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George Alagiah: ‘It took me a long time to feel comfortable in my Britishness’ | George Alagiah


The BBC turned me down three times at the start of my career, and I’m grateful. Had I joined then, I’d have entered a very white world, dominated by people from a certain class and set of institutions. Taking a job at South magazine informed how I report on international affairs to this day. The globe looks different depending on where you’re standing.

Swapping the mango trees of Ghana for an inner-city British Catholic boarding school, aged 11, was a shock to my system. In the showers, the other boys with tan-lines made jokes about how I was brown all over. Unsure of what was happening, I laughed along with them. Today I’d call what I experienced racism, but back then I didn’t have that language.

As an immigrant child I mentally parcelled up all the things that made me different. I didn’t want my identity to define me. Only in my late 30s did I open it again, to explore my heritage. It took me that long to feel comfortable in my Britishness; to reach a point where I didn’t feel it could be taken away.

I see the injustice of what’s happening in the US with the death of George Floyd. I’m old enough to remember the beating of Rodney King vividly. It’s still happening 28 years later.

I have very strong views, but I keep them to myself: impartiality is important. In the seat I regularly occupy on the BBC News at Six, I speak to millions of people. If they all knew what I thought on every topic we report on, we’d lose some of them. In my job one can’t decide that the view you subscribe to is the only one.

I was nearly killed by a shell in Afghanistan. It was 1994 in Kabul and I had just walked out of the house I was staying in. Crossing the road, I realised I’d left my satchel behind. Before I reached the front door the building took a direct hit. Had it happened 10 seconds later, I would have been blown up with it.

On being diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer in 2014, I constructed a pros and cons list of how my life had gone so far. The things that had gone well far outweighed the others, which brought me to a place of total contentment.

When you’re closer to your last day, you live each one with an intensity you couldn’t have previously imagined. Of course I wish I never had this disease, but I’m not sure I’d give these six years back. With friends, family and colleagues I’ve shared experiences and thoughts that we otherwise wouldn’t have had.

My granddaughter’s birth was a spiritual experience. There seemed something so powerful in a new life entering the world while another, mine, was so compromised. She even waited until my birthday to arrive.

The Burning Land by George Alagiah is out now (£8.36, guardianbookshop.com)



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