After the murder of Damilola Taylor, my mother moved the family from London to the suburbs. Trying to fit in with the white bullies left me feeling lost

Growing up on an estate in Camberwell, south London, in the late-90s, I was raised around different cultures. My mum is Nigerian, my dad half-Sierra Leonean. But my last name is Walker and so, even as a child, I felt different – a bit left out when it came to the Nigerians: in jest, they’d say, “Oh, your last name’s Walker, that means you’ll be able to get a job.”

I was always a quiet kid, sensitive; more so than my two younger brothers. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow unwanted. My mum would make fun of me because I was chubby and family members would call me ugly. They weren’t serious, but it hurt. One time, my mum and aunties got me to try on clothes in front of them – they didn’t fit and they all laughed. That messed up how I saw myself. I still have bad posture because I used to walk with my head down low.

When I started secondary school in Peckham, there were Latinos, Asians, Nigerians, Caribbeans, Eritreans, Somalians and, obviously, white kids, too. It was so diverse that I honestly didn’t even know what racism was. I thought it existed only in the United States. But everything changed in 2000, on the day of Damilola Taylor’s death.

I can still remember walking home after playing football with friends, going to get chicken and chips on the way. All I could see was the blue lights flashing. As I got closer, I could see police tape across the street. I looked at one policeman and he told me: “A kid died.” I took the long way home, got in and saw my mum on the floor, crying. In my head I was thinking, “Mum, we didn’t even know this person.”

Then they said his name was Damilola Taylor on the news, and I realised he was Nigerian, just like me. I saw Damilola’s mother on TV, in African attire, I think, and that was when it hit me and my mum even more. People like her had brought their children here for a better life. It could have been me, or one of my brothers.

Play Video 26:43 Black Sheep

The decision for us to move was not immediate. Mum showed us a friend’s house in a mostly white area of Essex and I thought it was like a mansion. Eventually we moved and, for me, it was a huge shock – going from a city to a village.

The first racist incident made me fully realise how different it was going to be. I was about 11 and walking to the shop for my mum when a young boy – up on a balcony in a mini-estate – looked down on me and said, “Oi, nigger!” I told him to come downstairs – how could he say that? I looked around, wondering if there was someone I could tell. There was no one. By the time I got home, I was so scared and shocked my belly had tightened up. I thought, OK, these guys don’t like us.

My black friends and I began to get attacked; people would speed their cars up and try to hit us in the street

When I started at my new school there was a black girl who was a family friend, and became my anchor. We were two of about four black kids at the school. I remember my friend and I seeing how the other two acted, how they spoke, with Essex accents. We looked at each other and said, “They don’t talk like us.” We went home and tried to do the accent that night. Right away, we were figuring out how to fit in.

I decided I had to be like the white kids. Have a laugh, develop the accent, entertain them, be funny. But soon enough, one guy said he wanted to fight me. It happened quickly; I lost badly. I did not know black people could get black eyes until I walked home with two of them. I came up the stairs and when my mum saw me she started speaking in Yoruba, wailing and crying. “My life, my life,” she said. “What have I done?” I told her I had been attacked by strangers.

I know I could have told her more about the racism I was facing, but I didn’t want to make things difficult at home – it was already tense. There were things that, as a child, I shouldn’t have seen. I blamed myself; I felt I was a bad omen.

I was off school for two weeks after the fight and when I got back, one of the black kids who fitted in – who I felt had been “colonised” – stood up for me; for a time, I was fine. But problems re-surfaced when more black people started moving to the area, and it became a case of black versus white – more territorial. And because I’d tried so hard to fit in with the white people who now accepted me, I found myself caught in the middle. It was as if I didn’t know if I wanted to be white or black.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Film-maker Cornelius Walker. Photograph: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian

Things got worse. My black friends and I began to get attacked; we’d walk down the street and people would speed their cars up and try to hit us on the pavement. Or we would be circled by men on motorbikes who would jump off and attack us. People threw things from cars, hurling abuse.

When my school was merged with another troubled school in the area, that fuelled it more. The teachers couldn’t protect us; they were sometimes racist, too. When the school realised there were hostilities between the black pupils and the white pupils, they held an assembly. One teacher stood up and said, “Certain people, after they were born stayed in the sun too long and became darker. So they were like us in the beginning and they’re just like us now – just a bit darker.” Imagine hearing that from your teachers.

I watched a lot of Jim Carrey at the time. The Mask became my guide – I saw how he’d become this wacky, adaptable person. I created a personality for myself; funny, happy-go-lucky, good with the girls. But still the racism followed me – I remember walking with a white girlfriend and someone saying, “If you have a baby, will it come out grey? If I see that baby, I’ll kick it.”

The girls in school started saying, ‘Oh, you’re so hot now.’ It was hard to know whether I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing

It was around this time that I found mum’s skin-bleaching cream in her bathroom cabinet. I was looking for her perfume – I was going through puberty and had started to think about girls; I wanted to smell nice. The cream said it was for skin lightening and clearer skin.

My black friend and I saved up our money to buy our own. After a while, I was using it every day. I think there was one day when my nose was so light, it actually went red in the cold. I thought, what the hell? But at the time I wanted to be accepted, I wanted to be popular. It felt, to me, like the only way to be seen and be appreciated was to be white.

But people noticed. The girls in school started saying, “Oh, you’re so hot now.” It was hard to know whether I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Even my aunties complimented me. Puberty had hit, so I’d lost a bit of weight. I went from ugly in their eyes, to good-looking, and thought it must be down to my skin, and the way I texturised my hair. If my parents noticed, they just thought it was a phase. A few months later, my friend and I got blue contacts. Anything that might make me seem more European was worth it.

There was a period after that where I lashed out, doing stupid crazy, violent stuff with my white friends and my black friends, too. It was a way of saying, “I’m going to put it on you guys now.” I wanted to be hard; I wanted to shore up my identity with violence. It was a release from what I was feeling at home, all the anger that had built up.

***

It wasn’t until I went to college that I felt my blackness was something that was celebrated by other people. There were more black women at college saying, “Oh, he’s really good-looking.” At secondary school, the white girls would like me and the black girls would make fun of me. But then the more black girls I was around, the more they started to appreciate my features. I realised there was nothing wrong with me. I stopped with the cream and the contacts.

I met a girlfriend who hated the violent side of me, who helped to calm me down. I also found out I was dyslexic – I’d gone all the way through school without knowing it. I’d been called stupid every results day, to the point where I believed it. The other thing that helped was that all the people we’d been warring against – a lot of the racists – didn’t care about education. They had dropped out of school and didn’t go to college, which made a huge difference; I didn’t need protection any more.

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Meanwhile, I was more ready to accept my black identity. When I first got to Essex it had been about survival. Now everyone, including me, had their own identity. The rest of my family moved to Canada, and I had the freedom to discover art, reading books like The Alchemist, and watching films – Sean Penn’s Into The Wild and Shane Meadows’ This Is England. I related to the white character, Shaun, as much as to the black character, Milky. I’ve since become a film-maker.

Now I’ve realised how much I appreciate my own heritage. Whether it’s respecting your elders, speaking to people the right way, or embracing community spirit, there’s a lot of positive things about Nigerian culture I am proud of. I remember my mum cooking jollof rice and I thought it was for us, but actually it would be for our neighbours. Those are behaviours that have made me unselfish later in life.

When I was younger I didn’t know who accepted me or who I wanted acceptance from. The greatest gift was learning to accept myself.

• As told to Jimi Famurewa.

Watch Black Sheep, the Guardian film about Cornelius Walker, at theguardian.com/documentaries.

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