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In the 1980s, like many young couples, Adwoa Agyekum’s parents left Ghana in search of the UK’s answer to the American Dream. Here, she pays tribute to the sacrifices her mother made to find it
MY PARENTS’ generation owes a lot to the Windrush pioneers for the suffering, hardship and profound discrimination they endured in order to be accepted as respectable members of British society. To some extent, that battle for respect and validity is still ongoing, and so we march on.
Africans have been a part of the make-up of British society since the time of the Romans. However, it feels as though it has only been in the last four decades or so that we have truly cemented our place in this country we now call home.
Unlike previous generations of black communities who came to the UK and were forced to take up low-paid, often unskilled work, a lot of young Ghanaians, including my own parents, arrived with the express desire to better themselves by means of higher education in the universities and polytechnics of their former colonisers.
AMBITIOUS
They were continuing the tradition cemented during colonial times in which bright and ambitious Africans left their home countries to study abroad. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, gained his degree at the University of Lincoln, in Pennsylvania, as did Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, to name but two. They were by no means the only post-colonial African presidents to be educated abroad.
Their ultimate aim was to return home and apply the successful Western socio-economic models within an African framework.
They tried. But by and large they faltered and, therefore, people like my parents fled to seek a new life, a better life – ‘the British Dream’, as it were.
While Dad enrolled in an accounting course and immersed himself in his studies and university life, Ma became the breadwinner of the family working as a factory-hand packing chocolates made from the same type of Ghanaian cocoa her father had harvested years before.
BREADWINNER: Adwoa’s mum (far right) as a young woman in Ghana
She paid the majority of the rent, fed and clothed her two young children, and regularly paid the remittances to the family back home who were caring for her firstborn son until things were stable enough for him to be brought over to the UK. He joined us later as a young adult.
But please do not think that my Ma was just another oppressed African woman. She had a force, an almost demonic drive peculiar to those who have experienced the harshness of poverty and death in the African village.
No, despite my father, Ma stretched forward to achieve her ‘British Dream’. Even though she did not attain it herself, she made sure that it was realised by her children.
We did not have an easy childhood, my brother and I. Growing up in a poor, northern city, racism repeatedly reared its ugly head in the form of Dad’s smashed car windows. Dad, then a taxi driver, had to sleep either in his car or park it a mile away from the house to prevent the local kids from vandalising his livelihood. School life was innocent enough but sometimes fraught amid my attempts to blend in.
CHILDHOOD: Adwoa next to her father’s car
I remember refusing to write my unpronounceable surname on any piece of work until I was in high school. No one I knew had such an ‘ugly-sounding’ name. Even the few other black kids at primary school had English-sounding names because of their Caribbean heritage. So I gave myself the name ‘Jane’ and drew pictures of myself with long silky hair, a million miles away from the thick, stubborn afro that Ma routinely tugged into asymmetrical bunches.
And then there was the ugliness from within: the clash of ideals between my parents. Ma had married a promising accountant, not a taxi driver. Her disappointment was palpable.
Then there was Ma’s insatiable ambition. Fighting against, sometimes beating out of us, the lackadaisical attitude we’d inherited from Dad. We had to excel academically – she knew it was the only means given to people like us to improve our circumstances. Unfortunately for Ma, I was “the clever one” – the bookworm, the introvert, the Daddy’s girl and the rebel. I was always at the receiving end of her pushy authoritarianism and rabid social mobility agenda.
HURT
Back then I didn’t understand why she was so hell-bent on achieving her ‘British Dream’, no matter how much it hurt and pulled us apart. She never said. She never spoke of the painful memories: selling chickens and drinks barefoot all day in the dusty village, cooking meagre meals for herself and her little brother during the rainy season, which turned her aunt’s little kitchen and eating area into a muddy pond, and the journeys she undertook with her Ma across the local river, goods tentatively balanced on their heads, taking deep breaths and saying a prayer as the water level crept up to her chin before receding. I never knew; she never told me.
We are still treading through the river but it is not as high as it used to be. My Ma has achieved her dream in a few respects.
REBELLED: Adwoa Agyekum
One of her children gained a place at an Oxbridge university (a story for another time: black, working class and northern mixing with some of the sharpest minds of the future. All in all, an underwhelming experience.)
All of us are now university-educated and are in professional but fairly low-paid jobs - a reflection of the times, perhaps.
A TUC report published last year revealed that youth unemployment among black men was 55.9 per cent, and 39.1 per cent for their female counterparts. I guess my brothers and I should be thankful. We have come a long way. Although my generation in the UK and back home have attained the education, sophistication and confidence to assert ourselves culturally in ways that my parents would never have dared to do, the doubts, the barriers and glass ceilings etc are still ever - present.
I know. I work in the publishing industry and the lack of cultural diversity is painfully apparent. I am one of only four non-white people in the 70-plus division I work in. Yes, we have come a long way but we are not there yet. And so Ma’s struggle, now our struggle, continues.