Before Bridgerton, There Was Black Period Drama Belle

For someone who grew up watching period dramas, especially those linked to my Sierra Leonean heritage such as Amistad or Blood Diamond, Belle was the first time I saw a Black or mixed-race woman dressed in the extravagant fashion of a bygone era—an era in which I had never imagined Black people existed at all in Britain. Writer Afua Hirsch alludes to this in her 2018 book Brit-ish: On Race, Identity and Belonging, when she and her friends discussed sepia portraits of well-to-do Black British women during Victorian and Edwardian times in a Whatsapp group. “It’s as if they are prompting us to reset some old, deep insecurity about our exclusion from history, which according to almost every other book, film, and period drama we have ever read is total. Until we saw these pictures, we had not felt particularly aware of their absence… It didn’t occur to the members of my group to miss something we didn’t know was available.” Thanks to scholars like David Olusoga’s Bafta-Award-winning series, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2018) which highlights that Black British history dates back to the Roman period, or Olivette Otelle’s African Europeans: An Untold History (2020) that looks at the overlooked history of Africans in Europe, tracing their presence from ancient times to the modern era, I, like many other Black Britons, now understand the former assumption to be untrue.