It’s all about the stories….
I came home from school one day aged five, or six, and told my family my class had been chosen to be snowflakes in the Christmas play. Laughter ruptured through the air as they fell about in smug delight, titillated by the notion of a black girl becoming snow.
I was raised by a beautiful young African mum in the heart of London, and a rambunctious part time, extended, white family; a vicar, his wife and their three sons who looked after me while my mother was at work.
It was my white side of the family that pelted laughing bullets through the air over Snowflakegate. It became one of my earliest memories of racial demarcation, and the first in a long, long line of class-race barriers to puncture my subconscious mind.
Unbeknownst to me an adverse relationship with Self was beginning to creep in, one that questioned my belonging and freedom to create.
Still I was ‘just Me’. Fearless. Boundary-free. Loved being on stage, loved fantasising. I had a soft marshmallow underbelly, super sensitive, but with an external that always rose up strong and fierce. Even at five.
My dad had been kidnapped, arrested and detained a few months before I was born. This, under the direct orders from the dictators of the day, Idi Amin and Julius Nyerere. Captive for more than ten years, I wouldn’t get to know my dad, till I was ten years old when we moved to Holland.
To me, my father still remains an unsung hero.
After a brief marriage, my parents parted ways and I, my mother and my baby sister settled in a small town called Driebergen, where for a while Dutch became ‘the new mother tongue’.
The Art of Storytelling only raged more vibrantly in me now with each new experience and encounter, leading me back to London town to chase the tales that made my heartbeat race.
I’m still so passionate about the basic human rights of every man, woman and child to follow their bliss and find their purpose, I even wrote a song about it! No not really! But I wrote a course about it!
I’m so grateful to my ‘Five & Fearless’ who has always had my back and held my vision steady, even when I fell or faltered, felt battered & defeated.
Together we still gleefully conquer creative planes, hand in hand, homesick for the future. But with a much clearer message running down my adult arm, ink on skin, shimmering bright, and rippling in the light. It’s a simple tonic that goes like this …
‘I Belong Here’