‘My loyalty is to history’

David Olusoga talks about history as if it were a lover. The study of the past is a 40-year romance that animates and excites him.

And like any infatuated lover, he sees the object of his affection everywhere. He sees it when he is out of an evening: “I love having a drink in Covent Garden and thinking about the Georgian rakes, drinking wine, looking at the same views.” He sees it as central to how his parents, a Black Nigerian man and a white woman from Newcastle, met: “It’s a classic story of empire . . . History’s about unintended consequences.”

You can understand why his partner, on a recent holiday to Cape Verde, wrongly assumed his ulterior motive for the trip was the islands’ history of Portuguese concentration camps. She “stormed into the bathroom with the iPad: ‘So that’s why we’re here!’”

Olusoga’s love affair with the past has made him one of the UK’s best-known and most recognised historians. In many ways his most significant achievement has been reimagining and mainstreaming Black British history. His 2016 book and documentary series, Black and British, took a topic that was beloved of specialists but had never enjoyed the popular breakthrough it deserved. (The only previous sweeping history, Peter Fryer’s 1984 epic Staying Power, had been published by a small radical publisher.)

As a result, Olusoga has been shot at from both sides in the UK’s culture wars. One anti-woke commentator, Tomiwa Owolade, dismissed him as one of “the experts condemning Britain for its racism”, while from the left, the writer Colin Grant criticised Black and British as “mediated by a committee of BBC folk determined not to offend”. Both the remaining candidates in the current Conservative leadership election have criticised “woke” historians for undermining our national identity.

The number of people who will state with absolute certainty that I must hate white people amazes me

“This idea that an aspect of British history, uncovered and written about by British historians, is an attack on Britain and British history I think is palpably ridiculous,” he says. “But that idea of creating enemies . . . is, I think, very deep in our politics.”

We are lunching at the Riding House Café in central London because it makes a convenient staging post ahead of his next assignment at the BBC. It’s a restaurant that is always full of, as Olusoga puts it, “TV people hatching plans or giving each other bad news”, and the menu is designed to neither overshadow nor ruin the moment. Food from various global cuisines sits side by side, cooked tolerably but not exceptionally. Our drinks order — sparkling water for him, Coca-Cola for me — arrives with impressive but, it turns out, unrepresentative haste.

When we meet, Olusoga is putting the finishing touches to the fifth series of A House Through Time, which tells the story of a single home’s inhabitants, and which launched on the BBC this week. The history of urban spaces is his original speciality, but he ranges widely. His latest book, and his third for children, Black History for Every Day of the Year, is an almanac that details the varied history of Black people across the world.

Before Black and British, popular histories of the Black British experience could be boiled down to “they come to us”: a smattering of Romans who we would now think of as Black, a handful of Moorish people in the Tudor court, then the arrival of workers from the imperial periphery.

“Possibly accidentally, the early historians of the Black British experience drew the borders of that experience around the borders of Britain,” Olusoga says. “They possibly took an African-American historical template which was much more developed and applied it to an imperial country.”

A proper history of the Black British experience, and indeed the British experience as a whole, is, as Olusoga says, “triangular”: it takes in British colonies in the Americas and Africa as well as in the imperial core.

Olusoga, youthful at 54 — despite the occasional, self-deprecating reference to the fact he is getting on in years — has become the elder statesman and most prominent figure in the reimagining of the popular history of the British empire.

So I wonder if the culture wars around imperial history bother him. “What worries me when I have hostile questions is not what people say, because what they say is almost always the same thing. It’s how convinced they are that I hate them, their culture, their history and our country.”

Until now, he has had two modes of speech in our lunch: boyish adoration for the subject of history, mannered thoughtfulness for everything else. Now he sounds audibly hurt. “The number of people who will state with absolute certainty that I must hate white people amazes me. I’m visibly mixed-race! I have an OBE! And that’s what worries me.”

