All deserve same shot at success

homes of rich white people and they paid my university fees.”

She became a teacher and in 1972 she moved to the UK – which she has called home ever since. Explaining how black identity is different in the two countries, she says: “Blackness in South Africa is part of the colonial history. The blackness here, it is us coming in, rather than us being born here.”

This “otherness” underlies many of Britain’s race relations issues, she says. Ellen recalls an incident during her time as a teacher that proved to her that racism is taught – and, perhaps, can also be unlearned.

She says: “You’re not born a racist. Your experience of racism is what is imposed on you. Those kids just saw me as Ms Lebethe. A good example is when we went to France. We got to Dover and I had to get off the bus to have my passport checked. They had a group passport

Mahkai and they were all British, I was still on my South African passport so I had a visa.

“One of the kids said to me, ‘Miss, why do you have to get off of the bus?’ and I said, ‘I have to have my passport checked because I’m a South African, I’m not British’. The kid said to me, ‘But you’re our miss. How can you be different?’”

Ellen taught at several schools across the capital including in Tottenham, North London, where she observed the Broadwater Farm Riots, sparked by injustices at the hands of the police.

Of the current protests, she says: “This isn’t new – George Floyd has just blown it wide open. It’s been brought to the fore quite vividly not only by his death but the response to his death.”

Ellen agrees the world has come a long away but that more needs to be done.

“Change has happened but it has not happened fast enough,” she says.

“Change is not talking, change is acting and making. Systems need to change, laws need to be brought in place which will make a real change. When we put our placards down, that shouldn’t be the end.”

LONG BATTLE Veteran campaigner Ms Lebethe FED UP Funnyman Kojo Anim GROWING up as a black person in Britain, you’re only encouraged to be who you want to be if it’s a footballer, entertainer, or one of those things expected of us. You notice early on how the colour of your skin changes the way people treat you. I remember when me and a white boy got sent to the duty room for both forgetting our homework, but I had to stay longer than him. Or even though I was known as the best football player in the team, in a school in Hackney that was predominantly black, it was always a white boy who was chosen to be captain. This is just as true in comedy, where there seems to be a one-in, one-out rule when it comes to black comedians on TV. Stephen K Amos famously said he’d have to wait for Lenny Henry to die before he got an opportunity. White comics don’t have to think, ‘Oh, Jack Whitehall’s got a show, so Jimmy Carr won’t get one’. But this is the reality for black comedians. Before BGT, I was tired of being told that my jokes might not work with a white audience, they’re not going to relate, yet black people have to relate to white comics. I remember other protests like Black Lives Matter, but this time it feels different. Because we are demanding more from white people. We are looking to people we love, people we’ve known for years, family, friends we’ve grown up with, people we know aren’t racists, and saying: “That’s not good enough.” We are asking: “What more are you doing? What conversations are you having when there’s no black people around? What seeds are you sowing in your home? “What can we all do to make sure that everyone in this country, regardless of their colour, starts from the same place, and has the same chance at success?”

EMOTIONAL