Whitewash: Historian on how victorians tried to delete 2,000 years of black history
Rona Munro, writer of The James Plays, worked closely with Dr Onyeka Nubia, one of the only UK historians who has researched the presence of people of colour in medieval Britain.
He explained how Scotland and Europe would have actually looked at this time.
“In the early 1500s, the trends in Europe were being set by the Holy Roman Empire, and this included the countries of Spain, Portugal and Italy, as we know them today,” says Dr Nubia. “People of African descent, who were also known as Moors, had very prominent roles within this society as musicians, singers, artisans and performers and in court life. We know this because of artworks depicting the period.
“Scotland, at this time, had a real European trajectory, so it wanted to adapt the same customs. To keep up and adopt European fashions and trends they, too, wanted to employ Moorish people to their courts as key figures. They were not brought to Scotland as oddities, or strange figures to be analysed, as we might think with a more modern lens. There is certainly nothing to suggest they would have been treated as inferior because of their ethnicity at this time.
“A lot of history is viewed through a Victorian lens. And obviously we know the Victorian era was a peak time of colonialism, where these ideals of racism suited the powers of the time.
“The Victorians wanted to create a ‘British culture’ which in some cases meant eradicating parts of the history of the country that they didn’t think fitted.
“But if we look at the actual records and evidence, we have it all there – people of colour, including those of African descent, were actually present in the history of the British Isles as far back as 2,000 years ago.”