
Catch-up service:
Giving Up On the Humanities Is a Mistake
The Orangutan Theory of Intelligence
Introducing/Pre-Ordering ‘John & Paul’
Why Britain’s Elites Shun Highbrow Culture
How the World Failed Greta
For those of you who don’t know him, David Olusoga is a popular British historian and TV presenter. Black and British (2016), the book which made his name, tells the story of this country’s relationship with people from Africa and the Caribbean, from Roman times to the Windrush generation. Black and British won widespread acclaim, not just from the left but across the spectrum; one its most prominent endorsements is from the former Tory minister, Kwasi Kwarteng.
Olusoga has been much garlanded since then: he was awarded an OBE in 2019 and a professorship from the University of Manchester (he’s not an academic by trade, which is probably to his advantage when it comes to writing books people want to read). I’ve no doubt he’s in Who’s Who. He’s done Desert Island Discs, of course. Last weekend he received another establishment accolade, becoming the subject of Lunch with the FT, one of the great institutions of British journalism.
These interviews can sometimes be enjoyably combative or waspish, but this one is unashamedly adoring (it’s exactly the kind of piece I’d like someone to write about me, if anyone’s up for it). The opening is positively Jilly Cooperesque: “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.” I like a bit of Jilly, however, and it wasn’t until I got to this paragraph that I started to feel a headache coming on:
…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.
Whenever I see someone being positioned this way - as above the culture wars, shot at by partisans on both sides, and so on - I reach for my gun, or at least an aspirin. Not because I don’t believe anyone is above the fray, but because the description is often applied to people who are, in fact, partisans in disguise. (Note: the other reason this paragraph snagged on me is its swipe at Tomiwa Owolade. The quote used isn’t a dismissal of Olusoga at all, and to characterise Owolade as “anti-woke” is about as intelligent as labelling Olusoga “woke”).
Black and British is an excellent book, meticulously researched and well written, on an under-explored aspect of our history. It doesn’t slap you over the head with moralising messages, or distort historical evidence to fit a narrative. It’s the work of someone genuinely curious about the past, rather than one using the past to make political hay in the present. But there appear to be two David Olusogas.
There is the careful, judicious author of Black and British, and there is the polemicist who writes columns defending attacks on statues; who accuses the NHS of appalling racism based on nothing except naive disparitism; who throws himself into every passing culture war, including the Harry and Meghan show; who uses Twitter/X to dunk on random idiots with gusto. This Olusoga nearly always hews to the same line as his political faction in these debates, and rarely, if ever, attacks the left for its idiocies, when God knows there are plenty to choose from.
Let’s be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with being a culture warrior. Public discourse would be dull if everyone argued dispassionately and mildly and declined to take sides. But political combatants should be honest about their appetite for battle and transparent about their aims. What grates on me is when those who consistently make contentious claims, and predictably take the same side of every controversy, congratulate themselves on being sophisticated, detached, impeccably nuanced - above the whole grubby business.
That’s the Olusoga we get in the FT interview. Although, even here, as he professes disdain for cultural politics, he reveals that he sees himself as first and foremost an activist:
“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.”
It is a remarkable quote. First of all, because of its eloquence. I wish I had the ability to blow such beautiful verbal smoke rings. The image of a historian standing alone in front of a stash of ammunition, fending off those who would use it for nefarious ends, is inspired. But it’s a good idea to distrust eloquence, particularly if you’re an interviewer, since there is no reliable correlation between mesmerising speech and good sense, even though it feels like there ought to be.
When you pay just a little attention to what Olusoga is saying here, you realise it’s grandiloquent nonsense. The historian is not a heroic protector of the public, saving them from ideas which might turn their pretty heads. Historians are not here to judge, on our behalf, which of today’s ideas are dangerous and which are safe (let’s not even get into what it means for an idea to be ‘dangerous’). The job of a historian is less romantic and more important: to find out the truth about the past and set it down.
What political lessons people draw from their findings and insights shouldn’t be the concern of historians, at least, not as historians. It may be their concern as activists or columnists, but that’s not a distinction Olusoga is keen to emphasise, perhaps because he feels his authority as a commentator rests on his reputation as a disinterested scholar. But the passage above reveals a circle that can’t be squared. Olusoga says he wants to stop people raiding history for their political projects. But why does he want to stop them? Presumably because he disagrees with their political ideas! His project is political, too, even if he doesn’t want to say it.
Believe it not, I don’t mean this to be an attack on Olusoga, so much as constructive criticism (not that he cares). I think it’s a good thing that he’s one of our most prominent voices on race and history; someone able to get the BBC to do its job and commission serious documentaries. He is better informed and more subtle than most pundits when it comes to race and empire, indeed than many of the academics who specialise in it.
I just wish he’d be more candid about his political pugilism, or less one-sided in his prosecution of it. It would be good to see him confront the historians who perpetrated the Henry Cort debacle, for instance, or correct the increasingly widespread misconception that Britain was an ethnically diverse society before the second half of the twentieth century. It simply isn’t the case that the only ‘dangerous’ or just plain wrong ideas about race come from the right. If the historian is to stand guard at a checkpoint it should be in the service of historical fact, not ideology.
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After the jump: thoughts on the responses to the Kaba verdict. Plus a rattle bag of juicy links, and some sublime music…
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