Half-Caste (An Excerpt)

Posted in Africa, Articles, Autobiography, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Women on 2010-12-11 02:15Z by Steven

Half-Caste (An Excerpt)

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 1, (2008)
6 pages

Angela Ajayi

At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as “half-caste.” The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in Nigeria.

For a long time—from early childhood to late teens—I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn’t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were “half-caste,” you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The “half-caste” women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.

In the first decades following Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left for their studies—and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, he met my mother and married her in a tumultuous time of discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union…

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Alumni Profile • Angela Ajayi ’97

Posted in Articles, Biography, Media Archive, Women on 2010-12-10 23:14Z by Steven

Alumni Profile • Angela Ajayi ’97

The Calvin Spark
The Magazine for Alumni and Friends of Calvin College
Fall 2005

Working at the big question

Who am I and how do I fit in this world?

While every person struggles with these questions, they come to Angela Ajayi ’97 with some particular twists. The daughter of a Nigerian veterinarian and a Ukrainian caterer, Ajayi attended Hillcrest International School in Jos, Nigeria, prior to coming to Calvin. She was encouraged to take a practical course through college, in order to assume a professional life upon her return to Nigeria. But the pre-dentistry major discovered in her English classes “something about literature that gave me a sense of being alive.” She struggled, she said, with what to do. “I was thinking about the future. What would I do with an English major? But passion won.”..

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