“The struggle of my life has been to come to terms with my identity,” writes Afua Hirsch, adding that it was a struggle “that chose me”. Nor is that struggle over, because she has taken it upon herself to enlist others in her quest to redefine what it means to be black and British, and will not cease from mental fight until she has built her very own Jerusalem in a land she appears neither to like nor understand.
At first sight the 36-year-old author of this polemic-cum-memoir seems to have done well. Brought up in Wimbledon, the well-spoken daughter of an English father and a mother from Ghana, she attended the kind of private schools that provided an ideal preparation for Oxford University. After