During the colonial epoch, the British forced Africans to sing
Source, in full
The British themselves started singing the tune in the early eighteenth century, at the height of using Africans as slaves. “What would have been Britain’s level of development had millions of them been put to work as slaves outside of their homelands over a period of four centuries?” Furthermore, assuming that those wonderful fellows could never never never have been slaves, one could speculate further on the probable effects on their development had continental Europe been enslaved. Had that been the case, its nearest neighbors would have been removed from the ambit of fruitful trade with Britain. After all, trade between the British Isles and places like the Baltic and the Mediterranean is unanimously considered by scholars to have been the earliest stimulus to the English economy in the late feudal and early capitalist period, even before the era of overseas expansion.
Notes from Wikiquote
p. 101