David Olusoga Quotes

The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.

When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.

It was through watching documentaries on the BBC in the late 1980s that I first became interested in art and history.

The easiest way to make television authentic is to make it really authentic.

It is of course perfectly possible for a university, or any institution, to carry out a rigorous investigation into the historical origins of its accumulated wealth, while at the same time putting in place systems to address modern inequalities of access and attainment.

Britain and Churchill fought not solely in the name of liberty and democracy, but also with the intention of maintaining the empire, defending vital interests and remaining a great power.

My view as a historian is that the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution and that the history of empire is one we need to confront and come to terms with, rather than celebrate.

Each year when the A-level results come out, thousands of students and their families settle down to deal with the implications – positive or otherwise – of the fact that their actual grades differ from those they had predicted by their schools.

What needs to be debated is whether IQ tests, as currently designed, are fit for purpose, and capable of measuring the changing nature of intelligence in the 21st century among generations brought up with digital technology and different learning habits.

Even the building of a second British empire in the 19th century never fully healed the wound of losing America, and the end of Britain’s imperial prestige after the second world war has cut deeper.

When historians write the last pages of their books, and the producers of history documentaries sit down to edit the final minutes of their programmes, there is often a strong urge to look to the future and emphasise the positive.

But Johnson‘s Churchill-lite shtick and Theresa May‘s even less convincing Iron Lady routine are only even vaguely viable because they tap into a fantasy version of British history that has contaminated visions of our conceivable future.

Black people are expected to be passive citizens, good immigrants, mute and grateful.

I think I was eight the first time I saw the Benin bronzes. I was taken to see them at the British Museum by my white, British mother, who felt it important that her half-Nigerian children learned about the artistic achievements of their forefathers. I’ve been entranced by them ever since.

I don’t have any personal memories of the broadcast of ‘Civilisation‘. I was born the year afterwards. But the many personal stories I have heard from the people it touched do resonate as I had my own television-induced epiphany.

As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.

Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I’m trying to put those bits back in.

As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.

Historians spend their days engaged in the literally endless task of reshaping and expanding our view of the past, while statues are fixed and inflexible.

For black and Asian people of my generation, the England team and the cross of St George were once ingredients in a toxic broth. For decades, a minority of England fans brought the nation and the national team into disrepute, bringing violence both to foreign streets and immigrant communities at home.

Along with never having got round to writing down our constitution and having a monarch who legally owns all the swans, one of the things that makes the UK a bit of an outlier is our university admissions system.

Talking about class and identity can be as divisive as talking about race and racism.

The great untruth around which everything pivots is the idea that the defenders of these statues are the defenders of history and truth; while those who want to see them toppled or contextualised are the Huns at the gate, who would destroy national histories and bring down great men.

Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country‘s long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.

In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers.

The old racism of imperialism not only rendered the postwar political elite unable to see black people as full British citizens, it provided them with a whole glossary of stereotypes and preconceptions that they then deployed in order to justify their aim of introducing immigration controls.

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.

If you want someone to call you a traitor or accuse you of hating Britain, try suggesting that Britain is a normal nation or that our history is remarkable but not exceptional.

To describe someone as a pessimist is to issue an insult, whereas to be labelled an optimist is to get a pat on the back. To dismiss someone’s argument as pessimistic is to suggest it is the product of a personality disorder, rather than careful analysis.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

Racism is not primal or instinctive.

What we’re seeing is a backlash against any attempt, whether from the world of scholarship or popular culture, to paint non-white people back into the British past. Those of us who write about this history have long been familiar with this.

The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn’t get through to us in the same way.

Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.

The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life. I wish we had agreed on a different form of words, but we haven‘t and the decision to change the system is above my pay grade.

Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response.

At its height, Rome‘s empire stretched right along the coast of north Africa and sub-Saharan Africans passed to and fro across its porous southern border.

Most people involved in the delivery of history, in universities, publishing, museums and the heritage industry, are aware that we have a problem with diversity and inclusivity.

Very occasionally, I wish I was French. The fantasy usually materialises just after a holiday, when I dream of living by the warmth of the Mediterranean, or after a trip to Paris during which I indulge fantasies of being a Left Bank cafe-bohemian.

The age of national leaders, or candidates for high office, has never been automatically regarded as an issue for concern.

Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.

I disagreed with my teachers on pretty much everything, including what grades I was going to get at A-level. I was sure I’d pass, they were convinced I’d fail.

Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.

By 1956, London Transport was recruiting in Barbados, even loaning migrants the costs of their passage to Britain. British Rail placed ads in the Barbados Labour Office and the NHS appealed to West Indian women to come to Britain and train to become nurses.

The emotional compact between football clubs and their supporters is visceral and usually lifelong.

Schools unable to keep their lights on and their doors open for the full working week is just the latest bleak instalment of a long-running show. The age of austerity returns for its ninth miserable year; always in the background, the common denominator in everything from the Brexit vote to knife crime.

The British deployed the men of their Indian army on the European battlefield from October 1914; the decision being made within days of the outbreak of hostilities.

After 150 years, Bristol‘s prime music venue is to finally change its name and thereby cut its link to the infamous slave trader Edward Colston.

Many anglophone Africans still have deep emotional, economic and often familial links to Britain, but those with money are now as keen to holiday in Dubai as London.

The nation of 2019, exponentially wealthier, appears to have a fraction of its former self-belief and little faith in its capacity to solve the latest in a long line of housing crises that stretch back to the 18th century.

As one of the very few black historians who, from time to time, appears on TV, my daily life is a constant, open-air focus group.

Ultimately, the naming of buildings is not a mechanism by which history is kept alive. It is a mechanism by which the rich and the powerful are honoured.

I am as much British, white and working class, my mother’s background, as I am black and Nigerian, my father‘s heritage.

Humans are pattern-seeking animals, consciously and subconsciously imposing designs and theories on to past events. We do this in both our private lives and when looking at history.

Even in London, at the centre of the wealthiest region in northern Europe, in so many ways insulated from the financial realities faced by the rest of the country, the facts of austerity are becoming harder to ignore.