Book Review - One Of Them By Musa Okwonga

The amount of stuff I don’t know about wealthy people could probably fill several warehouses. The wealthy are too far removed from me both in terms of class, and location. They may as well be invisible to me. I know they exist floating around somewhere out there in the world but I don’t think I’ve met any. Wealthy people to me are characters in TV and film. They’re Scrooge McDuck swimming in his giant money vault, or Lex Luthor coming up with his next plot to kill Superman. I have no idea what their lives are like, no idea what an elite private education at Eton would be like, no idea what their social rules dictate, or what it does to a person who grows up in that world. I only see the end product, the Eton graduates once they’ve fully levelled up and reached their final forms like Boris Johnson or David Cameron. I don’t have the first clue as to how the sausage gets made. One Of Them by Musa Okwongo is a look inside the sausage factory. One Of Them is a memoir written by Okwongo about his life mainly focusing on his time studying at Eton College. He writes about his time at Eton, his experiences, and the racism and prejudice he dealt with.

His writing isn’t what you would expect from a standard memoir and consists of a series of vignettes about his experiences one after another. As a reader this presentation style was a surprise to be sure, but not an unwelcome one. These vignettes follow roughly chronological order (though there is some jumping around), with each one getting its own title so they’re like a series of short stories that, thanks to their connected nature, add up to cover his entire time at Eton effectively. Their length varies with each being exactly as long as it needs to be to deliver its specific story. I came to appreciate this approach quickly as it made the memoir feel like a series of memories from Okwongo’s past. It builds the connection between Okwongo and the reader naturally. It feels less like reading one extended narrative from beginning to end, and more like sitting with Okwongo in conversation over coffee and he’s remembering one story after another. This approach also fits the subject matter well as Okwongo’s focus is on his time at Eton College, and a lot of people reminisce on their past school experiences like this. For many of us our time at school can be one of the most memorable and formative periods of our lives in terms of making us the adults we become, whether that be for good or bad, and Okwongo is no exception.

This is not to say all of the stories present are tinted by the softening lens of memory and nostalgia. While he has many positive memories and stories, particularly those focused on his love of playing football at Eton, he writes about the racism he has experienced too. These incidents are peppered throughout the book so several positive memories will be included in a row lulling the reader into a false sense of security, and then suddenly a painful, or infuriating memory of racism he was subjected to will pop up. It’s as if occasionally something would happen just to remind him that no, don’t get too comfortable here, don’t let your guard down, you are a black boy at Eton: the rich White man factory. These incidents don’t dominate the overall narrative, and aren’t the main focus, but they stand out more because of how they can sneak up on the reader. One such incident that Okwongo writes about that stands out in this regard is when he describes how a bully peeled a banana and mushed it into his face in the middle of the lunch hall. The pain and humiliation Okwongo felt is palpable as he describes in detail how the banana got into his eyes, and how nobody present in the lunch hall helped him or did anything to stop the bully. On top of this he even blamed himself for the incident for not doing anything compounding his pain through self-recrimination for something that wasn’t his fault. This incident is slotted between a short piece about how Okwongo was told not to show off when playing cricket, and a jubilant memory of scoring the winning goal in a football match. The reader feels the shock of the bullying incident as Okwongo does as it suddenly appears sandwiched between two short stories about sports.

Throughout all of the memories Okwongo writes about one common thread is his almost painful awareness of his position as a Black student at Eton. He writes about the self-imposed pressure he felt to excel and always improve because he knew how hard his mother worked to be able to send him there. It is a lot of pressure to place on anyone’s shoulders, particularly a child, that anything less than perfect is considered a betrayal and failure to the person they care for most. He also recognises what an important factor timing played on his ability to attend Eton. He put it better than I could: “Since I attended my school, the fees have more than trebled in just twenty years, meaning that they would now be unaffordable to someone like my mother, and that most of the boys there will be drawn from an even narrower segment of society. While my school is more likely than ever to produce more prime ministers, it is grim to think that the journey I took – a full five years there at 50 per cent of the fees – is no longer possible for boys like me.” He needed to be perfect in everything he did extended to how he interacted with his fellow students. He writes about how he is aware that many of the White students who attend Eton will have never had any Black friends aside from him and the handful of other Black students in attendance. He didn’t want to confirm any stereotypes they might have about Black people and decided to ensure he was perfect in his conduct around them not touching alcohol for example until after he had left university. He took it upon himself to almost be an ambassador of Blackness to them and he conducted himself with an extreme level of self-restraint beyond anything the white students displayed.

Where Okwongo’s Blackness brought him a grave sense of responsibility, his fellow students time at Eton seemed to nurture in them an extreme level of privilege. Eton’s position as an elite school that has produced twenty Prime Ministers, combined with the wealth most of these students enjoy as children of the upper classes produce students who act with a level of shamelessness Okwongo, or I, would never dream of. He writes about a friend who told him about attending a party with some rich white friends where there was a large bowl of cocaine just sitting out in the open in the middle of a table. This shamelessness, and apparent lack of care for the possibility of consequences seems to Okwongo, to not be to these students’ detriment, but rather is a key part of the privilege Eton instils. Again, he puts it better than I could, so to quote Okwongo directly: “Shamelessness is the superpower of a certain section of the English upper classes. While so many other people in the country are hamstrung by the deference and social embarrassment they have been taught since birth, the upper classes calmly parade on through the streets and boardrooms to claim the spoils. They don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, but this is where they perfect it.” As a reader I found Okwongo’s perspective as someone who was themselves immersed in this privilege and shamelessness, but who didn’t benefit from it, highly valuable, and one which I’m glad I was able to read.

I will draw this review to a close here by saying overall One Of Them was a compelling and illuminating peak into what life at Eton was like. It seems everything about the school, from its emphasis on the importance of hierarchy, to the school uniform, to the competitiveness, and increasingly expensive price of entry is built around reinforcing, and strengthening the sense of privilege the upper classes have. Eton has an ever-narrowing net which it uses to draw in its students, but a seemingly ever-increasing influence on the political stage, and on the country as a whole. This is a state of affairs that Okwongo himself is critical of: “the fate of a nation should not come down to whether the nice guy or the nasty guy in your class ends up as prime minister. Power should simply not be held so tightly by one group, being passed around the same circle of individuals as if it were a joint on a night out.” This is a book that as many people should read as possible because it’s a rare glimpse at a world of privilege that is hidden from most of us. In 2024 there have been many criticisms, examinations, and observations on the nature of white privilege, and how it intersects with and fortifies class divisions but with One Of Them it’s coming from the perspective of someone who has been on the inside.

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