My name is Esther. My father was born in Barbados and my mother was born in Guyana, South America. My dad didn’t talk a lot about history. I didn’t know much from him about his early life in Barbados. When I did, sort of, inquire much later on when I was much older, he sort of said, well history wasn’t something they were encouraged to, to really remember.

I was from a very young age quite questioning I think, quite critical, quite a critical thinker. And I wasn’t afraid to ask difficult questions or challenge, kind of like, the status quo of what had been considered the norm. But I found that my parents couldn’t really answer some of those questions. Or didn’t want to talk about it or didn’t know how to talk about it.

Where did we come from? Where did our people come from prior to the Caribbean? Why did we face racism? The real turning point for me was when I did an independent Black Studies course, because that’s when I had access to information about Black history. I remember learning about, in particular, the oppression of Black women in terms of forced sterilisation and racism in the housing sector and in the employment sector.

Me and my father never really spoke a lot while he was alive about these kind of issues because we were on different poles, ideologically and politically. You know, my dad was very into the monarchy, for instance. He was very pro – laughs – British establishment. And he struggled with identifying as coming from Africa.

When I started growing locs. And I used to wrap my hair like Erica Badu, a singer, used to wrap her hair. And I can remember my dad saying to me one time, ‘Why have you got your head wrapped like an African?’ Which was a strange thing for him to say. And I said, ‘Well, because we are African.’ And he was like, ‘No we’re not.’But it was something that it seemed as though he hadn’t thought about a lot.

In my twenties, I began to get involved more formally with reparations activism. As a reparations activist, essentially what I do is education to sensitise African heritage communities and the rest of the world as to the history of African chattel enslavement. And particularly looking at the legacies of chattel enslavement and colonialism in how the world views us, and in the structures of oppression and domination that we still face.

The fact that I don’t know my mother tongue. The fact that, until recently, I carried the name of the enslavers that enslaved my family. My family name, Stanford, is an English name, OK, that comes from Norfolk. It’s not an African name. This was a name that was imposed upon my family. And I carried that name until 2023. You know, that is how the genocide and the ethnocide lives on through me.

Once I began getting involved with reparations activism, my parents were worried about that. Because back then it wasn’t like now where you know, states, whether in the Caribbean or Africa, are also talking about reparations. It was very much seen as a fringe movement. And it was always seen as like, I’m just hanging about with some – laughs – loony people who don’t realise what, what privileges and what benefits they have access to because we’re in Britain.

My dad probably struggled most. And maybe it was his generation. He was of a particular generation that were colonised. They didn’t have access to a lot of the education and information that I went on to have access to, that made me see my identity different.

Even though I was born here in the UK, I grew up knowing that the type of British experience or level of citizenship was second or third class. And some members of my community, literally an underclass. So I’ve never felt that Britain is my home. Because I grew up in a home with parents who came from the Caribbean and their sense of cultural identity was very much African Caribbean. We would have called it just Caribbean then. I later went on to learn and discover that a lot of what we had brought with us as people of the Caribbean or that came from that region, was based on our earlier, African identities that they couldn’t totally eradicate and suppress. That we found ways to resist culturally and maintain this. Whether it was through my mother teaching us through the use of proverbs, Guyanese proverbs, that taught us African wisdom. Say like Anansi. Anansi stories that was very much common in the Caribbean, we know comes from Africa.

My sense of home now is far more expansive. Home is ultimately Africa. But the story of my people is that we’ve made home across the world. Wherever we’ve peopled the planet we have built civilisation, we’ve built community, we’ve sustained culture, that has maintained our sense of who we are. So home is not just a physical place. It’s actually a lived experience of a journey that me and my people have taken. And it’s coming full circle. And actually I am the first person that I’m aware of in my extended family that has returned to Africa.

The first time I went to Africa was Ghana, because I was determined to trace my ancestry and go back to the land that I knew my, certainly my mother’s people, were taken from.

I remember when I came off the plane I, you know, touched the ground and was – yeah, this traditional thing of literally trying to kiss the ground. We were never, one, supposed to survive, and two, to return. It was like… Yeah, it was a homecoming.

The Windrush narrative, you know, I struggle with it. It’s very problematic because it assumes as though, as a people, we came without history. A simplistic narrative that we were answering a call somehow, a welcome invitation from Mother England to come and help rebuild Britain. That is, you know, far from the truth. It sanitises the history of genocide. It sanitises Britain’s role, the British establishment and elite’s role in subjugating African people that were then trafficked to the Caribbean. It sanitises the experiences. The discrimination, the racism. Racism was legalised then because we didn’t have race relations until really in the 1960s, in terms of legislation, the 1960s. You know, my father tells me of experiences where he would be walking on the street and people would come behind him, literally feeling to see if he had a tail. My father experienced that.

So this Windrush narrative, I think is very dangerous because it’s based on erasing, not only our heritage and our identity, but the true history of how we’ve come to be here and what we were faced with when we came here.