1958 in Nottingham and Londons Notting Hill. This is nothing to do with slavery or as with black lives matter, blacks being shot, and everything to do with a shakedown of the white man. Wider imperialism reparations that include South Asia, China for the Opium Wars and so on, surely even more prohibitively costly, regardless of how effective the education system gets at making young Brits feel a vague sense of guilt about it all. Less flippantly, Western countries are not of one mind when it comes to the age of consent sex with a 14 year-old is legal in some countries, criminal in others (yes yes, paedophilia versus ephebophilia etc, you got me).. Sloane witnessed and later became part of a system ruled by terror. Like Fryers book, Olusogas will inspire and will come to be seen as a major effort to address one of the greatest silences in British historiography. We aint paying no goddam reparations & no-ones gonna make us. The strongest argument I can see for reparations is not that white people bear some kind of ancestral blame. 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. At the moment it seems to regarded as a good thing. David Olusoga, introduces his book Black and British, an exploration of the relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Surely the US has already spent much more than that on black Americans. A renowned economist has said that $12 trillion should be afforded to black Americans in reparation for slavery to help the close wealth gap.. What has Nigeria ever done for him? Olusoga is making an appeal to white guilt. My family did nothing. Sure. It may not. I havent the faintest idea whether slavery in the Roman controlled areas of Britain was more along the continental Roman model or retained Celtic characteristics. Read about our approach to external linking. Inflaming the reader has no purpose relative to slavery. That was when the Democrats were still Americans. Away from the creative arts, the Equiano Project aims to promote race equality and he was mentioned in Parliament during a debate on Black History and Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum. History is just one awful thing after another. The historian tells Michael Segalov about getting up early, reading George Orwell, taking his dog George for a walk, playing his guitar As Black British History Month draws to a close, TV historian Prof David Olusoga looks at the impact it's had - and how young people are taking it on. When the American Civil War interrupted the supply of cotton, hundreds of thousands of British workers were made destitute, dependent on soup kitchens, and the British economy was dealt a thunderous blow, all because an ocean away the forced labour of four million enslaved black Americans had been disrupted. When I met her, ~1995, I started asking her questions about the war, as I thought she was a fabulous resource of information. In 1860, cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports. 2023 BBC. The following decades were taken up with popular and political rhetoric about immigration and parliamentary acts to limit blacks coming to Britain. Hundreds of White women raped every day. In the case of slavery the answer is clear. Anglo-Saxons had slaves. Over 1000 years in Britain. You might have heard of a Romano-British chap called Patrick, got enslaved and nabbed to Ireland? . Over 150 years in America. 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. By David Dabydeen (Photo By Alamy) Nineteen eighty-four was a transformative year for David Olusoga. Then dont discuss it. Writing in english is cultural appropriation so STFU. Which of those societies does Olusogas ancestry come from? (At least in our society) Get over it. "This is a richer history as well as a necessary history; this is a more vivid history as well as a history that tells the back stories of more people in this country than the traditional narratives we've had.". Anti-Black race riots broke out in 1948 in Liverpool and so on year David! An estimated 12.5 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the West and... Purpose relative to slavery this as if it was the first book I ever for! By this logic, we do not even have to go that far the! 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