The 'Casualty' actress opens up about the vile bullying she was facing because of the color of her skin during her school years and the valuable lessons she learned from the ordeal.
- Dec 11, 2023
AceShowbiz - "Bridgerton" star Adjoa Andoh experienced brutal bullying at school over her skin colour. The 60-year-old actress, who stars as Lady Danbury in the Netflix romance show, was born to an English mother and an upper class Ghanaian father, and was singled out as the only Black child at her school in the Cotswolds, even having her head smashed into walls by racist fellow pupils.
"Having my head smashed against the wall in the infants, and it's a traditional Cotswold stone county primary school, so Cotswold stone it's bumpy. You know like in the Beano you had 'Gnnhhh!' - all those exclamations of pain. As my head would hit I would see stars, but I would also see the cartoon bubble of 'Gnnhhh!' " she told MailOnline when asked her first memory of pain.
However, Adjoa was able to force the bullies to leave her alone once she began to fight back and headbutt the bullies. She said, "It stopped when I realised there was this thing I could do to make it stop. I was aware of being walloped a lot, and then I was aware of having to fight back...."
It took Adjoa some time before she realised why she was being targeted. She explained, "I sort of thought that was what happened at school until I was a bit older and friends would say, 'Oh, we're going to go back to mine, we'll have to get out before my mum comes because you're not allowed in our house.' "
"It would be that sort of thing and then you start to investigate that, but I think I must have been the end of infants before I twigged what that was. I just thought that fighting was the thing. We were the [only] black people in the 40, 50 miles radius. We were in the rural Cotswolds."
Even with all of the horrific abuse Adjoa had to endure, the "Adulthood" actress can see the positives in how her ordeal shaped her future. She said, "It's given me an absolute everlasting love of nature, it taught me very early on to be self-conscious, that I had to make people like me, because they might not like me because of the look of me. And I think that's a terrible burden for a child."
"If I'd stayed in the Cotswolds, there's a life I could have had that would have been working for Lloyds bank, getting married, settling down and just being there forever. That could have been a very nice life but I don't think it's a life I'm gifted for."
