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BLACKAMOORES: AFRICANS IN TUDOR ENGLAND,THEIR PRESENCE, STATUS AND ORIGINS Onyeka Publisher: Narrative Eye and The Circle with a Dot Year: 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9533182-1-6 Pagination: pp.461 Price: £24.00
Onyeka presents the results of years of exhaustive research here tochallenge accepted British history and allow the Black, or African, people living in Tudor times to take their place in the historic social fabric of the country. Whereas previously these Black people have been considered an anomaly, and their status automatically assumed to be as slaves, Onyeka's efforts restore these people and their circumstances to a degree of visibility. As he writes in his Preface, 'if we cannot see England clearly, do we imagine her as a book with white pages and no black letters in?'(p.5). He quotes Arthur Schomburg, who, speaking in 1921, said that African history represents 'the missing pages of history' (p.5). Onyeka began his research in 1986; five years later he decided to focus on the Tudor period, developing 'acute concerns about how English history was being presented in books such as those by the historian Geoffrey Rudolph Elton' (p.5). Such books did not acknowledge that Africans were present then, even though Tudor...