Gove also wants to dump Equiano

Not satisfied with consigning Mary Seacole to the historical scrap heap, the Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, also has the same fate for another great Black Briton, Olaudah Equiano.

Equiano is as, if not more important than Seacole. Equiano wrote the first autobiography as a freed enslaved man. Moreover, it was his narrative, as a pioneering slave abolition-er he so fantastically shook the political establishment to the core. A self-taught man, he used the Christian sensibility to turn on itself and ask the obvious question. Is this what Christians do?

O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you-- Learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of grain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? “

His beautiful prose is almost Shakespearian, only this is not a work of fiction aimed at entertaining, but a narrative to shame the world’s leading nation in human trafficking and slavery on an industrial level.

And Gove wants to remove Equiano from our children’s books? Why would anyone want to do this? It has been noted that many of these ideas come from Gove’s education Tsar Simon Scharma. He famously said when he took up the post that teachers need to be ‘brave’, that ‘history is dangerous’. We’ll there’s nothing brave about removing two great Black Britons from our National Curriculum, but Scharma’s correct if he sees this brand of historical revisionism as ‘dangerous’.

OBV along with many prominent individuals, including Rev Jesse Jackson will be writing an open letter to Michael Gove MP.

Simon Woolley