AFRICAN EUROPEANS, an untold history

291pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2021

First published in the UK in 2020.

"This is a book I have been waiting for my whole life. It goes beyond the numerous individual black people in Europe over millennia, to show us the history of the very ideas of blackness, community and identity on the continent that has forgotten its own past. A necessary and exciting read." Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

"Yoking together the 'African' and the 'European', too often treated as entirely separate categories, Otele skilfully invites her reader to navigate the multiple intersecting worlds inhabited by her characters. This is fundamentally reparative writing that undoes the cultivated ignorance around race and blackness in Europe and shows us what is irrefutably true—that black history is European history, indeed, world history." Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire

"The first survey this century of the fascinating 2,000-year-long history of Africans in Europe. Otele’s masterful narrative weaves together the lives of prominent figures - St Maurice, Jacobus Capitein, Manga Bell, Paulette and Jane Nardal - with those of everyday people." Hakim Adi, author of Pan-Africanism: a history

Olivette Otele is Professor of the History of Slavery at the University of Bristol and Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society.