Hashi Mohamed is a barrister and broadcaster based in London, England.He arrived in Britain aged nine, as an unaccompanied child refugee. He attended some of Britain’s worst schools and was raised exclusively on state benefits. Yet today he is a successful barrister, with an Oxford degree and a CV that includes numerous appearances on the BBC.
In his debut book People Like Us: What it Takes to Make it in Modern Britain, Mohamed explores what his own experience can tell us about social mobility in Britain today.
At the Waterstones blog, he tagged five notable books on social mobility, Including:
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor NoahRead about another entry on the list.
Noah’s experiences growing up in South Africa as a child of a black mother and white father may seem quite far from my own experience. But his observations and conversations with his mother about his father were powerful. The need to reconcile, understand, digest and ultimately be at peace with the fact of an absent father is crucial to many people’s social mobility journey.
Whether it means finding your father for the first time, re-establishing a relationship, or learning to live with their absence, you have to do it to be able to move on with your life. On this, I am with the mother of comedian Trevor Noah. Noah, who is mixed-race, was brought up in apartheid South Africa, and born at a time when interracial relationships were still a crime. His father wasn’t around during his childhood, and when he was twenty-four, over his own protests, his mother told him:
‘Too many men grow up without their fathers, so they spend their lives with a false impression of who their father is and what a father should be. You need to find your father. You need to show him what you’ve become. You need to finish that story.'
Born a Crime is among Brian Boone's five hilarious Thurber Prize-winning reads and Keith Rice's ten best books on South Africa.
--Marshal Zeringue
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