What about his critics who say that he isn’t polemical enough? He points to the “moral messiness” of history. One of the subjects in his series on Britain’s forgotten slave owners was an old woman, living in Britain in 1833, whose only pension was “two enslaved people she owned in the Caribbean,” he says. “You do find yourself having a bit of empathy for [her], and almost slap yourself awake when you remember what the commodity you’re talking about is: that’s what I think is important. It’s not to find the cartoon villains . . . but to focus on the messiness.”

One way that Olusoga’s love affair with history is complicated is that he doesn’t expect very much of it. He’s not someone who expects history to solve our problems.

I think [the job of historians] is to try to stand there at this arsenal of dangerous ideas and to make it more difficult for people to raid that arsenal to use it for their political projects

Our conversation turns to the recent riots in England, where far-right extremists targeted immigrant communities following a horrific stabbing attack. The events more closely resembled a medieval pogrom than a 20th century race riot. “This blood libel, this idea that this [whole] community is responsible for this crime, all of these ideas are not new.” He hesitates, an unspoken “but” hanging in the air.

“This is where I sort of question the utility of history. History can inform us of what happens in the past; it can warn us of the dangers of the past, but I’m not sure that there’s very many examples of people turning away from those pathways, even when the warnings are made apparent.”

Like Olusoga, I studied history as an undergraduate. In my application to university, I made all sorts of pompous claims about the importance of history as a way of learning the lessons from the past. But now, like him, I’m no longer as sure. If history has a lesson, it is that we don’t learn from it.

“When I was a young historian, I imagined that history was, as I was told, a way of avoiding the mistakes of the past . . . what I think now is something much less grand. I think [the job of historians] is to try to stand there at this arsenal of dangerous ideas and to make it more difficult for people to raid that arsenal to use it for their political projects. It is to complicate the picture; it is to show that these simple assertions are much more nuanced; it is to muddy the waters and to try to de-weaponise the past.”

Some 50 minutes have passed, and in vain, we have failed to signal to a waiter that we would like to order. Olusoga tells me that one of his friends talks about “bar presence”: the ability to get served at bars, a quality he has concluded that he lacks. I clearly don’t have it either. When a waiter arrives, Olusoga, conscious perhaps of the demands on his time, orders a collection of starters. I go for a lamb dish with unnamed spices.

One way that Black History for Every Day of the Year seeks to muddy the waters of the past is by breaking with the tradition of sanitised fables for young people. The entry for my birthday is the Sharpeville Massacre, when armed police fired on peaceful protesters in South Africa, killing at least 69 of them and wounding hundreds. On the day we meet, the relevant entry is another South African tragedy: the murder of Steve Biko by state security officers. Other days are unalloyed joy. I ask Olusoga if children’s books should have a different, sunnier version of history than those for adults.

“Too often, Black history is seen as all slavery and all imperialism, and the counter to that is it’s all achievement and it’s all Mary Seacole and Martin Luther King and wonderful musicians and artists.” Ultimately, he says, “Black history, all history, is tragedy and wonder.”

Given his belief that history doesn’t help us solve problems, why write children’s books at all? He says “one of the most important events” in his life was buying Fryer’s Staying Power aged 16. He did so because he was looking for answers: in his early childhood, he, his mother, and his sisters were terrorised by the National Front and forced to move from the council estate in Gateshead where they lived. He remains close with his siblings, who are the co-authors of Black History for Every Day of the Year.

“The first reaction to those experiences was trauma, and it would be kind of crazy and dishonest to pretend that that was not the first and the lasting impact.” But after moving home and schools, “life got better, Britain got better”. With time and distance came a question: “What motivated the people responsible for those experiences that me and my siblings and my mother experienced?”

“I’ve never encountered a cause or an idea or a feeling that would convince me that the right thing to do would be to break into an old Victorian cemetery, creep across the gravestones in the dark and throw bricks through the windows of bedrooms with children sleeping in them. And that’s what they decided was the right, appropriate, correct thing to do.”

