t’s 1996 in a perfectly ordinary suburb just north of Heathrow airport. A teenage boy and his sister are on their way to the optician. Walking under a railway bridge, they pass a man who slows down and gives the boy a stare “as startling as scalding water”. He can’t stop thinking about it all through the appointment, and when they emerge – though surely the man won’t still be there? – they walk a different way back to the bus stop, just in case. When the bus arrives, they climb to the top deck, and as it turns the corner, the boy peers out. The man is still there, and smiles as he catches sight of them, before opening his coat wide to reveal a colourful patchwork of swastikas sewn into the lining: red, white, black, purple. The boy is Musa Okwonga, and he goes to school at Eton College, just the other side of the M25. Over there racism may not announce itself with swastikas, but it’s a constant background hum, with something of the same menace as the man in the coat: just when you think you’ve evaded it, surprise! Here’s a moment to chill you to the bone, like when a fellow pupil boasts about the fact that his ancestor was a slaver. Nevertheless, Okwonga thrives at the school, which he set his heart on after being dazzled by a documentary he saw as a child. He wins a scholarship and aged 13 becomes a boarder, putting on the school’s distinctive morning suit every day: “The greatest proof of my status is my uniform. It consists of a black tailcoat, a black waistcoat under which I wear a white shirt with a starched collar and thin white cotton tie, a pair of black pinstriped trousers and black shoes.” He becomes a model student, almost to a fault. But he’s carrying around a double burden of responsibility: first to his father, who was killed amid political violence in Uganda when he was four, and his widowed mother, who works hard as a doctor to pay his fees. Then there’s the second, crushing weight imposed by society’s expectations of young black men and the mostly white environment of the school. “I think it is unlikely that many of my contemporaries,” Okwonga writes, “have had a close black friend, and so I don’t want to conform to any of the stereotypes they might have about black people. I resolve never to get drunk around any of them, never to get stoned in their company. I don’t even risk getting a haircut that I might enjoy.” Much of his time, then, is spent conducting himself with “a military level of self-restraint”, although he admits “it is unclear whether my classmates either notice or care”. Okwonga tries to make sense of the pressures, absurdities and rewards of his schooldays in his latest book, One of Them: An Eton College Memoir. He talks to me over Zoom from his flat in Berlin, where he has lived for the past six years. As well as being a poet and writer, he presents a successful football podcast, and a big red professional microphone juts into shot. His conversation is more laidback than his prose, which can have the disconcerting quality of feeling both buttoned-up and incredibly raw. I ask why he wanted to write about Eton now, more than two decades after he left. “It felt like it was time. Look at our society – politically and socially, where we are.” (In the book, he writes of the current moment that “It feels like the bad guys have won”.) “I’ve gone to this boarding school which prides itself on creating prime ministers,” he says, “but then I look at the job those prime ministers have done. David Cameron promised stability, but he’s given us – well, he hasn’t given us stability. And Boris Johnson has done terrible damage to the country.” Okwonga describes the gallery of busts in the 17th-century building known as “Upper School” on the sprawling campus outside Windsor (he writes: “No one here ever tells us out loud that we Etonians are natural leaders: that is what the architecture is for”). Prime ministers from Walpole to Earl Grey to Gladstone are immortalised in marble. The prospect of Cameron and Johnson joining them one day makes him queasy. The school smooths the path to power, but seems to evade responsibility for how it is wielded. The memoir doesn’t contain any blueprint for reform, though Okwonga says the first thing he’d do if he was in charge of the country would be to crack down on tax evasion, and “plough a tonne of money into housing and education”. He thinks there are serious questions to be asked about the charitable status of private schools on the basis of public benefit, given their role in the reproduction of a conservative establishment that tends to strip the public realm of resources. But mostly he wants to start a series of conversations that have largely been avoided. In the book he writes, “I keep reflecting on what Eton doesn’t talk about”, from the part it played in the creation and maintenance of empire, to the function it serves today. He tells me: “The school explicitly prides itself on leadership, right? But if you’re not creating the kind of leaders that are moving the world forward – that’s the most pressing conversation to have, I think.” Of private schooling in general, he asks: “As a structure, as a system, is it serving our society best? I don’t