Right now, for the first time I’ve fallen in love with my name, and last year or the year before or whenever, it was always Mina, Mina, Mina. It was about others. But now it's about me owning my name, my life, my choices and now I’m proud to say, “Yes, please do call me Negara Khatun.”

I currently work in a school supporting children for whom English is a second language. I was born in Mombasa in Kenya in 1969. We lived in a really poverty stricken way. My (step) father, Abba Jee, has had the highest impact on my life, and he always said to me that, “Mina, all I could see was this woman with these five children, struggling.” So yeah, he proposed to mum and they got married. I was seven years old when we emigrated to the UK, three sisters and two brothers. I was the youngest of all of them. After a bit of time in Nottingham, Abba Jee got a house in Percival Street in Bradford 3. It was a back to back property I think with only two bedrooms.

At that time, if you were a foreign student you were not sent straight to school. You were sent to language centres, but we were only there for a short while, because in Mombasa we were taught English in schools, so our English was fantastic. The point of these schools was to establish your English grammar. We were taught English grammar, we were taught basic English, and I think also it was nice. Speaking from my own experience, had I been thrown into a dominant white English-speaking different environment, where there were already routines and disciplines that you had to fall into – you know, it would have been quite scary as a foreign student because you’re new to the country, you’re new to the environment. Whereas the English centre was a very informal place. We had lessons and we had one thing in common – we were all new, not only to English but also to England.