Debunking the BBC's Horrible Black History

The BBC produced a song for the Horrible Histories children's program called 'Been Here From the Start' which makes several spurious, misleading and outright false claims about black people living in ancient Britain. From Cheddar man to Septimius Severus and the Moors, I debunk the lies contained in the BBC video and present the truth.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Survive the Jive. I'mTom Rousel, I'm an a historian,
and today I'm going to debunk Children'sBBC who have created a song for their
Horrible Histories program about two years agoon their YouTube channel called been Here from
the Start, which makes a numberof egregious false claims about the history of
Britain, trying to depict it asa place in which sub Saharan African people

(00:21):
have always played a significant and importantpart and have always been present. I'll
debunk each of the false claims today. After the first chorus, which is
awful, there is a verse whichclaims that the Mesolithic population of Britain,

(00:44):
typified by the example everyone Knows cheda man who is in fact a member
of a race that was found allacross Western Europe from Sweden to Spain,
which was known by geneticists as theWestern hunter gatherers. They were not black,
they were not even related to Africanpeople today Subshian African people in any
way. In fact, modern whitepeople are more closely related to black people

(01:06):
than Western hunter gatherers were. Infact, no race on Earth today has
any genetic relationship specifically to the WesternHunter gatherers except white people. White people
are the only people who descend fromWestern hunter gatherers to any significant degree.
Like cranial morphology is very typically European. They have blue eyes like Europeans,

(01:26):
and straight hair like Europeans, snubnoses like Europeans. They are generally going
to be European looking. It's possible, based on a prediction of the genes
associated with complexion, that they haddarker skin than what modern Europeans have.
That's a possibility, although many scientistshave called for caution when talking about that

(01:49):
because because we can't accurately predict skincolors in such an ancient population. However,
even if they were dark skinned,it doesn't make any difference because they
are not sub Saharan are in Africanblacks. Nelson Mandela is called black because
he is sub Saharan African. Hedoesn't actually have black skin. He's quite
light skinned, but he's still calledblack. Tamils from South Asia have very

(02:12):
dark skin, but they're not calledblack because they are not from sub Saharan
Africa. When you say black inBritain, you mean sub Saharan African.
And this man, Chada Man hadno sub Saharan African DNA at all.
He was not related to sub SaharanAfricans. It is a complete lie to
say that he is. Its completelyfictional. Skipping forward eight thousand years or
so, probably couldn't find any peoplethey could claim we're black during that massive

(02:36):
period. Next we come to theperiod of the Roman occupation of Britain and
they bring up Emperor Septimus Severus asan example of a black man, although
he was not a black man atall. He was about probably half Roman
which is basically Italian, and halfNorth African, which means not black.

(02:57):
North Africans today are not black,of course, of West Eurasian origin.
Some of them have in Arab DNA, but even before the Arab expansioned into
North Africa, the overall population ofNorth Africa was of West Eurasian descent,
that means it comes from the MiddleEast and Europe. The population of North
Africa today is not called black.However, they often have little bits of
black DNA because the Muslims during theMuslim period in medieval times, the Muslims

(03:22):
enslaved black people and sometimes into bredwith them, and so sometimes you'll find
like residual black admixture sometimes five oreven ten percent black admixture in North Africans
today, but we still don't callthem black. But before that, in
the Roman period, when we're talkingabout now, there was no black admixture
in these people. They weren't blackat all. Septimus Severus had no black

(03:44):
ancestry, and in fact, there'sa story about him, possibly apocryphal,
but it's still very revealing that aboutwhen he encounters an Ethiopian Roman soldier.
Ethiopian didn't just mean from Ethiopia,it just means black. Ethiopium means burned
skin in Greek basically, so it'swhat they called all black people. And
the soldiers spooks Septimus Severus so muchthat he thinks is a bad omen seeing

(04:11):
such dark skin. So not onlywas Septimus Severus not a black man,
he was actually racist against black people. The next false claim they make is
also in the Roman era, andit concerns about three hundred Maori soldiers or
Maury soldiers serving under Aurelius. Theman singing the song refers to them as

(04:32):
the brave Aurelian Moors. The moreis an English word that derives from the
Old Latin word mark Maury, whichis what they referred to North African people,
basically the same as modern day Burbers. Berbers are not black. Some
Bourbers today do have a sub SaharanAfrican admixture for the aforementioned reason with the

