Kamal Ahmed On growing up with his single mum in Seventies Britain
Seventies Britain was often a hostile place, Kamal Ahmed and his mother tell Julia Llewellyn Smith
‘I used to tell people my name was Neil. It was that, or I’d get called ‘Camel’ ”
In forging his stellar career, Kamal Ahmed has always been driven by a need to “work 10 times harder than anyone else”. “It’s what they call the black tax,” says Ahmed, 50. “If you have dark skin, you have to put in that extra effort to show everyone you’re good enough to be at the top table.”
That determination was shared by Ahmed’s mother, Elaine, now 75, a retired schoolteacher, who brought her son up alone after her Sudanese husband, Seddig, walked out when he was four. “I was determined to challenge assumptions about single mothers. There was such a stigma then and I wanted people to see I could do it properly,” she says.
Both mother and son’s persistence paid off with dividends. Today, Ahmed is the BBC’S newly appointed editorial director and on the oneto-watch list for potential director general. In an institution that loves to beat itself up about its “posh” staff (30 per cent of management attended private schools), Ahmed, who attended a “bog-standard” comprehensive in his native west London, then Leeds University, is a shining example of diversity.
Yet since childhood, he saw fitting in as the key to success. “Like many people from the first or second generation wave of immigrants, I was always trying to keep my head down, wear shiny shoes, have short hair and a nice accent, because I was just happy to be here.
“Don’t forget, when I was still a baby Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech and there was a genuine debate about sending people like me ‘home’,” he continues, sitting with Elaine in the tidy dining room of the terraced house in Ealing, west London, where he grew up. “I came from the comfortable suburbs with clipped privet hedges and cars that were washed on a Sunday, and the pictures I saw of Africa showed people sitting under trees and chaos and poverty – I worried if I somehow scared the horses, someone was going to come and send me there.”
Racial identity is one of the hottest topics of our era, with best-selling books by young British women such as Reni Eddo-lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish) arguing racism still permeates even the most liberal corners of society.
Now Ahmed has made his contribution with his memoir, The Life and Times of a Very British Man, giving the perspective of someone who can remember how in the Seventies, the National Front marched with swastikas and Union flags just a couple of miles from his home. Ahmed defines himself as mixed-race, putting him in what today is our fastest growing ethnic group, numbering 1.25million at the last count, yet was so unusual during his childhood that it was not listed on the census form until 2001: “There were only one or two people like me in the whole of my school,” he says.
This was the era when the only black people on television were West Indian cricketers or butts of jokes in ITV’S Mind Your Language. Sometimes, not wanting to explain his “exotic” name, Ahmed told strangers he was called Neil. “Otherwise you’d hear ‘What?’ or, worse, ‘Camel.’ Neil was just easier.”
At school, he usually shrugged off taunts of “jungle bunny”. But once, aged 10, he beat up a namecaller – a rush of pent-up emotion from “carrying this idea you couldn’t articulate, that you were somehow negatively different because the others were from a place whose history was full of kings and queens and you were from this continent of mud huts”.
Elaine, for her part, tried to buoy her son’s confidence by buying him educational books glorifying African history, “but I was more interested in kissing the girl who sat behind me at school,” Ahmed laughs. She was occasionally shocked by colleagues’ comments. “Once, another teacher said “I don’t think of Kamal as black’ and I said ‘Well, what difference would it make if you did?” she says. “When he got an A for O-level English a year early, another said ‘That was a surprise.’ I don’t know if he was referring to his colour or my being a single mother or both, but I was very sensitive to the prejudices.”
Many, after all, had warned Elaine that the differences between herself and Seddig would make their marriage impossible. She was the daughter of a civil servant who grew up in Devon, “where we never saw a black face”. Seddig was the son of a high-ranking Sudanese family, who had never met a white person until Elaine – as a favour to his cousin – collected him from Heathrow, where he arrived in 1965 on a science scholarship.
At their wedding, the registrar took Elaine aside before the ceremony to warn her: “You know we won’t be able to help you if you go to Sudan; get stuck?” Elaine’s parents had no issue with Seddig’s colour but found his abrasive personality challenging. “Dad was difficult,” Ahmed says. “He wouldn’t say please and thank you to them because in Arabic culture if you thank your family it shows they’re not close to you. Mum’s family were very calm, they hated arguments and he introduced a sharpness and difference into their lives.” Ahmed’s relationship with Seddig, who died 10 years ago, was equally fraught.
“I’m not sure I ever really knew him,” he says.
They were estranged for several years after Ahmed chose to read politics as opposed to a “proper” subject such as chemistry at university. He didn’t attend Ahmed’s wedding to his first wife Gemma Curtin or learn for some years about the births of his two grandchildren.
“I felt very bad that assumptions were made that it was cultural differences that drove Seddig and me apart, because I think it was more to do with him liking his own space too much, while perhaps I wasn’t as good at compromising as I thought I was,” says Elaine.
“We’re all guilty of that,” chuckles Ahmed, whose second marriage to writer Elizabeth Day also ended in divorce, with him going on to date first his BBC colleague Sophie Long and now human rights lawyer Polly Glynn, whom he thanks fulsomely in his book’s acknowledgements: “I’m very lucky to have you by my side.”
“You can blame lots of things on brown stuff,” he writes in the book. “My own emotional failings are not among them.”
For someone who appears so much part of the establishment, Ahmed’s sense of “feeling other” has only recently diminished.
After Obama became US president, he was elated thinking a “post-racial” world had arrived, but subsequent tensions surrounding immigration made him less assured. Not long ago, in Ealing, he was astonished when an elderly man greeted him and his son Noah with a Nazi salute. “I thought if this is happening in the leafy suburbs, what is happening elsewhere.” But the way Noah simply laughed the incident off made him conclude the incident “didn’t represent anything very much I would consider British”.
“‘Brown’ people like me were once so unusual, now they’re everywhere and my mum and dad played their part in that they were trendsetters,” he says. “And it doesn’t cross my children’s minds that certain names are ‘funny.’ So now I’m glad my name is Kamal. No offence to any Neils, but it suits me better.”