Simon Webb & David Olusoga — REAL HISTORY v PROPAGANDA

In case you hadn’t noticed, Black History Month has arrived again in the UK. Sadly, most of what passes for black history here and worldwide is largely fiction. The undoubted champion of this fantasy in Britain is David Olusoga, a man who has a particular obsession with slavery, but only one aspect of it, the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He seems to believe that much of Britain’s wealth was based on this trade, and that there has been a black presence in Britain since the Roman occupation. Fortunately, while the BBC and academia give him space to promote this foolishness, YouTube gives Simon Webb a channel to debunk it.

The Black History UK website can be found here. And here are a few of its claims debunked. African soldiers are said to have served in Britain, including at Hadrian’s Wall. David Olusoga has endorsed this claim, and on October 20, another black historian will be perpetuating it, but as Simon Webb points out, these Africans were not black – Negroes to use an unfashionable but taxonomically correct word. They were from Morocco, as well as few in number. Blacks are the wrong minority to claim an association with Hadrian’s Wall, the man who constructed it, the Emperor Hadrian, is said to have belonged to another minority, though not an ethnic one!

It is also claimed that Rome’s first African Emperor died in York. York, or Eboracum to give it its Latin name, was the northern capital of Britain. The Romans occupied Britain from 43AD until 410 when the army was pulled out. By this time the Empire had fractured – there was a Western Emperor and an Eastern Emperor, but Severus died in 211AD, and as far as being African…he was born in Libya. That hardly makes him black. The Christian apologist Jay Smith was born in India as was the entertainer Cliff Richard. Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya. Erin Pizzey was born in China. Black in this context alludes to race, and clearly the Emperor Severus was not black.

Ever heard of Beachy Head Lady or the Ivory Bangle Lady? These are two sets of human remains found in the last century. Fantasists claim they were black; Simon Webb claims otherwise and has the goods to prove it.

Olusoga’s obsession with the slave trade as the source of Britain’s wealth is too stupid to comment on, but we will anyway. Britain and now the world’s wealth came not from slavery but from the virtuous circle of new technology and investment. That new technology was developed almost entirely by white men. There was the odd contribution by women, and even by black men, although Simon Webb has dispensed with most of the fanciful claims about black scientists including one (endorsed by Joe Biden) that a black scientist invented the light bulb.

If Africans suffered on the plantations, so did the common people in factories. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in the Caribbean 26 years later. But young white boys were still being shoved up chimneys to clean them decades later. The last fatality of a climbing boy was in 1875. In 1863, Thomas Clarke, “master-sweep of Nottingham” told the Children’s Employment Commission: “It [apprenticeship] is as bad as the Negro slavery, only it is not so known”.

There are plenty of old films, and photographs before them, that show the terrible conditions of the common people. Even domestic servants worked long hours for poor pay. All this was unavoidable, and racism had nothing  to do with it.

In 2016, Olusoga published a book called Black And British. It should be noted he is neither; he is half-black and was born in Nigeria ten years after it was granted independence from Britain and seven years after it became a republic. This book is very long and discussing it in detail would take up too much space, but at page 517, he makes claims that are more worthy of a socialist polemicist than an historian. 

“The riots of the early 1980s were profoundly different from the disturbances of 1919, 1948 and 1958, all of which were at various times described as ‘race riots’ but were mostly outbursts of violence in which white gangs targeted black people and communities”.

The riots in the 1980s were “uprisings” that were fought by “young black people in response to years of systematic persecution and prejudice. They were destructive and damaging but they were understandable”. 

Seriously? Let us take one of these riots, the notorious Broadwater Farm riot of 1985. In October of that year, Floyd Jarrett was arrested and charged with theft. The police then went to search his mother’s home on the Broadwater Farm Estate. Mrs Cynthia Jarrett was only 49 but she was grossly overweight, and whether or not there was any sort of scuffle, she dropped dead from a heart attack during the raid. Her family rightly called for an inquiry, but they also appealed for calm.

Ignoring the Jarrett family – the real victims – the mob sought revenge on the police, and this riot resulted notoriously in the death of PC Keith Blakelock followed by the framing of three miscreants for his murder. Other “race riots” had similar pretexts. Simon Webb has debunked claims by the usual suspects about the 1919 riots, as for the 1981 disturbances in Brixton, like Broadwater Farm, these are within living memory. The catalyst  was  an attempt by a police officer to assist a black youth named Michael Bailey who had been stabbed and was being chased by three other blacks. It seems whatever the police do they are wrong, even when they do the right thing.

The narrative of white oppressors and black victims is the dominant theme of so-called black history, a history that only truly began when the African was taught to read by the White Man. It is a narrative that has been swallowed hook line and sinker by this young woman who talks about “allies” and “white privilege”. As if.

Gullible black youngsters may fall it, but for a graduate of two universities like Olusoga, swallowing this kind of garbage is unforgiveable.