(04:53):
contact during the Islamic slave trade.The Moore's back in those days, or
rather Maury, did not have anyblack admixture. They were not black people.
They were they were Burbers. Soagain it's completely wrong called them black.
Black means sub Saharan Africans. Berbersare not white people, But it
would be more accurate to call themwhite people than to call them black people,

(05:15):
because they're genetically more related to whitepeople than they are to black people.
So if it would be dishonest torefer to the Burbers as white,
it's even more dishonest to refer tothem as black. One of the lines
says, before Harold lost at Hastings, black people played their part. What

(05:35):
does that mean so far in thesong they have not succeeded in coming up
with a single black person. Infact, there probably were a few black
people in Roman Britain and maybe someafter as well, but hand you know,
very rare, like the Ethiopian soldierthat septum of severa saw, for
example. If that story is true, then there's a black soldier. There

(05:56):
might have been black soldiers. Wehaven't actually found any yet. We have
actually found any. Many of theskeletons that have previously been called ancient Black
Britains, such as Ivory, BangleLady and bet Head Lady, have subsequently
after DNA and Alice's, been provednot only not to really be black,
but not to have any black ancestryat all, completely non black. And

(06:17):
these are people the BBC on theirwebsite have formally listed as the greatest the
Black Britons. They weren't even black. One of them was from mixed North
African and European heritage and the otherwas entirely of Southern European heritage. They
didn't have any black ancestry, butthey were so eager to call them black
that they're not only you know onyou know, guesswork based on the skull

(06:39):
called them both black, but theyalso listed them as great Black Britons on
the website of the BBC. Whois regulating the BBC, aren't they supposed
to now have some kind of youknow fact Checking Department. Why don't they
fact checked themselves? And why isn'tOffcome, the regulatory body for the United
Kingdom that makes sure that false information, fake news disinformation isn't broadcast, hasn't

(07:00):
done anything about it. Why don'tOffcome care? These are important questions to
ask. Okay, so let's skipforward fifteen hundred years to the Tudor period,
which is the next verse. Andhere they claim that John Blank,
who was a trumpeter of Henry theeighth, was black, And actually they

(07:21):
got this one right. He reallywas a black guy. Spain, as
I mentioned, the Muslims controlled it, and they had an African slave trade,
and some of their slaves were grantedfreedom if they converted to Islam,
and as a result, some blackpeople who had formerly been slaves could become
free. And then you had apopulation of a few black people within the

(07:43):
Moorish population. And that's why theconfusion today when some people think more means
black, because during Tudor times therewere some people who were black who referred
to as Moore's. But DNA analysisof a Moorish cemetery reveals that there were
more white Moors than black Mores.They didn't find a single black More in
the cemetery there were just a couplewith some African ancestry. Subs are in

(08:05):
African ancestry, so they might havebeen classed as black. But the original
Moors were North African, which meanslike Middle Eastern basically, and they enslaved
white people and black people, andsome of those whites and blacks converted to
Islam and became free and were thencalled Moors. So being a More in
that period could mean you were eitherblack, Middle Eastern or white, but

(08:28):
more likely you were Middle Eastern.The blacks and the whites were a minority
of the Moors, and at nopoint does more just mean a black people.
So just because someone is called aMoore, that doesn't mean they're black.
In fact, there were in thecemetery where the DNA and assets of
Moorish skeletons happened, there were morewhite Moors than black Moors. But you

(08:48):
wouldn't assume that more means white person, because that's wrong. It's just because
of their slavery. Now, JohnBlank was probably descended from one of these
freed slaves, and he ended upin England. Why because the Court Henry
the Ape needed to he needed todemonstrate. The king needed to demonstrate his
worldliness, his power, and havingan exotic man from the far reaches of

(09:09):
the earth with such an unusual complexionthat would shock everybody and cause everyone in
the court to gossip and talk aboutwhat an impressive sort of menagerie of exotic
things and people and animals this Kingof England has. That's the reason that
he was there. He was literallya human trophy to show the King's power

(09:31):
and influence. He was not himselfa historically important figure. John Blank played
a Trumpet's not any more important thananyone else who plays a trumpet. It's
not He wasn't part of a blackcommunity. He wasn't part of a you
know, some black British identity thatnever existed. He was just a trumpeter
from Spain who was used as astatus symbol by an English king. The

