The Prince and me

I hope Prince William enjoys studying Kiswahili. I certainly did. In my mid-thirties I jacked in a job as a binman, did two A levels in a year, passed both, then studied Kiswahili for three years at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury as part of an African Studies degree.

I went to all that trouble because I was fed up with being rained on and broke all the time. A university degree, I imagined, would be a passport to a job, if I wanted one, that paid more for doing less, and doing it indoors. At the time, however, I saw going to university as ‘selling out’ and was slightly ashamed. I justified it to myself and others with the expression ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ – a saying which I still don’t fully understand, to be honest.

Entering the Swahili classroom at SOAS for the first time, I was late. There was one vacant chair only, next to a petite young black lady. ‘If you can’t beat them, join them,’ I said as I parked myself beside her. As it happened, this lady, Miriam, was an ex-Marxist guerrilla and it was her motto too. After the lesson, conducted by a quiet and courteous man, who, we heard later, had just done a 12-year stretch in a Tanzanian prison for something he said, Miriam invited me back to her north London semi for tea. We had beef and rice, which she fed to me with her fingers. She didn’t just pop it in; she carefully pushed the rice and chunks of beef right to the back of my mouth. All I had to do was sit there with my mouth open. While Miriam fed me, she told me about herself.