believe it is. And I say that as someone that’s benefited hugely from that world.” Okwonga sees access to the best education, and therefore to power, narrowing rather than broadening. Yet resilience in the face of global problems such as the pandemic or the climate crisis demands you engage as many people as possible in the search for solutions. “We’re not going to handle the challenges that are facing us right now if we’re only taking expertise from an increasingly small group. It’s not going to work.” The “why now” question has a personal answer, too. Okwonga started thinking about school again when he was invited to his 20-year reunion. It was the prompt for a fairly unforgiving bout of introspection. He was embarrassed at how his penurious life as a single writer nudging 40 compared with his fellow alumni, by then wealthy executives with houses and families. In his autobiographical novella, In the End It Was All About Love, published earlier this year, the protagonist says: “There is not a week when you do not look in the hallway mirror and think, my God, what have I done.” But unlike in the Talking Heads song, there is no beautiful house or large automobile in sight. When I ask him what psychological marks Eton left on him, Okwonga says: “You’re taught to compete all the time. And once you leave a world where you can readily compete against others, you kind of turn that competition inward. So you’re pushing yourself constantly, you’re just brutal with yourself. And sometimes things don’t feel satisfying unless they’re difficult.” Difficult is certainly the word for some of Okwonga’s searing judgments about himself, particularly in In the End It Was All About Love, which agonises about the insecurity of freelance life, the alienation of being black in white spaces, romantic rejection and self-loathing. I ask if this confessional phase will continue. He says he’s looking forward to returning to fiction, even sci-fi, having written some unpublished work in the past. The last couple of years, however, called for self-exposure. “We’re in a time of artifice, you know, fake news, and charlatans who aren’t being honest about their intentions. I just thought, what’s the antidote to that? The answer is basically to interrogate yourself and your surroundings. The way through all this stuff, this artifice, is to say, here’s something that I felt that was real, and others may relate to it and feel it as well.” The exacting standards Okwonga sets himself have roots that go deeper than Eton. He talks of a “survivor’s guilt” over relatives affected by war and Aids at the time his school career was taking off. “Make it count” became something of a mantra. And then there’s his father. “My dad died very young. And he achieved a lot in his life. I think that there was a sense of: I’ve got to do stuff by a certain age.” Forty is always a landmark, but it held particular significance for Okwonga. It was the age his father, having temporarily left the family in order to fight in his country’s civil war, was killed in a helicopter crash. So it’s extraordinary that this was the moment he finally achieved some peace of mind about his professional life. “Yeah, my life changed in the last year and a half, right? Everything changed. I was on the phone to a good friend of mine. We hadn’t spoken for a few years. And during that phone call, I got two notifications in half an hour.” They were both book deals. “I was, like, stay on the phone!” he laughs. Of a third contract, Okwonga says: “I was slightly pushing – can we sign it, can we sign it. It had all been negotiated, so it was going to be signed anyway. But the reason I didn’t give was that it was a few days before I passed the age my dad was. And I was, like, ‘Dad, I did it! Just before I passed your age, I made work that I felt has honoured you.’ And I went and got a cupcake around the corner. I know it’s not that dramatic or extravagant, but it’s my method of celebration. I did it. I did it just in time.” An extract from One of Them: An Eton College Memoir There is a way some boys look at me here that I have never seen before. When I annoy someone in my home town, they make eye contact with me, the fury glistens in their gaze. But at Eton, if I confront one of the more arrogant students who dislikes me, there is a very particular stare they give me: a glazed expression, never fully focused, as if they are peering out into the yard at a distant and mildly irritating disturbance, a fox howling somewhere in the dark. Boys who look at me like this belong to a class that everyone refers to as “the lads”, and they seem exempt from generally accepted codes of behaviour. The lads intrigue me from the moment I arrive at school. They are fascinating because they seem to defy all social conventions – I have been told my entire life that it is important to get on with people in order to succeed, but these peers of mine often seem supremely uninterested in that. My school never creates the lads – they arrive there with the core of their egos fully formed – but it frequently seems to end up rewarding them with some of the most senior positions in the student body. The lads have long ago