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M.V. Juliette, tell me a bit about your family background and upbringing.
J.G.My mother is from the West Indies, from Dominica and she came over
in the 1950s and met my father at Hackney Hospital where they were training
in nursing. They then had four babies, me and my three sisters.
M.V. Are you the oldest?
J.G.No, the second oldest. It was very difficult
for them as a mixed marriage couple to survive in London, I think. My
father was out working all day, and there was quite a bit of racism
in London against a mixed marriage and so they decided that life would
be easier if they went abroad and so we all went off to Tanzania. In our
early childhood days we lived in East Africa and had a very strange colonial
upbringing.
M.V. What period was that?
J.G.The early 1960s
M.V. Can you tell me what year you were born in?
J.G.1959.
M.V. So in the 1960s you were in Tanzania. What was the situation there
then?
J.G.Before the vicious dictators, I think, but as a child one remembers
being quite protected from all that. I think living in a colonial situation
we were quite isolated from the local community. My father was an adventurer
and so we would go off quite a few times on safari and spend a lot of
time up the Nile and camping and so on.
M.V. So your family made the best of opportunities in Tanzania?
J.G.They did, yes. I think my mother was secretary to someone quite high
up, and my father worked in a hospital.
M.V. So your father was nursing?
J.G.Yes, he was nursing. It was a mental health hospital. It was also
like a huge compound. There was a prison camp and a general hospital and
a psychiatric unit. So there was a number of hospitals on the campus,
and we lived a very nice lifestyle really.
M.V. Who were the people you were mixing with? White colonials mainly
or did you mix with quite a few people of mixed background? Or with the
local black people?
J.G.No, it was mainly white colonials who were working out there, but
my father had a particular interest in the Masai and some of the tribes
in East Africa so he would go out of his way to ensure we had interaction
with the local people, and, of course, we had houseboys which were local
to the area.
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