![]() ![]() 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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