My mum is republican, so I've always been brought up really strongly for a united Ireland. I was taught rebel songs - I used to sing them to people when they came round, things like that. I remember my mum telling me that her grandmother saw people dying on the road with grass in their mouths during the Famine, but I wasn't taught Irish history at school. I was taught it first at college, doing A levels. They said, "We're now going to deal with 'the Irish problem'." I said, "The Irish problem?" I questioned it, and that was the first time I didn't like the way it was being put across. The second time, at the poly, we were doing literature and they said, "We're doing English literature here, the poets and playwrights, Shaw and Oscar Wilde and Sheridan." I said, "Excuse me, I don't really think they're English." We argued for about half an hour. The whole class was bored because I wouldn't let it drop. But I really felt indignant. It's a real English thing anyway, it's like what they do with black athletes. They claim who they want, when they want, when it serves their nationalism. But the thing is, those lecturers have been lecturing the same thing for years, they're not going to change it.
As a small child I had no conflict about my mum being white. She told me that when I was about four or five I said to her, "Mummy, am I black?" She was taken aback by this and she said, "Yes, yes, you are black." She told my dad and my dad thought it was really funny. Later on, in school, the biggest thing for me was that my father was African rather than West Indian. I used to say he was American, because Africans were, you know, called monkeys and savages and cannibals and the rest of it. It's awful now, when I look back on it. It's all part of what the colonialists have left us.
My mum and dad never sat down and talked to me about racism and being mixed race. My dad would talk about Africa and say I was an African child. My mum would talk about Ireland and say that I'd get on because everyone would like me for what I am. With a lot of children of mixed race now, their parents consciously tell them. Looking back on it, I can remember feeling apart at primary school. There weren't very many black people, so my friends were white -- funnily enough they were all Catholics, but they were white English. I can remember feeling a bit different. Maybe when I was younger I put it down to other things, but I know I felt a bit like an outsider. I was about eighteen years old when I actually sat down and confronted it, and cried about it, and felt I didn't belong. My identity crisis came at eighteen, which is quite late, you know.
At school we learnt about the slave trade, we learnt that it was really bad, that it was really wrong, but we never learnt about how great the civilizations were in Africa, before the people were taken as slaves. So, although we were given a sympathetic view, we were given a really negative view. It wasn't put into perspective -- they left out a very fundamental part that could have given a lot of black children a lot of pride, because to be taught that your history started at the time of slavery is pretty tragic.
Jenneba Sie Jalloh, Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby, Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 966.
