The historian and TV presenter on the story of former slave Olaudah Equiano and the significance of Black History Month
Historian and broadcaster David Olusoga has been the face of a decolonial turn in British broadcasting that, in recent years, with series including the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, A House Through Time and Black and British: A Forgotten History, has inspired new conversations about injustice in the story of Britain and Britishness in living rooms across the country. Anticipating this year’s Black History Month (October), he has contributed a foreword to the republication by Hodder & Stoughton of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the memoir of an 18th-century formerly enslaved man that is also widely recognised as a foundational text of Black British literature.
What led you to get behind this republication of Equiano’s memoir?
It’s a book I read at university and that has been part of my life for 30 years. I think it’s the most important of the British narratives of people who were enslaved. Equiano is someone who managed to purchase his way out of slavery, to travel the world as a Black person in an age where you could be kidnapped and transported back into slavery. He was a skilled sailor, a political operator. He became a public figure when this country was the biggest slave-trading nation in the North Atlantic. There are many voices that come out of the experience of British slavery but none of them have the same impact as Equiano.