He admits his search for answers “could all just be trauma disguised as academic interest; maybe I haven’t found the right therapist to go into this, and maybe my entire historical career is a form of displacement.”

At the same time, after he wrote Black and British, he “kept getting stopped by parents: Black parents, white parents . . . white parents of mixed kids, saying, ‘You should write a children’s book’.” He remains grateful to a Nigerian woman, a stranger, who approached him on the train from his home in Bristol to London, who “didn’t so much suggest I should write a children’s book as issue a direct order”. “She said, “I’m using African-American literature to teach my children, it’s not good enough”. And I really thought, “My God, she’s right!”

Our food arrives with remarkable swiftness: my lamb is fresh from the oven and is served, modishly, on a pan rather than on a plate. Olusoga’s selection of starters — tempura broccoli, pak choi, a side of roasted tomatoes — make for a plausible set of options at a small plates restaurant.

Unlike some of his students at the University of Manchester, where he is professor of public history, he does not believe in hiding racist language in his work. “I disagree with my students and younger people that I don’t think we should disguise the reality of the past,” he says. “I absolutely think we should warn people about racial language because sometimes you just need to protect yourself . . . You’d like to know there’s a fire there before you put your hand into it, so there’s a choice.”

But, he adds, “I’m uncomfortable with the idea of disguising the true virulence of the past, because my loyalty is to history, my passion is for history, and my job is to be a historian, and that means putting your hand in the fire.”

I wonder what Olusoga makes of the argument that some BBC shows or school lessons should prioritise telling unifying and aspirational stories about the nation.

“These things are only problems if you need everything to be perfect.” he says. “I love Dickens. One of the reasons I love [London] is because I have an ambition to read every word Dickens wrote, which means all his magazine articles as well — I’ve done most of the novels. Dickens’s compassion for the poor of this city, partly because of his own experiences, partly because he was a man capable of empathy, is astonishing. [Yet] Dickens’s contempt for non-white people, Africans, Indians, is breathtaking: the racism within his books, within the American Notes. I can still love Dickens, and I can still love his empathy and his descriptions of poverty: I don’t need him to be perfect.”

I don’t think we should disguise the reality of the past. We should warn people about racial language because sometimes you just need to protect yourself

He continues: “It seems very likely that Shakespeare was not a nice person: I don’t care! It doesn’t matter. God, the idea that you would withhold from yourself the works of either of those writers because of their personal frailties is just ludicrous.”

Our plates are cleared, but neither of us show any sign of developing the necessary “bar presence” to get the bill or dessert. A publicist has arrived to take Olusoga to his next engagement (10 minutes after they leave, our waiter will return and ask if we want dessert). Olusoga asks for a few minutes more to finish his thought, to go for what he dubs “Defcon one”: the greatness or otherwise of Winston Churchill, whose role in winning the second world war makes discussion of his historical legacy a question of great sensitivity.

“Thank God Churchill rather than Halifax became prime minister in the spring of 1940”. You’d have to be crazy not to think that,” he says. “But at the same time, it is also true that Churchill held appalling views about the people of Africa; he said terrible things about the people of India; his attitude and his decisions around the Bengal famine are catastrophic.”

The search for “perfect figures creates this tension between what historians do and what politicians are offended that historians do,” he adds.

“I don’t need history to build my identity. I’m fascinated by history, I draw things from history, but I draw different things than I drew 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It’s only a problem if you believe in magical exceptions and that those complexities should be disguised.” It’s that work of undisguising history, whether through the account of a house or the book on minstrelsy he is currently planning, that shapes much of what he does.

I was wrong, I realise, to see Olusoga’s love for history as a romance. It’s much more like a religious love: his life has been changed by history and he wants us, too, to feel that excitement, and to embrace it in all of its complexity. So, he heads off to the BBC to keep doing that, while I remain at the Riding House to continue to signal ineffectively for the bill.

Stephen Bush is an associate editor and columnist at the FT

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