Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason: 'Britishness should be something that we all have a part in'

Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason lectured in English at the University of Birmingham before giving up her career to have children. All seven of her children – Isata, Braimah, Sheku, Konya, Jeneba, Aminata and Mariatu – are classically trained musicians. In 2016, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason was named BBC Young Musician of the Year, the first Black musician to win the award. His siblings all followed him into the spotlight, making the family an extraordinary success story, but they have been subjected to unrelenting racist abuse since coming to public notice. Two years ago, Kanneh-Mason decided to do something about it.

Big Issue: What part did music play in your upbringing?  

Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason: I was born in Sierra Leone and then came to the UK. I moved to Wales when I was eight. There were four of us children, but my father was one of 45 children, so we had lots of cousins and aunties and uncles. Music was really important for us in Sierra Leone, everything there is about music and dance. Every occasion is about singing. And music is very important in Wales of course. So music was just a very natural part of my life. My father got us piano lessons. I grew up thinking music was part of everybody’s life, it was just what you did. 

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Did you always want a big family? 

I wanted four children to replicate what I’d grown up in and my husband Stuart wanted three and somehow, we seemed to add them together and had seven. I loved my career as an English lecturer but with the children it became increasingly difficult to work – my husband was away a lot, working in the airlines. So I stepped down so that I could just be around for the children. 

How did you introduce your children to music? 

My husband and I both did music at school, so we decided to give our children the opportunity. We bought a small upright piano. We started our eldest on it and she absolutely loved it. And the others just followed. And then, because the piano can be quite a lonely instrument, they wanted to play music in an orchestra, so they also learned the violin. We ended up having seven children who were playing at least two different instruments. Of course, it got to be very expensive, but we couldn’t refuse the younger ones what their elders had.  

Why do you think music is such an important aspect of a full emotional life? 

I would say that actually all the creative, performing arts are important but music is one of those subjects where all children can join in. It doesn’t mean they have to become musicians or be brilliant, but I think it’s a shared language, a universal language. And I think it gives children a chance to express themselves and to learn self confidence. They might have to stand up in front of people to perform, and learn how to present themselves, which is important in every single aspect of life. And when I watch children perform, there’s a wonderful sense of ‘look what I’ve achieved’, and ‘listen to me’. You can express sadness, and you can express joy and I think if you take away that opportunity for children it can be devastating. 

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Tell me about the night in 2023 when your daughter Isata was making her debut for the Proms. How did you feel watching her?  

Oh, that was a wonderful night, because we love the Proms, it’s such a great celebration of classical music. It was a real dream of hers to play there. And then I was looking at the online comments. They were all mostly wonderful. Normally, I protect the children from negative online comments. But this time I was unguarded and my 17-year-old daughter popped up behind me and saw a comment which said Isata was only chosen to play due to having “the right melanin” because she was Black, and she was “taking the place of a white musician who deserved to be there”.  

That was devastating to my daughter, she started crying. It was a huge knock to her confidence. And I thought, I’ve never actually said anything about those cruel, racist comments but what they actually are saying is, if you are Black, you can’t possibly be good enough. In fact, you shouldn’t be there at all. So I decided to talk about it very publicly. I think I thought when they were younger that things would get better, but I don’t see that happening. So I went on to Twitter, and I just said, this is a problem. We should talk about it.  

There’s an incident in the book when the whole family is turned away from a pub… 

Yes, when they were small children we tried so hard to give them a positive life, and we used to go to a lot of different places in Wales. We decided to have a pub lunch, something we used to do regularly. When we arrived, we could see that the place was half empty, but the pub owner saw us and his face changed – he blocked the doorway, and said the pub was full. That was very, very difficult, because, of course, we knew why we weren’t allowed in. We tried very hard to shield it from the children. We didn’t want to make a great thing of it, but it was incredibly damaging. We had to think, well, here are our children, and they’re not allowed into a space with others. They’re seen as somehow unfit. That was a terrible thought. 

Tell me how you feel about singing Rule Britannia at the Proms, celebrating the idea that the UK, with its history of slave-owning, never will be slaves?  

I think for anyone who’s not English, it’s a huge problem. It was pretty poignant for my children, because their father is of Antiguan heritage. So their ancestors really were slaves. They were slaves of the British. So to have a celebration about how wonderful we are, the English, that we’re never going to be slaves and never were, is directly offensive. We’ve always found it kind of appalling and amazing that it is still being seen as an appropriate attitude at something which is supposed to be a celebration of British music. I think Britishness should be something that we all have a part in. If it becomes exclusive to one group of people, you’re not telling most of the story, and someone else’s experience is being silenced. And that is incredibly sad. 

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To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason is out now (Oneworld, £16.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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