The abductions, the slave ships, the abuse, the plantations - every horrible truth. Everything you know about slavery is, in this book, just as you've known it to be. What would such a world have looked like? How would it have been? Turns out - exactly the same. The idea was promising, for sure: What if the whole world of slavery had been turned upside down, a complete reversal where black people ruled and white people were the slave race. alas, I saw what Blonde Roots was about, and was instantly intrigued. A friend recommended Bernardine Evaristo and I clearly should have started with something else, likely the always highlighted 'Girl, Woman, Other'. This book is an excellent introduction to the horrors of the enslavement of millions of humans, especially if you have bothered to read about these histories is before. It’s a very scary reminder of the scientific racism of the 19th and 20th centuries and every so-called scientist should be forced to read this book, as should every schoolchild, both in Europe and in the United States. Some of the most chilling chapters are the ones in the centre of the book, where the whole horror of scientific racism is reimagined as a process whereby blak people are placed at the top of the evolutionary cycle and whyte people at the bottom, through a whole process of measurement and so-called anthropometrics. It feels as if a simple geographical twist of fate is what enables the huge shift in the evolution of humankind.

This is a very creative and clever reversal of historical events and Evaristo goes a long way towards convincing us that the world is very different to the one In which we are currently living. This means of course that white readers get a taste of enslavement from the perspective of the whyte people from Europa and, in that respect, Evaristo pulls no punches in her detailed descriptions of life on a slave ship and on the plantations. If you are reading this you are probably aware that Bernadine Evaristo reimagines a world where it is the technologies of people of colour, located in the Africa continent, where the evolutionary story begins, as she constructs people from that continent as superior to all the other so-called races and it is whyte people, originating from the continent of Europe, who are at the bottom of the evolutionary pile.

Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo