Idols

There is something very exciting about finding a personal connection with a famous person who you admire greatly.  When it is a famous person who works in the industry that you aspire to work in that feeling becomes deeply heightened.  So when I learnt, not long ago, that I had been in very close proximity to someone who falls into this category from the age of eleven, I was absolutely thrilled.

Aside from teaching English, one of my other ambitions is to be a successful writer and as such I read widely.  I have just finished Brit(ish) by the incredibly talented writer, broadcaster and general powerhouse Afua Hirsch who I have been a huge fan of since I first discovered her journalism a few years ago.  But it was only recently that I learnt that not only did she grow up, like me, in South West London but she also attended the same secondary school that I did, only she was two academic years above me.  Nonetheless this means that we would have been studying in the same building for three years, cue huge excitement.

The book provides urgent reading on race and many of the issues pertaining to it in Britain today, the more personal parts exploring racial identity and Afua’s ongoing search for a sense of belonging as a person of dual racial heritage.  It is luminous, educating on every page and I consumed it in just a few sittings, every chapter worth savouring.  But it was the early part of the book that really sparked my interest as she also, unsurprisingly writes a lot about her experience of growing up and her time at school.  The first section makes much reference to the childhood she spent in Wimbledon.  The leafy London suburb is one that also played an important role in my own formative years of teenagehood, not just because of school but because much of my social life was centred around the area and it was a place where I spent the majority of my time.  From the glamorous boutiques of the village, to the ceremonial tennis fortnight and the expanse of stunning woodland that makes up Wimbledon common, there is no doubt that it was a privilege to spend so much time there growing up.  But for anyone who has followed me since the start of this blog you may recall that the years spent at my secondary school, also in Wimbledon, was not exactly a time that I look back on fondly.  All girls, highly academic with a toxic comparison culture, for a free spirit like me, it just didn’t provide the opportunities that I needed to explore my creativity.  My boredom with the traditional style of teaching and stringent rules were restrictions which I struggled to abide by.

For Afua, the unpleasant experiences that she had stemmed from an entirely different place.As a child born to a black Ghanaian mother and a white father of German Jewish descent, Afua was studying in a school that had next to no diversity.  I can vividly recall looking at my peers and wondering why there were so many white people and so few of any other ethnicity.  To be precise, there were three people of colour in my year group of one hundred and fifty pupils and I am sad to say that I can remember the negative and harmful stereotypes that many of the girls bought into.  From the assumptions about the only Asian girl in the year being the most intelligent with the strictest parents to the judgement that was made and the whispered comments about one of the few black girls in the school and the fact that she lived in council housing, an experience that was worlds apart from that of the many who lived in spacious mansions dotted around the expensive postcode. Now, as an adult with a lot of experience in the education sector, I dread to think about what the teachers may have been thinking or saying at the time too.

Afua writes about some of her worst experiences at school from being called “Troll” by her peers, referring to her hair, to being told that she had “thunder thighs” by some of the white boys from a neighbouring school.  For me the most disturbing was her recollection of being given a nickname “Shaggy”, a reference to the Jamaican musician whose songs were very popular in the UK in the nineties.  She recalls, “It’s not obvious what resemblance I bore, aged thirteen, to a black, male dancehall artist from the Caribbean, but for private school kids in Wimbledon, he was probably the only other black person who sprung to mind”.  And despite her mild mannered ways and calm and friendly disposition, Afua was often told that she was the “scariest” girl in the school by those girls who she wasn’t friends with but worse that that, heartbreakingly, was told by her close friends, “don’t worry, we don’t think of you as black”.   Afua’s struggle to find her identity and sense of belonging in terms of race is not one that I am able to relate to or even pretend to understand.  Nor would I try to compare the types of displacement that we felt, however struggling to fit into the constraints of an establishment that didn’t feel like it was meant for you is something that I can relate to.

One memory that she describes in the book, something that took place outside of school, is deeply enraging.  When visiting one of the many expensive clothing boutiques that line the main high street in Wimbledon village, she was told by her friend, via a shop assistant, in no uncertain terms that she would not be welcome inside.  “It’s off putting to the other customers.  And the black girls are thieves”.  Although I shouldn’t be surprised, racism and white supremacy are still rampant today, so why should it shock me that twenty years ago, this type of occurrence took place, seeing this printed on the page made me ashamed of my fond memories of the area - how could adults be so racist and cruel?  

In my opinion, Afua Hirsch is nothing short of a genius and a true inspiration.  Her honest voice, one that is not afraid to show vulnerabilities and struggles is one that we can all learn from and her talent doesn’t stop at her writing.  She has also made some brilliant work for screen including African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power, a three part documentary where she visited Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya meeting local artists and musicians whilst recounting the histories of each country.  She was also involved in Samuel L Jackson’s Enslaved, a powerful six part documentary series about the transatlantic slave trade.  And she was named on the 2020 Powerlist of the most influential black Britons from African and Caribbean heritage.  So if you haven’t yet read Brit(ish), you know what to do.

https://www.bookdepository.com/Brit-ish-Afua-Hirsch/9781784705039