Afua Hirsch: Belonging, Britain and the Stories We Inherit

Afua Hirsch writes about the distance between belonging to a country and being accepted as part of it. Across journalism, memoir, film and cultural criticism, she examines how the history of empire enters ordinary life: in a conversation, a classroom, a museum or the way a woman learns to see her body.

The brackets in Brit(ish) do a great deal of work. They interrupt a familiar national identity, making something apparently settled look conditional. For the person whose belonging is repeatedly questioned, that interruption is familiar. A birthplace, an education or a lifetime in Britain may never quite satisfy someone determined to locate their origins somewhere else.

Published in 2018, Hirsch's first book brought this problem into the centre of a wider investigation of race and national identity. Its significance lay partly in the connection it made between personal encounters and public history. The awkward question at a dinner table could not be separated from the stories Britain told about itself. [1]

Growing up in Wimbledon

Born in 1981, Hirsch grew up in Wimbledon in a middle-class family with Ghanaian heritage. In her own account, the predominantly white environment around her presented a persistent contradiction. People claimed not to notice race while treating her African name, appearance and background as signs of difference. Her family's pride in Ghana also sat uneasily beside the images of African poverty and violence she encountered in the media. [2]

Those circumstances complicate any account in which educational or material advantage automatically removes racial exclusion. Class shapes the opportunities a person has, but it does not necessarily determine whether other people regard them as belonging. Hirsch's writing asks readers to hold both realities in view.

It also makes a distinction between having an explanation available and having to discover one. A child may recognise that something feels wrong long before finding the vocabulary to describe it. Books, family conversations and encounters with other Black people can supply connections that the school curriculum leaves incomplete.

Learning to ask public questions

Hirsch began contributing to The Voice as a teenager, reporting from the age of fourteen. This early connection with a Black British newspaper matters alongside the national institutions that later employed her. The Voice provided a space in which Black readers and their concerns were already central, rather than a readership to be introduced as an exception. [3]

She went to St Peter's College, Oxford, to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 2002. Her academic interests included African politics. Work with the Open Society Institute took her to Dakar, Senegal, before she qualified as a barrister in 2006 and trained at Doughty Street Chambers. Her legal work included cases supported by legal aid. [2]

These experiences gave her several ways of approaching an argument. A lawyer must identify what can be established and what a claim requires. A reporter must decide whose account has been overlooked. A memoirist must consider how their own position affects what they can see. Hirsch's books bring these different kinds of enquiry into conversation.

There is also a question of access running through that career. A right has limited practical meaning if someone cannot secure the help needed to exercise it. Similarly, an experience can remain publicly invisible when the people living through it have little opportunity to shape the news.

From the courts to the newsroom

Hirsch's journalism included work as the Guardian's legal affairs correspondent and its West Africa correspondent, followed by a role as social affairs and education editor at Sky News. Moving between these subjects placed law, migration, schooling and international reporting within the same working life. Her later appointment at the University of Southern California extended that experience into journalism education. [3][4]

The connection is useful when reading her. She is interested in the institutions that make decisions, but also in how those decisions become intelligible to the public. A policy can be described as an administrative measure while the people affected experience it as uncertainty over home, family or livelihood.

Reporting from Africa introduces another responsibility: to avoid treating a continent as a setting for British anxieties. African societies have their own political disputes, artistic traditions and competing accounts of modernity. A writer addressing British readers needs to explain connections without implying that every story begins or ends in Britain.

The argument of Brit(ish)

Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging combines memoir with an investigation of British attitudes to race. Hirsch places her own experiences alongside questions about history, representation and the limits of a national self-image built around tolerance. The book asks what becomes difficult to discuss when acknowledging race is itself treated as the source of division. [1]

This is an argument about the terms of conversation. If only openly hostile behaviour counts as racism, quieter patterns can disappear from view. The person describing those patterns may then be required to prove not only what happened, but why noticing it was reasonable.

For a Black British readership, that predicament may need little introduction. What a book can offer is the space to connect episodes that daily life forces people to handle separately. An assumption about a name, a narrow history lesson and a recurring image in the news can be considered together without claiming that every experience is identical.

The memoir form also places limits on the argument, and those limits are valuable. Hirsch's upbringing cannot stand in for every Black British life. Reading it seriously means noticing differences of class, generation, region and heritage, as well as recognising shared pressures. A personal history becomes most useful when it opens a discussion rather than closes it.

