Everyone dreams about education at the top British universities, but those who actually made it there may have a completely different experience. Particularly if you had the chance to face the lowest racism and discrimination.
Afro-Saxon. Homecoming Memories of a Black Boy at Eton by late Dillibe Onyeama was the first black person to ever finish Britain´s most prestigious and expensive private school. But he had to pay the price of colonial trauma. From an educated family from Nigeria, with his father himself finishing Oxford, he spend four years of his young life - between 1965 and 1969 - being the victim and target of racist slurs and horrendous physical treatment. Some may say that those were the times and physical punishment was somehow part of many other educational systems around the world, but the memoir makes it clear the clear racial target of his ´special treatment´. There are the dark ages of education, if one understands by this also the horrendous racist policies unshameful used on an everyday basis.
Read with our nowadays educational and human sensibilities, the cruel stories shared by Dillibe Oneyeama are hard to cope with sometimes. But from the historical point of view, there are relevant as testimonies as the colonial credo they were based upon.
For anyone trying to better understand what being black in Britain may be, this book is a direct testimony. A warning that no matter your race, one should never stand injustice and racism, even if it is wrapped under the colourful papers of a place like Eton.
Rating: 5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own
Thanks for the blog tour support x
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