I felt huge guilt and shame for not having had a chance to say goodbye or appreciating his presence more. Then I saw footage of the whole family together …
One afternoon in May 2009, when I was eight, my four older brothers and I sat in our crowded bedroom, working out how to use a VHS player. We waited with bated breath for the grainy images to flicker on screen. The video showed our last day in the Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania, family and friends celebrating our departure, children running around in ragged clothes, teenage boys and girls gossiping. A melancholy gospel song played in the background – Unikumbuke, which means “remember me” – as scruffy men argued over politics and football, and women cooked mouth-watering meals.
At this point my family and I had been in the UK for a couple of months, relocated under the Gateway Protection Programme for refugees. In 1998 my family had fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the outbreak of the second Congo war, in which more than 5 million people died and 2 million were displaced. I was born in a refugee camp, in the middle of the Tanzanian savanna. There, my father was a jack of all trades – a construction worker, carpenter, and a volunteer who helped vaccinate children and give family planning advice at the local hospital. At weekends, he worked as a pastor at our local church. My mother was a social worker, supporting women who were victims of domestic abuse.
