Well, I wasn’t planning on writing this blog, but Biscuit made me……..well, maybe not forcibly, but my buttons were pushed! So here goes.....

Biscuit posted the following comment on my blog ‘The madness that is Diversity Day’:

“An example of this is a place I used to work at where they celebrated black history month in a big way. Us members of staff from all walks of life got along fine the rest of the year, but an air of "us" and "them" came along as soon as the posters and emails about the black history month celebrations started up, which was not helped by the whole theme throughout seeming to bang on about slavery and not much else”.

My take on Black History month is just celebrate History if you want to, don't make it a racial issue because it immediately becomes divisive. Unfortunately this is then compounded by the way that the whole thing becomes focused on slavery – black slavery. One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature - that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true.

North African pirates, mainly those from the Barbary Coast, abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids on coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall. Particularly hard hit were the Devon and Cornish fishing ports. They also attacked any merchant ships that they came across. Thousands of white Christians were seized every year to work as galley slaves, labourers and concubines for Muslim overlords in what is today Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya.

The heartbreaking plight of these unfortunate souls is brilliantly documented in a fantastic book called “White Gold”, which is the account taken from letters and manuscripts of an 11 year old boy who was seized and enslaved for 24 years. Thomas Pellow, a Cornish cabin boy was captured at sea by the Barbary corsairs, taken in chains to the great slave markets of Algiers, Tunis and Salè in Morocco and sold to the highest bidder, who in Pellow’s case happened to be the tyrannical sultan of Morroco, Moulay Ismail.

Strangely there's never much of a mention of this - I wonder whether this has anything to do with the fact that white slavery had been minimised or ignored because academics prefer to treat Europeans as evil colonialists rather than as victims?