Black Woman with an African accent...the people I met

I have always wanted to capture my one year postgraduate study experience at Cambridge University, but it is one of those things that it is really hard to capture in one page or even explain. There were many angles to it, but today, I will try and capture the people I met.

The people I met

I was very curious about the people, I would meet at Cambridge, and God, was I very disappointed.
I was not disappointed in their intellectual ability or their exposure, but I was very disappointed by their attitude to Black African.
Most people in Oxbridge are snobs. Don’t get be wrong, it is not a myth.
A foreign accent with a dark skin (black), says to them you love rap music, you can dance, you are probably the diversity quota and you should count yourself lucky to have gotten into the university.
A classmate said to me once that he likes hanging out with me, when we go out, ‘cos would make him look cool.
Everyone assumes I can dance and my favourite type of music is rnb and rap music.
Someone said to be once, that my accent may be a barrier, ‘cos people may assume that I have nothing intelligent to say… and I was thinking, I am sure you mean the colour of my skin.
There was a white South African in the class, so were other white skinned foreigners with non-British accent.
The colleges are worse; it is very hard to integrate, unless of course you join one of the clubs or societies
I lived in a 3 floor block apartment, in the college for one year and no one ever spoke to me
I found that most foreigners (excluding British & Americans) feel that they have to keep away from their own.
The lecturers are usually ex-students, so they are Oxbridge all in all
Oxbridge is very biased to their own.
All the Oxbridge undergraduate students were granted full scholarships on the postgraduate course
They are also biased to Scotland. Quite a lot of applicants from Scotland got scholarships
Scholarships are quite subjective, left to the discretion of the course director and governing bodies
Everyone speaks with a “posh” accent
It was like being back to secondary school; there is the element of wanting to be seen as “posh and cool” and it is all about family history and connections.
Summer parties, formal dinners, horse racing, polo, punting etc are the order of the day.
Oxbridge students don’t work. It is discouraged. So, you study very hard and then spend the rest of the partying very hard.
Oxbridge students dodrugs, weed, ecstasy etc.
All in all, for a black woman with an African accent, it was an eye opener.