worked out, or been told, that what matters is not being good-natured but achieving high office. In a system where boys are raised to be deferential to those in authority, they know that if they merely gain prestige, then personal popularity will follow. The school’s power structure is strange to me. The school prefects are not appointed by staff, or elected via secret ballot by their own year. Instead they are chosen by the prefects in the year above. The result is that if a boy wishes to be socially prominent at school, there are only twenty people whose approval he truly needs. I watch boys campaign for election as prefects with a vigour that I will later see in the world of politics, and I will realise that this is the kind of place where these politicians learned it, that this is what they mean by networking. Networking is the art of laughing a little longer and louder than necessary at the jokes of the person whose patronage you seek, of standing silently by their shoulders when they are making a nonsensical argument, of hanging around just in case they need an extra pint, of strategically making sure you are in the same place as them on holiday. It is the least dignified behaviour I can imagine, but I will see boys carry it out with such ease that it appears to be genetic. I think a great deal about the English concept of fair play: the idea that there are some things that are simply not done. The older I get, the more I wonder how much that concept was created to keep people of a certain social class in their place. I look at the most confident people in my year and I realise that the greatest gift that has been bestowed upon them is that of shamelessness. 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. here is an incident of racism that occurs at school, which I cannot ascribe to mere ignorance and which I will never truly forgive or forget because I cannot believe that someone so focused in their hatred has actually changed. I get into an argument with a boy and the exchange is spirited. He has been told I have been disrespecting his family, which I find strange because I do not even know who his family is or what they do. I tell him this, but despite my protests he does not believe me. A little later, as a class is just about to begin, he is overheard by a close friend saying that he hates me so much that he wishes he could tell me that his great-grandfather was a slave driver. My friend tells me, and once I have absorbed this news I go and do some research, the irony being that I am finally in a position to talk about what the boy’s family does for a living. My research reveals that the profession of the boy’s great-grandfather very likely did involve the ownership of black people. From that day, my hatred for him will remain unashamed, unrelenting and total. In his final year at school, he ends up in a position of significant authority. It is interesting to me that, despite his stance on this issue, he has always been far from an outcast. t is grim to witness some of the school’s former students with little apparent compassion for so many of their country’s occupants. I once watched them in awe in debating chambers and on televised university quiz shows as they destroyed their intellectual rivals. Now I watch interviews where they can barely contain their contempt for people who are poorer and less gifted, where they defend policies that take blowtorches to the budgets of local communities. I wonder how they became that, or whether this is who they always were. Each time I see a leading Conservative politician from my school in the news, either the ones who were in the year above me or those who were there a generation before, I note that they always seem to have the same brutal outlook, the same ruthlessness towards public-spending cuts. They seem indifferent to the desperation of disabled people claiming benefits; they swat aside the latest poverty statistics as if they were weak retorts in a sixth-form debating chamber. For them, maybe politics is tennis, and every unhappy fact is thrashed away with a single-handed backhand. The boy who was our head prefect, someone I could not have admired more, crafted the same economic policies that the United Nations’ poverty expert would later describe as punitive, mean-spirited and often callous. Almost every schoolfriend whom I have seen express a political view on social media has been Conservative. And why wouldn’t they be? This world works for them just as it is. It provides them with living standards and a basic level of comfort that are unimaginable to most people. A key problem for too many people from my school is that they’ve never really seen widespread poverty. They have read about it, and maybe even seen it on their gap years, but they don’t really believe in it – that is to say, they largely think it is something you can elevate yourself out of, if you work just a little harder. The reason Eton can hold such grand anniversary celebrations is because we are utterly certain that there will be so much to celebrate. We are absolutely sure that most of us will be affluent, if not wealthy. On the whole, hard times do not happen to us.