Africans have been present in England for more than two thousand years, but we rarely see them or hear about them. And often their existence is dismissed as a figment of 'political correctness' or 'wokism.' This lecture will critically assess the myth of England's story as a 'sacred white space' and examine the evidence for diversity in medieval and early modern history. Africans are integral to English history and forgetting this diminishes Englishness, by preventing us from understanding ourselves.