Unlike other modern inventions, however, there is a healthy cottage industry that likes to extend the concept backwards through time. In the UK, a new children’s book, Brilliant Black British History, defines both Quintus Lollius Urbicus, one of Britain’s Roman governors, and Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor whose campaign to conquer what is now Scotland was cut short by his own death, as “Black Britons”.
In historical terms, of course, this is pure fiction. Severus was born in Africa and is depicted with dark skin in contemporary work, but he was no more “black” in the sense we understand it today than growing up near a Roman road makes me a centurion. He was not a Briton and, having come here as a conqueror, would have found the term insulting.
But of course, Brilliant Black British History is not really a history book, just as the surprisingly engaging hit Christian cartoon series Veggie Tales is not really biblical education. These are actually morality plays for concerned parents to read to small children to prepare them for adult life. So too are the whole gamut of what you might call “Feelgood Tales for Liberal Tots”: the Little People, Big Dreams series, which wants to teach kids that they can do anything and be anything. This features heavily sanitised stories about the likes of Coco Chanel (heavy on the entrepreneurship and the stylish outfits, light on the Nazism and the cocaine) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (much is made of the art and his sexual openness, less of his early death and heroin habit).
None of these books are free of controversy. Even Veggie Tales is frowned upon by some ultraorthodox Christians for implying that talking vegetables can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, a privilege extended only to humans. But it is not, I think, particularly helpful, to criticise Brilliant Black British History because it is flatly contradicted by Olivette Otele’s marvellous African Europeans: An Untold History, or to find Veggie Tales wanting because it falls short of what the Bible actually says.