(09:54):
next claim they make is also fromroughly the same period, and it concerns
a woman also born in Spain,and she was called Catalina of Montreal,
and she was not black. Shewas probably of Moorish descent, and therefore
she might be of mixed North Africanand Spanish descent. We don't have her

(10:16):
DNA. Nobody called her black.She certainly doesn't. There's no reason to
think she was black. It's completelyarbitrary to call her black to make up
that she was sub Saharan African.And as I say, based on scientific
evidence of Morris cemeteries in Spain,it would be much more statistically likely that
she was white than she was black, or that she was Middle easton,

(10:37):
which would be most obvious because morethan Middle easton. But yeah, if
she wasn't Middle Eastern, she'd bemore likely to be white than black.
So yeah, again, they failedto find a black person in the list
of you know, we've been herefrom the start. There's trying to portray
Britain as a place which has alwayshosted a black community. It's it's not

(10:58):
true. It's never happened. Andoccasionally a black person might show up like
one you know here or there inhistory, and they are not a continuous
popular community. They come, theygo there. The idea of a black
Britain is entirely modern, even whenwe actually start having a real black community
here in the nineteen fifties after windRush, they had tiny, tiny amount

(11:18):
of the population. When I wasborn in the mid nineteen eighties, this
country was still ninety five percent white, and the non white population was more
comprised of South Asians than it wasof blacks. They they weren't even a
big part of this country in thenineteen eighties, although even in the nineteen

(11:41):
eighties they were overrepresented in the BBCmedia. Because there's been a push for
decades to try and exaggerate the significanceof Sub Saharan Africans in Britain and its
history. Why, I don't know, you'll have to work that out yourself.
But this ultimately is a criminal misrepresentationof British history and it is undermining

(12:05):
the sense of continuity of the indigenouspeoples with their historic culture and trying to
claim that newcomers. Remember, mostof the black people in this country now
are nothing to do with the windRush generation. They came here in subsequent
decades and have no claim to theancient history of these islands. None of
the wind Rush generation have any relationto any of the black people who ever

(12:30):
did visit Britain in the past.Because descendants of the Africarribbean people ultimately hail
from West Africa, places like Nigeria, Gabon, Niger along on the western
coast of Africa, whereas the Moorstook their slaves from further north. So

(12:52):
the Moors would have taken some blackslaves into Spain, and some of those,
somehow in the the Tudor period mayhave made up made an appearance in
Britain, but they didn't form communities. By the way, all those North
African Romans that came here during youknow, the Roman occupation, they left
no legacy and they didn't stay.We know that because there's been thorough genetic

(13:16):
studies of pre Roman Britain and RomanBritain and post Roman Britain, many different
studies, and they have all cometo the conclusion that the Roman occupation left
no genetic legacy in Britain and thatthere is genetic continuity such that the Britons
after the Romans left are exactly thesame genetically as those there had been before
the Romans ever came. The peoplethe Roman stationed here were very diverse.

(13:39):
They included Germanic people, Middle Easternpeople, North African people, people from
all over the Empire were stationed assoldiers. But you know, I is
Iraq. Now very American got lotsof British and Irish ancestry because Iraq was
occupied by American soldiers. No,there was just a military occupation or even

(14:01):
the British Raj India was occupied byBritain and ruled by Britain for hundreds of
years. The average Indian person haszero British ancestry just because of military or
colonial force occupies a country. Thatdoesn't mean that everyone has sex with the
soldiers. That's not how it happens. Of course, there is no genetic

(14:24):
impact from the Roman Empire actually inBritain, it just didn't happen, and
this has been very well documented scientifically. The continuity of British DNA is not
disrupted at all until the Anglo Saxoninvasions, and they did make an impact,
as I've discussed in other videos inthe past. If you'd like to
learn more about this sort of thing, have a look at some of my

(14:46):
old videos. I keep having todebunk the nonsense that is put out by
lying fake media like the BBC.So if you want to have more honest
approach to history, keep watching Survivethe Jive. Thank you have a nice
day. You should also make sureto check up my Teaspring store to get
some very Indo European garments and seeyou next time.