David Olusoga is brave and brilliant. His tomes on black Britons through the ages and programmes on Empire made public truths which most previous keepers of the nation’s story had buried or neglected. Call it unconscious mass misinformation.
In 1984, Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain was published. The author was Peter Fryer, a white historian. The effect of the transformative book on him, says Olusoga, inspired Black and British: A Forgotten History, his groundbreaking book and BBC series.
I have known Olusoga for over 20 years. Time passes, friendships fade. But I admire him as much as ever. This critical column does not change that.
It was triggered by this part of an interview Olusoga did with Rosie Millard in Radio Times this week. It’s worth quoting his words at length, when it was put to him that for a thinker critical of Empire, he had accepted an OBE in 2019.
“I’m often told by privileged white middle-class people that it’s a terrible thing for a Black person to accept an OBE, and I think they underestimate what it means,” he explained to the Radio Times. “It’s a different thing for somebody who is an immigrant to turn down a national honour than it is for someone who was born here… My mother was British, but nationality is patrilineal… I arrived as a little boy from Nigeria and this country, with a lot of help from my mother, invested in me. Turning an honour down would be a snub. And I don’t want to snub a country that I became a citizen of, and which is my nation.” His feelings, his choice, no issue there. It’s the grandstanding that irks.
