Dr. Onyeka Nubia is a pioneering and internationally recognised historian, writer, and presenter. He is reinventing our perceptions of diversity, the Renaissance, and British history. Onyeka is the leading historian on the status and origins of Africans in pre-colonial England from antiquity to 1603. He has helped academia and the general public to entirely new perspectives on otherness, colonialism, imperialism, and World Wars I and II.
He has written over fifty articles on Englishness, Britishness, and historical method and they have appeared in the most popular UK historical magazines and periodicals including History Today and BBC History Magazine. Onyeka has been a consultant and presenter for several television programmes on BBC.
I wrote...
Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins
By
Onyeka Nubia
What is my book about?
Do we think of English history as a book with white pages and no black letters in it? Tudor history is often portrayed as a ‘scared white space’ populated by personages such as: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, and of course William Shakespeare. But in Tudor times, Englishmen such as Thomas More, William Harrison, George Best, and Francis Bacon, described Africans ‘living amongst them.’ These Africans such as Henrie Anthonie Jetto, Mary Fillis of Morisco, Catalina de Motril, and Fortunatus left their mark on English society.
This book for the first time reveals that Africans in Tudor England were not all inferior slaves and that their history, is all our histories.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Black British History: New Perspectives
By
Hakim Adi
Why this book?
New Perspectives shows us that Black British history is a complex field of historiography. No longer should we look at it as a sketchy, speculative, politically correct apologia for historical investigation. But rather see, that for more than three generations scholars have worked very hard to establish a vigorous pedagogy. It is a pedagogy that supports wider British histories, but subverts the traditional trajectories of those narratives. This book introduces us to some of the major developments in Black British history and it is an excellent place to start for a reader who knows very little about this subject.
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Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850
By
David Northup
Why this book?
Northup provocatively challenges our perceptions of the early modern world. By offering a relativist view and investigating the primary sources written by Africans themselves — the Africans of the early modern period. They reveal much about sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, as well as African civilizations.
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In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process 1: The Colonial Period
By
A. Leon Higginbotham
Why this book?
We may think we know about colonial America. Higginbotham reveals that we are just beginning to learn about this geographical space and this period of history. Higginbotham shows another ‘America,’ still dominated by the laws of European countries such as Britain, France, the Dutch Republics, and Spain. This is an America that may be unfamiliar to us and it is a place where Africans could still negotiate their status in the courts of law. This book offers a very detailed exploration of a fascinating moment in American history. And shows us what the founding of the United States of America really meant to the Africans, who had already been there for more than a hundred years.
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The Healers
By
Ayi Kwei Armah
Why this book?
If there is one book you read on: colonialism, pre-colonial West Africa, and African traditional religions, let it be this one. The Healers is fiction, but it reads like a storybook-documentary, with moments of tragedy, horror, and despair unfolding on every page. Above all Armah shows, that Africans had civilizations and culture and that they were capable of resisting European hegemony. This book is a fluid, poetic and masterful classic.
