One of the things that the British government was terrified about us coming in was precisely that we discover that most of people will be poor and non-educated and not treated that well. “Remember our grandparents leave Jamaica, in my case, believing everybody in Britain’s rich, like the white people in Jamaica. “One of the things that the British government was terrified about us coming in was precisely that we discover that most of people will be poor and non-educated and not treated that well” – Akala Then we arrive with all of these aspirations to move up in the world because it’s what our grandparents were fed in the colonies. Even poor white kids are not taught ‘of course you can be an astronaut, of course you can be an architect, of course you should aspire to run the country.’ That’s preserved for kids who go to Eton or who are privately educated and so a lot of this is about the pre-existing class hierarchies that were in Britain prior to even black and brown folks arriving in large numbers. I can now understand why she maybe felt like a traitor to her race, to her culture and to history if she allowed me to believe that I could access the best of British society. This doesn’t excuse her, but she was conditioned in a very particular way.
This is a woman who was brought up in the 1930s, at a time when the idea that white people were innately genetically superior and that Britain’s right to colonise the world were self-evident. She obviously knew I didn’t have problems with English – I was reading The Lord of the Rings at home. My teacher at seven put me in a special needs group for kids who didn’t speak English. And I found out very early that this offended some teachers’ very sense of identity. “But I went into school too well prepared for school for a child from my ethnic and class backgrounds.
I saw probably four pieces of theatre a week for the first ten years of my life. I think I met Angela Davis there, I met this South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela – you couldn’t ask for culturally a better upbringing. My stepdad was a stage manager of a theatre which was probably the most important black-led cultural institution in 1980s Britain. I was from a materially poor but culturally very rich family.
“I went into the British school system a nerdy boy who wanted to be an astronaut.
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