Rene Carayol MBE

Renowned business guru and speaker René Carayol MBE, author of Corporate Voodoo, has sat on the Board of some of the UK's leading corporations. He argues fervently that we must escape from the shadows of the past and focus on our ability to create a bright future. In the early 1960s, Gambia was a British colony. It had primary education, hardly any secondary education and certainly no tertiary education. Like many West African parents in the British colonies at the time, my parents, believing that education was the key to success, gave up their careers, gave up their livelihood. They were someone back in Gambia, they were prepared to be no one in the UK to give their kids a chance.

At that time, there were next to no Black people here. The only places that were open to us had the worst housing, the worst schools. We moved into Harlesden Northwest London, which was a really difficult place to live.

At the time, I don't think my contemporaries and I understood the sacrifices our parents were making. They didn't come here for a life-changing moment, they came here for their kids to get educated and then go back.

The situation is different now. Most countries in West Africa have universities now. But at the time, there wasn't that choice. When my parents came here, it was going to be for a very short space of time. Get their kids through school, and they were going back and all of us were going back with them.