Hirsch also served on the 2019 Booker Prize judging panel, which selected Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other as joint winners. It was another setting in which questions of storytelling, readership and cultural authority became practical decisions. Her participation places her within literary life as a reader and critic as well as a writer of non-fiction. The work of evaluating novels also differs from judging an argument: a fictional world asks how people are imagined, not simply which position they represent. [10]

Making the law accessible to children

In 2019, Hirsch published Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court with Legal Action Group. The illustrated story follows Ama, a schoolgirl from Richmond in Yorkshire, on a visit to the Supreme Court. Through Lady Hale's life and work, it introduces young readers to legal decisions, equality and fairness. [5]

This book belongs within Hirsch's wider career rather than at its edge. Her interest in who feels entitled to enter an institution becomes a practical question about childhood. A court can appear distant and forbidding; a story can help a child understand that it is made up of people, arguments and decisions.

The connection between aspiration and understanding matters. Encouraging children to imagine a professional future is useful, but explaining what the profession does gives that encouragement substance. Justice becomes something to think about and question, rather than merely an impressive word attached to a building.

Looking again at British art

Empire, published in Tate's Look Again series in 2021, brought Hirsch's questions into the national collection of British art. The short book considers relationships between imperial history and artistic representation, drawing attention to the changing meanings of familiar works. [6]

A museum offers a particularly clear setting for this kind of enquiry. Its arrangements can seem natural because the pictures have become familiar. Yet a collection reflects choices about what to acquire, preserve, describe and display. Looking at an object also means encountering those choices.

An imperial context does not remove a painting's formal qualities. It adds questions about the world in which it was made: who could commission an image, whose labour supported wealth, and who appeared as an individual rather than an unnamed presence. A fuller account can deepen attention to an artwork rather than make looking at it impossible.

History carried by the body

Decolonising My Body, first published in 2023, turns towards beauty, adornment, ancestry and ageing. Hirsch uses personal experience, travel, interviews and research to investigate ideas she had absorbed about how a body should look and behave. Her encounter with tattooing at forty becomes part of a broader examination of inherited assumptions. [7][8]

The shift in scale is striking. A national story may seem abstract, while dissatisfaction with one's appearance feels intensely private. Bringing the two together asks how a judgement came to feel personal in the first place. Who established the desirable shape, texture or age, and through which images did that judgement become familiar?

The subject also requires care. Ancestral practices cannot be reduced to a single, timeless alternative to Western beauty culture. Traditions change, and people within the same society disagree. The productive question is how recovering other histories can widen the choices available now, without turning the past into another set of instructions for women to obey.

Documentary, teaching and a wider audience

Hirsch has taken these interests beyond books through documentary work including Enslaved, co-presented with Samuel L. Jackson, and the BBC's Africa Rising. She founded the production company Born in Me and has also worked in audio, including We Need to Talk About the British Empire. These formats reach audiences who may first encounter historical questions through a voice, an image or a conversation. [9]

They also change the demands on a storyteller. Television must establish connections within a limited running time. A book can pause, qualify and return. Teaching asks the further question of how another person will investigate a subject independently. None of these forms can do everything; together they explain the range of her public work.

Hirsch's contribution is not that she supplies one final definition of Britishness. It is that she makes its everyday conditions available for examination. Her books invite readers to ask who has been expected to explain themselves, whose history has been treated as peripheral, and how those habits might be changed.

For readers arriving through Brit(ish), the later books reveal the reach of that enquiry. The courtroom, gallery and dressing table belong to the same social world, even when they are discussed separately. Hirsch follows the connections between them, insisting that questions of belonging have material, cultural and intimate consequences.

Sources

[1] Penguin — Brit(ish), publication details and overview

[2] Afua Hirsch — autobiographical account

[3] USC Annenberg — Afua Hirsch faculty biography

[4] USC Annenberg — appointment as Wallis Annenberg Chair

[5] Legal Action Group — Equal to Everything

[6] London Review Bookshop — Tate Publishing's description of Empire

[7] Penguin — Decolonising My Body

[8] Wellcome Collection — Decolonising My Body bibliographic record

[9] Goldsmiths, University of London — Afua Hirsch

[10] The Booker Prizes — 2019 judges and winning books