Rebecca hopes her memoir will be a ‘tool for empowerment and education’

Throughout October, Swim England is celebrating individuals from all aspects of our sport who are championing equality as part of Black History Month.

Here Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain, discusses her new book, These Heavy Black Bones.

After Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell had taken part in her first swimming race at the age of six, she went home and drew her mum a picture.

“It was of a little brown girl in a costume with a comically big gold medal,” said Rebecca.

“I said to my mum, ‘this is me when I win the Olympics’.”

That little girl is forever immortalised in the dedication of Rebecca’s new book – These Heavy Black Bones.

It reads: “For the little brown girl with the focused eyes, float easy, I’ve got you.”

But it’s not just the ‘little brown girl’ breaststroke specialist Rebecca has ‘got’. Her forthright memoir charting her rise to become the first Black woman to represent Great Britain in the pool is, in her words, ‘a tool for empowerment and education’.

It details the highs and lows of her career which saw her represent Team England at the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games, dealing with the pressure of making history at such a young age, the trauma harsh training sessions had on her adolescent body both physically and mentally and dealing with the void she faced after walking away from the sport months before the London 2012 Olympic Games.

But it’s also much more than that. It covers the misconceptions that still sadly exist which prevent participation among the Black community and Rebecca hopes it will become a ‘handbook for everybody’.

“I would love to see the swimming community, or at least swimming institutions, kind of embrace the book as a tool for empowerment and education,” said Rebecca, “because I think it is just that – it’s very real.

“It’s very much about my life. It’s not just about race and racism. It is about coming of age.

“It’s also about what it means to be an athlete, specifically a swimmer, so I think there’s something in there for everyone.”

Swimming was very natural to Rebecca.

“For me, swimming has always felt easier than walking,” she said. “I just was always at home in the water.

“I first learned to swim out in Kenya in Lake Victoria and then, more so, in the Indian Ocean on the coast of Kenya.

“Like most children getting into competitive sport, it happens slowly, slowly and then all at once.

“There’s not a moment when you opt in – it just becomes more and more a big part of your life.

“When we moved to South Africa, it stepped up again. I think I still hadn’t seen an indoor pool at that point.

Enduring narrative

“I moved back to the UK when I was 13 and that was really for my swimming. My parents had moved back to Kenya and knew that the resources weren’t there to kind of take me to the next level in the sport.

“So, I went to Plymouth College and sat next to Tom Daley in maths.

“I became double British champion and was ranked first in the world for a short period of time.

“By the end of my career, the professional nature of elite competition had kind of overtaken my love a bit.

“But I still love to swim – and it still feels easier than walking.”

Rebecca believes that the representation of the Black community in aquatics has improved – but she still believes there is a long way to go.

“These Heavy Black Bones, I guess, speaks to this enduring narrative that says that black people can’t swim because their bones are heavier,” said Rebecca, who is the CEO of the 10,000 Interns Foundation, a non-profit organisation that champions underrepresented talent.

“It’s part of racist mythology that has been exclusionary and, I think, perpetrated over many decades. Swimming is still a very, very white sport.

“But it’s also something that the Black community has also kind of had a hand in perpetuating. And, you know, it’s really taken hold, in ways that feel very difficult to get around.

“It’s not just about access or resource or socio-economic background. It’s also about, hair and just a general fear of the water.

“This idea that there’s something physical or physiological that makes Black people less able to swim is probably the thing that you know is most damaging.

“So, yeah, These Heavy Black Bones, I think, tries to speak to that directly. But also, you know, it’s about me and my experience of being the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain and how those racist narratives impacted my life and my swimming career.

“There is more representation in the sport. I definitely see more black and brown bodies on poolside now, especially at the Olympics when representation has been kind of historically, like almost zero.

“I think people are ready to have this conversation.

“If that is investing more in local schools, investing in black and brown people to get through their coaching qualifications or to become officials on poolside.

“I never saw a Black official once my whole swimming career. It’s that lack of representation, that lack of seeing yourself in the sport at any level. I think there was one Black coach who was relatively high up when I was swimming, and that was it.

“Representation is the support that people need. They need people who understand their lived experience and positions of power, who can treat them as a whole individual, an athlete, a woman or a young girl or a person of colour.”

Really challenging

While Rebecca details the negatives she faced on her way to representing her country, she also describes in detail the joy and happiness of being in the pool.

She firmly believes, however, that more support should be available for elite athletes once they retire from their sport.

“Most of the book is about euphoria of the perfect race and kind of chasing that feeling in forever, said Rebecca, who went to Oxford to study fine art after her retirement from swimming.

“I think a lot of ex athletes struggle with this. You think the best thing that I’m ever going do with my life is like what already happened.

“It’s hard to kind of accept that that specific kind of euphoria is over.

“But there are many other things in life that, you know, make you feel as good. It just it takes a while to kind of grow up and get there.

“I went to Oxford and threw myself into another very intense institution and studied all the time.

“It was a really, really hard year but I was very much in a different space and it still was hard to kind of form a different identity.

“I threw myself into the rest of my life quite quickly.

“I do think that that’s another thing that we can do to support athletes is incentivise them to think about life beyond sport and help them to chart a route out of it because I was really lucky.

“I know a lot of people don’t have a great time of exiting the sport and that it can be really, really challenging. There’s not a huge amount of support there.

“I recognise that I was super fortunate and, you know, was fortunate enough to go and have a great education

“But I think more needs to be done to help people out the other side as well.”

As for the six-year-old who drew the picture after her first competitive swim, what would Rebecca say to her or any others dreaming of following in her footsteps?

“It would probably be the same advice that I ended up following,” she said. “I just didn’t realise it.

“Swim as long as love you it and as long as you want to stay in the water.

“But it’s okay when that isn’t the case anymore.”

These Heavy Black Bones by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell is published by Canongate at £18.99

Main picture: Shopé Delano