The bestselling author Florence Olajide writes about the difficulties of researching pre-colonial African history for her novel, The Stolen Daughter, including the language the Victorians used about her ancestors.
Authors face many challenges when it comes to their writing, but my experience with African historical fiction involved some unique and personal difficulties.
My first task when building the world for my historical novel The Stolen Daughter, was finding out what daily life looked like in the 1880s in West Africa. Prior to colonisation, except for North African Islamic nations that had a written language tradition, most African cultures passed their history down through generations using oral traditions including tales and songs, and through their artwork.
I grew up in post-colonial Nigeria with a few anecdotal stories from my grandparents, but these did not answer basic questions such as, what did villages, towns and cities look like before western civilisation took root? What was the architecture like? What did people wear?
Little did I know it, but my research was about to take me to places I had not anticipated and would have a profound impact on my mental health and well-being.
To answer my questions, I found myself turning to some unusual places, namely the writings of early missionaries and explorers like Sir Richard Francis Burton. Thanks to the internet, I found a wide range of letters and books. But someone ought to have slapped a warning label on some of these.
As enraptured as I was reading about my ancestors and their daily life, it was hard to stomach the degrading language that early explorers used to describe them. The disdain and sense of superiority underpinning Great Britain’s colonisation policy were crystal clear in the black and white letters.
The professional I am pushed my emotions aside as I ploughed on, determined to glean as much as I could to make my characters’ world as realistic as possible. It was a most enlightening voyage of discovery; learning things I never knew and shedding further light on childhood memories, which had once faded but now sprung to life. I got the job done, but all that suppressed emotion was to find expression in an all-consuming anger once I stopped writing.
The Victorians’ blasé intent on world domination, the repercussions of which are still felt globally, left me with a bitter taste. I have never been an ‘angry’ person, my motto generally being ‘whatever, get on with it’. But for the first time I felt an empathy for angry people, because suddenly, I was one of them.
My anger was further fuelled by a long-anticipated trip to Australia and New Zealand, where Captain Cook’s legacy dodged my every footstep. That my visit coincided with ‘Australia Day’ didn’t help.
The historical abuses suffered by the Aborigines brought the thorny subject of colonisation back to the fore as a bitter war of attrition played out in the Australian press. What should have been a relaxing holiday learning about new cultures became one filled with ire.
I have since come to terms with my emotions without the need for therapy, although I suspect I am still processing. The current political climate in Britain doesn’t help and regular stories in the media portraying racism and misogyny keep picking at the scabs.
My research changed me in ways I didn’t anticipate, but ultimately for the good, I think. For one, it’s made me bolder. I am no longer afraid to ruffle feathers by calling out the long-lasting impact of empire, even to those who don’t want to know. I won’t blast my views in anyone’s face, but if you ask me what I think, you’ll get the truth, as I see it.
It’s also made me more determined than ever to promote the proper teaching of history in schools, so hopefully future generations will be more respectful of each other.
As an educator, I hope for a future where we British teach our children the actual truth about the Victorians, the good, the bad and the downright ugly, instead of the sanitised pretty-bow wrapped stories that currently feature in the national curriculum.
While I’m not advocating brutalising seven-year-olds with the entire untarnished truth, a little perspective would help. When they learn about the ‘Empire’, I hope it helps them understand that empire included the wealth of Asians, Africans, Arabs, Maori, Aborigines and other uncountable nations and explains Britain’s current multicultural profile.
I hope they learn that many Black and Brown people are in Britain because the Victorians annexed their countries and made them British.
When learning about the Kingdom of Benin, I hope they learn of the role the Victorians played in sacking it and how that has, and continues to, bring wealth to Britain. For example, thousands pay good money every day to see the looted Benin artefacts currently displayed in the British Museum.
At the height of the Empire, Britain was truly great, and its reach covered every corner of the globe. But its greatness was built on the exploitation of many. If more British people knew and understood this, it would help build a more cohesive and respectful society. Education and a less white-washed ‘truth’ is what is needed, not culture wars.
That said, the meticulous if somewhat prejudiced notes of the early explorers and missionaries were invaluable to me, and for that I thank them. One of the perks of reading historical fiction is the opportunity to discover things about the past that you might never learn otherwise.
The end product of my research, The Stolen Daughter, and books like it often give readers a glimpse into the vast richness of cultural identities in the world today. And I hope that as they do, it also inspires readers to appreciate a little more the things that make us all human.
The Stolen Daughter by Florence Olajide was published on 31 May, 2024.
Florence is an educator and author of the best-selling memoir Coconut.
You may be interested in our interview with Toby Green, who won the HWA Non-Fiction Crown Award in 2020 for A Fistful of Shells, a history of pre-colonial West Africa.
Images:
- Three brass head sculptures from Ife, c14th–15th century: British Museum via World History (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Sir Richard Francis Burton by Rischgitz/Stringer, 24 August 1864: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Mounted Police and Blacks, lithograph depicting the Waterloo Creek (Slaughterhouse Creek) massacre by the New South Wales Military Mounted Police, WL Walton after Godfrey Charles Mundy, 1852: Australian War Memorial (public domain)
- Map of the Gold Coast in 1774 from the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce by Malachi Postlethwait (4th edition): Wikimedia (public domain)
- Brass plaque from Benin: British Museum, photo by Michel wal for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
