I think he's just telling the story as he goes along. This happens, and then that resulted in this. How do you get that balance? There's nothing to be balanced about. It's desire to try and justify one over the other. Is just telling it as it was. That as i said, i'm in favour of full disclosure. This is the only way to move forward. We have another question asking, do you think the history of the abolitionist movement is still important to teach? Of course it is. My my problem with that is that it's the only story that has been taught. And that is a problem because it doesn't give us a fuller picture of
The history of Africans in Europe may seem recent – a result of migration in the 20th and 21st centuries – but in her new book, African Europeans, historian Olivette Otele tells a very different story – a story of African presence in Europe that stretches back centuries.
Otele writes of African Europeans through the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary. She has uncovered a forgotten past, one that features the Libya-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a Medici duke believed to have been born to a free African woman and enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance. By exploring a history that has long been overlooked, she sheds light on questions very much alive today: What can movements like Black Lives Matter learn from the long history of Black activism in the UK and Europe? Why are Black Britons such as the Windrush generation often treated as if they aren’t full British citizens? And how can remembering the silenced narratives of our past help us understand the present and lead to a better future?
On November 23 2020, Otele will came to Intelligence Squared to reveal this untold story of European and African history. She was in conversation with author and BBC Radio 4 presenter Kavita Puri.
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