At a secondary school on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone, the speaker finished an address to the assembled pupils with a little mantra that was all too familiar to me. I grew up with it. My parents, especially my mother, would often impress upon me and my nine siblings the exact same thing: that our focus should be on “Education, education, education”. The unspoken subtext being, of course, that education was the only escape route from the lowly position that we (and they) had been born into. This time, the advice was being delivered in an entirely different context.…
