“When did you first realise you were white?” I once mischievously asked a friend. She was initially stumped. Until then she had never considered it; she’d never had to. That innocence is a luxury denied to people of colour in the UK. Kamal Ahmed has long known that he was brown, but it took the elevation of Barack Obama in 2008 before the BBC’s economics editor, soon to be its editorial director of news, felt comfortable enough to tick the identity box marked “mixed”.
Ahmed was born in England to a white English mother and black Sudanese father. But he is not English; definitely not. Ahmed identifies as British because, he writes, the term “‘English’ has been manipulated to suggest, with its flags of St George and cricket tests, something far more racially distinct” and “exclusive”.
Like the authors Afua Hirsch and Akala, whose memoirs focus on an identity semi-detached from Britain, Ahmed inhabits a curious state that the African American scholar WEB Du Bois once described as double consciousness. Black people felt a “two-ness ... two warring ideals in one dark body”. What Du Bois describes is even more pronounced perhaps when one parent is white.
Early in the book, Ahmed, who was raised in London in the 1970s, gives us a schoolboy’s perspective on racism as a thing, like acne, to be ignored: maybe it would just go away. Yet his recollections confidently refer to “us” and “we”, meaning the British people – words written by the dutiful son of a public-spirited, trend-setting mother, who happened to fall in love with a black man.
The writing is full of charm. He remembers his maternal grandmother, who cut bread “so thinly you could almost see the light through each slice”, and, as a sensitive 10-year-old boy, being so unsettled by the Arabic name Kamal that he told strangers he was called Neil. His new brogues, he writes, gave him an advantage in street fights. There is much modesty here, yet publishing a memoir is necessarily an act of arrogance, and a man whose elbows are sharp enough – as well as his talent obvious enough – to be promoted to the editorial director of news surely knows he has risen above the ranks of the ordinary.
There are intriguing omissions in the book. Ahmed was brought up by a single parent (his mother) but will not be drawn on the strains that led to his parents’ divorce. “It is always difficult to explain why marriages break up, and that is not a subject to detail here.” It’s his prerogative, but for a work reflecting on race and identity it is perhaps pertinent. In his poem “Digging”, Seamus Heaney conjures the power of the pen as a tool of excavation, but mostly Ahmed eschews the personal for the general and political. It could be that as a journalist and broadcaster he is discomfited by the inaccuracy of memory or absence of facts.
Earlier this year the BBC got itself into a pickle when it broadcast a dramatic rendition of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech (on its 50th anniversary), a flawed decision compounded by the producers’ decision to employ an actor to mimic the delivery and cadences of Powell. In a chapter entitled “Preventable Evil”, which includes parts of Powell’s rant, Ahmed attempts his own interrogation of the speech and makes a better fist of it than his colleagues. He meets Powell’s biographer, who highlights his subject’s unbridled criticism of the British authorities for the death in 1959 of Mau Mau detainees at the Hola prison camp in Kenya as evidence of Powell’s non-discrimination. Ahmed concludes that though Powell the man might not have been straightforwardly racist, his famous speech undoubtedly was.
Still, Ahmed has faith in “us”. He draws unashamedly on nostalgic notions of British fair play and the “gentleness of English civilisation”, as espoused by George Orwell in “The Lion and the Unicorn”. Ugly manifestations of fascism, such as the goose-step, could never take root in Britain, Orwell wrote, because “people in the street would laugh”. Ahmed argues that just because fascists aren’t parading around giving salutes, it “shouldn’t be taken as permission from the political classes to ignore the factors that allow extremism to flourish”. Perhaps it is this drive to investigate underlying factors that has led to the BBC giving an extraordinary amount of coverage to Nigel Farage.
“Do they have censors in the BBC?” a character asks in David Caute’s 1986 novel News from Nowhere. “No,” is the sad reply, “they make you do it yourself.” Ahmed is a senior figure at the corporation. His ambition is to rise even higher. The exodus of high-profile black executives from the BBC in recent years demonstrates how tricky that path is. While this careful book will no doubt deepen the conversation on race and identity in Britain, it sometimes reads like an audition.
• The Life and Times of a Very British Man is published by Bloomsbury Circus. To order a copy for £12.49 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
