They reach out to me to come back and it’s only because I am the only Black graduate in my class. In fact, I am the oldest Black graduate the school has in its records.
All those who came before me — Toks Akintola the son of the Premier of Western Nigeria, Dilibe Onyeama and John Mbu — are dead. I was the fourth in nearly six hundred years to make it through that school without any problems.
Akintola was asked to leave as was Onyeama. Mbu ran away. There was a nationwide manhunt for him with his face in every newspaper and they found him working under the name Jimi Hendrix washing dishes in a hotel. The white boys encouraged him so much into hating himself — that was what I told the newspapers when they followed me around Eton asking why he ran away, did Dilibe Onyeama’s book Nigger at Eton have anything to do with it.
His father begged the school to allow him back to finish his studies and when he was allowed back he turned to me one day in Eton High Street to complain that I was happy to be the only Black student. I told him he was mad, misinformed, and called him an Uncle Tom. When he got to Harvard, he went crazy on drugs, they threw him out, he was dead aged thirty.
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Today as I write I remember that try as I wanted to, I never liked the man. He was easily led down the garden path into self-destruction because the rich white students he so desperately wanted to emulate made him a plaything and they messed him up badly.
I am letting loose today after all these years because I am fed up with people distorting history. I respected Ambassador Mbu — he treated me like a son — and when his second son Eddie killed himself, another Eton graduate, I felt for the man. Two sons he sent to Eton, dead at such young ages.
I decided at John’s funeral, which I attended in his father’s hometown in Cross River State — the only friend of his who turned up — that I had a great time at Eton, I survived the curse as I call it, so let’s leave it at that. Let me not push my luck because funerals were becoming too commonplace for my liking.
Unfortunately, one of the two mixed-race boys that joined me at Eton — the Stewart twins — they were both expelled for crazy behaviour, carrying knives to fight racists. Everyone was racist in their eyes. I never saw anything like it. Why win scholarships to an all-white school to spend your time screaming racism? One was dead at thirty. One went mad, I hear.
Gegbi Ojora went there for A levels. He died recently after I begged him to stop drinking, keep away from those people. I screamed at him.
All my friends dead. Only me left.
Well, there is another Mbu, but I never hear from him, and he survived because he was disciplined — and therein lies the secret. You cannot go to these elite institutions that are dominated by people who live the most privileged lifestyles on the planet and try to mimic them. You need to stay grounded, disciplined and focused. Taking drugs and drinking yourself to death is not going to help anyone.
For too long children of powerful rich Nigerians have tried to be like their white counterparts, and in my time that was the beginning of the end. In my case my father kept an eye on me. My father was very strict, and the Nigerian flag was flown from morning till night. I only identified as Nigerian — nothing else. Back then it was the best thing to do. Nigeria was an oil-boom country, we were treated like stars. So why try and be Lord Blackface when I was Chief Kio?
I sold Nigeria from morning to night and up till today all my friends say Kio never faced racism at Eton because he was the racist. If you understand — I looked down on them, flipped the coin, flew the flag, played Fela loud, very loud, had my three showers a day while they went dirty, ate my Nigerian food. Yes, I was proud to be African. Which is why I am alive.
You cannot come from a country where there is no electricity and be talking grammar. I tell the young Nigerians in these posh schools: do not pretend to be what you are not, and most of all do not be part and parcel of your parents’ desperate attempts to social climb. It will kill you.
I rest my case.
*Kio Amachree is President, Worldview International
