Black Truths

Book Reviews

The Story of Black History
by Roy Kerridge
Claridge Press, 72 pages

[Most easily obtained through www.amazon.com]

Roy Kerridge is that most annoying of commentators on a controversial subject -- one who actually knows what he is talking about.  There is probably no white writer with a more intimate and informed knowledge of how English black communities really function.  He was raised by a black family and grew up in black London where his stepfather was secretary of the "African League" and editor of The African Voice.

While this book is mainly about the English experience, its lessons are important for Australia and all other Anglomorph countries with flourishing multiculturalism and race-relations industries.

It is difficult for libertarians to say that anything should be compulsory reading, but The Story of Black History should surely be obligatory for anyone who wants to make a constructive contribution to, or say anything informed about, race relations today.  It is particularly recommended to certain of the buffoons in clerical collars who might like their words on race relations to have some constructive content or at least some relationship to the facts.

It cuts a devastating swathe through cant and politically-correct lies, though it is alarming and depressing in its revelations of just how deep institutionalised lying has now gone, and of the extent to which black people are being pressured to live in a mythology of falsehoods.  Though the implications are chilling, and one may -- and should -- feel outrage at the perversions of truth documented here, there is a kind of appalling fascination in the intellectual and historical rot that Kerridge turns over and exposes.

One of the major points which The Story of Black History makes is that real black history is not a monolithic thing and, despite the patronising assumptions of race relations and black history industries to the contrary, black people in Britain are not anything like a single, homogeneous mass.  The heritages of African and Caribbean migrants are quite different.  So are the cultures of, for example, Jamaica and Barbados.  Nor is the experience of blacks in Britain and America the same, though British blacks are now under the overwhelming cultural pressure of Hollywood mythology.  Kerridge recalls growing up in black London:

The Trinidadians soon allied themselves with Creoles from Sierra Leone, West Africa ... the few Jamaicans we met seemed very odd fish, with their baffling allegiance to God, Queen and Commonwealth ...

Kerridge asks why, if it was true that blacks were brought to Britain to do the jobs that whites didn't want, as "black history" claims, were working-class whites not overjoyed to see them, and did not greet them with cries of:  "Here, take my job!"

He continues:

As I remember it, from my schooldays in the "African League" every boatload of West Indians that arrived in Britain was met by eager con-men from West Africa or Trinidad out to fleece and bamboozle the newcomers ... My friend Virginia Farmer ... spent her first night in London shivering on a station bench as she "waited for the man to come and tell me where to live and get me a job".

Apart from the complexities of West Indian and black American culture, Africa is not -- how odd that one should be need to be told this! -- one country with one language or set of customs.  Kerridge points out, in regard to the mythical "Africa" which exists as a kind of country of the mind:

Until recently, the "African language" proclaimed by "African Americans" was Swahili, an Arab-pidgin used originally by slave traders operating from Zanzibar.  The language (never learned, but often quoted) accorded well with the general "pro-Islam" slant of the New Africans.  Now, after thirty years of glorifying Arabs and Islam, the neo-Africans have at last become dimly aware of the vast Arab involvement in the African slave trade.  Yoruba is replacing Swahili as the "African language" ...

Hollywood and American television add another layer of fantasy and distortion.

Kerridge is a brilliantly economical writer, and one of the feats of this small book is to indicate just how complicated real black history actually is.  Sophisticated neo-Africans, he points out, disown as "low" the genuine African traits which are still to be found in some black American communities.  How ashamed they would be of the black American pastor who greeted him in Louisiana with joy as

A man from England, home of our mother-church, the great Church of England!

Whites who commiserate with blacks over the legacy of slavery may provoke nothing but embarrassment.

The products of the "black history" industry do not seem helpful preparation for life.  Rather, it seems an engine for inculcating paranoid fantasy.  The result of false mythologising is layers of confusion that can shade into outright madness.  There is, for example, the weird history/ cult of Nubianism.  This seems to have little to do with the real black Kushite kingdom which had some important interaction with Pharoanic Egypt, including supplying a Pharoanic Dynasty.  It claims rather that

Nubians are super-beings made in Africa in ancient times by immortals from space adept in arts of genetic engineering, wrongly called God.

There is something terribly wrong when this nonsense seems to be practically beyond criticism and has actually attained a kind of academic status.

I can attest to his from personal experience:  while I was in Britain recently, a television programme was screened in which a "black history" academic solemnly informed us that Cleopatra was black.  Not only is there not a shred of evidence for this (Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, of a Greek dynasty installed following Alexander the contemporary writer paid tribute to her "white breasts" -- and she can hardly have been two-tone.

Kerridge points out that:

Knowing no history, the white English cannot counter-attack the diatribes of Nubian historians, since for all they know the Nubians are telling the truth.

Much of what he writes has devastating implications about the teaching of all history today.

Nation of Islam literature printed in America and distributed in Britain admonishes against eating foods associated with American slave-mythology, such as "deer, possums, coons, turtles or hominy grits", which few British blacks would be inclined to eat anyway.  One bizarre result is that many black (like some white) British schoolchildren now quite literally do not know what country they are living in.  When taught by Nubianism and Nation of Islam that "the white man is the devil", the effect on some blacks:

instead of making them ferocious [is to make them] feel timid and nervous in the presence of white people.

This stuff is, in short, a form of abuse and damage to the people who are subjected to it.

Kerridge writes with wit and grace as well as knowledge, making this book in its way delightful as well as horrifying.  By writing and publishing The Story of Black History, he and Claridge Press have performed a brave public service, and not only blacks should be grateful.