This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
In December, we lost the passionate and radiant poet, novelist, performer and activist Benjamin Zephaniah, a dear friend whom I loved and needed in my life. As did countless others. Then, on New Year’s Day, Camila Batmanghelidjh passed away, someone I’d long defended. She was a fiercely independent maverick with an infinite well of love.
These two charismatic, unforgettable characters had enemies. They saw a black man with dreadlocks and a fat woman in flamboyant clothes as dangers to the British way of life. Zephaniah kept on rising till the end but, tragically, the forces of darkness brought down Batmanghelidjh.
To those of us who knew her, she was simply Camila. Who was she, really? Why was she cut down and by whom?
Camila, part Iranian, part Belgian, came from a well-off and well-connected family in Tehran during the Shah’s reign. Born premature, she suffered health problems all her life. Her obesity, apparently, was caused by post-birth endocrinal imbalance. She was also dyslexic. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, her father was imprisoned for four years, and her sister Lila committed suicide.
Camila was granted political asylum in the UK. After studying dramatic arts at Warwick University, she trained as a child therapist. In time, she became concerned about, then consumed by, the welfare of the lost children of Britain – neglected, angry, distressed, self-destructive and, often, unappealing.
She strongly believed (and often said) that the social service system was failing them, partly because of inadequate resources, partly because of the rigidity of their approaches. This was blasphemy for the childcare sector. But she had research evidence on the failures of conventional practice.
She set up her Kids Company in Southwark in 1996 to provide a radical alternative for troubled children. That’s where I first met her. There she was, dressed in an extravagant, multi-coloured gown and turban, reclining on an armchair in a bower festooned with plastic flowers. A tall black boy, who looked about 14, was sitting on her lap. It was a disconcerting sight. Turned out he was just nine and incredibly shy.
Other staff members were similarly emotionally engaged. Kids and young people came for hugs, security, food, therapy, clothes and fun. Pocket money was given out on Fridays, nice clothes were bought. The social cast-offs were made to feel precious, given permission to be themselves.
Too many used drugs or were into petty crime, caused, Camila told me, by their itinerant lives and severe emotional needs. The late Deborah Orr revealed in The Independent in 2012, that 96 per cent of the “unreachable and unteachable” children returned to education after help from Kids Company. That boy on Camila’s lap was an orphan from Sudan who had been in trouble with the law. Children the state had given up on were tamed and loved there. I saw that with my own eyes.
All too soon she was being courted and feted by the great and the good, the famous and rich. David Cameron and Boris Johnson and big businesses used her to polish their images. Archbishops anointed her, pop stars became ardent supporters. She got myriad awards, vast funding. The lioness was lionised. It all went to her head. I lost touch with her.
In 2015, the edifice collapsed. It happened, I believe, because the “foreigner” had become too powerful and prominent. She and her company were accused of professional mismanagement and financial impropriety. Wild allegations were made about child abuse. Trustees, especially Alan Yentob of the BBC, were caught up in the blaze which could not be put out (BBC haters were among the fieriest torchers). The project was in ashes; the “witch” badly burnt.
Some criticisms by the Charity Commission and Commons public administration committee were valid. But they could have been sorted easily.
The Met found no evidence of crimes; attempts to bar her and others from serving as company directors were dismissed by the High Court judge, Mrs Justice Falk, who concluded that the charity might have survived had it not been for the dubious allegations of abuse. Media maulers who had brought down a good woman and her company never properly reported the exonerations.
She lived quietly after that. This Christmas, she sent 150 Christmas gifts by taxi to Brixton Soup Kitchen with the instruction: “Don’t say they came from me.” That summed up the woman. And shamed the nation which so easily betrayed her.
The Gaza war has exposed the lies and hypocrisies of free speech warriors in the West. There has never been an absolute right to free speech. That “right”, used as culture war artillery, is manifestly false or delusionary. The Gaza war has exposed the lie and illusions.
In the EU, any vocalised support for Palestinians is legally prohibited. Here, self censorship has turned into thought censorship and boycotts against Israel will soon be banned. Failure to stand by Israel is leading to sackings in universities and broadcast channels.
Mehdi Hassan, the much admired British-Muslim anchor on MSNBC, has had to resign. Ethical citizens in all these nations still keep coming out on to the streets to stand with Palestinians. You can’t crush the truth. It will always survive and speak.
Long, long ago, back at uni in Uganda, I got to know Jonathan Kingdon, a white, Tanzanian-born artist and self-taught zoologist. He was big, bearded, with a booming eyes and intense eyes, a Hemmingway figure.
After leaving Uganda, he moved to an Oxfordshire village, continued writing books, painting, drawing and sculpting. On my wall I have some of his gifts – exquisite animal drawings and prints of his abstract art. We eventually lost touch.
I called him this week. He’s had strokes, been unwell, but still creates prodigiously. And I still feel that awe and connection. He got volcanically angry about Brexit and the shallowness of contemporary life, described his most recent book, Origin Africa: Safaris in Deep Time.
One critic has compared him to Darwin, Durer, Leonardo and Picasso. But to me he is Jonathan, a friend whose artistry and science enabled me to understand wild and wonderful Africa, and whose internationalism echoes mine.
Our Asian languages have few words to describe sexual relations, body parts, or physical ecstasy. Before my first wedding in 1972, an aunt gave me this advice: “It will give pain, but you must let him do it. It is your duty.” Sex with that hubby was fine, but I still knew little about female pleasure.
Shere Hite’s The Hite Report (1976) was an awakening. Then she was forgotten. A new film about her will, I hope, rehabilitate the amazing woman, who has long deserved a place in feminist history.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite is released next week.
This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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