K Tempest Tumbles

There were Africans in Britain before the English were here—that’s the opinion of Peter Fryer, the great historian of the black presence in England. In his history Staying Power, he quotes the existence of an African legion stationed on Hadrian’s Wall in the third century…If we skip forward to James VI’s court in Scotland, we come across a number of black court entertainers…a black knight, and a lady who was famed for her beauty: “A black lady—a skin that shone like soap. In her rich costume she gleamed as bright as a barrel of tar. When she was born the sun had to suffer an eclipse.