EUNICE Olumide has crammed a lot into her life so far. A huge amount of work, a wide range of achievements and a lot of contradictions.
She’s harnessed the lessons from growing up in one of Edinburgh’s most challenging areas to help young people conquer the limitations of poverty; she’s made a major impact on the world of fashion despite initially having zero interest in clothes; she’s passionate about the inspiring power of music but kept her own musical life quiet for years.
Next month, she’s involved in a number of shows at the [[Edinburgh]] Fringe, including screenings of her debut documentary Secret Lives: The Untold Story Of British Hip-Hop, which she directed and produced. The film is also being shown at the Fringe by the Sea in North Berwick.
She also has a fashion and sustainability event – Why Do You Wear What You Wear? – at the Fringe. She wrote a book about fashion in 2018, has contributed anonymously to seminal hip-hop records and is planning to release the first album of music under her own name next year.
She’s also a V&A Dundee design champion, an actress, a masters graduate and was awarded an Open University honorary degree.
As if all that isn’t enough, she’s spent years working with a range of charities, many aimed at inspiring young people to build better lives. If there is a common thread running through all her work, it is a determination to inspire and motivate people from under-privileged areas and give them a voice.
Eunice Olumide’s story begins on the streets of Wester Hailes, an area on the outskirts of Edinburgh which has long been afflicted by social deprivation. It was one of the five most deprived areas of Scotland in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) published in 2020.
“I just grew up in a really strange time in Scotland where it was nuts,” Olumide tells me. “Living in a council estate was kind of fun in a weird way, but it was like Lord Of The Flies. In those days, people would meet from one scheme and have a pagger, we’d call it. A fight in a big field.
“It was like a battlefield and I’d go down there on my scooter and just whiz through everyone watching it in what seemed slow motion. I remember growing up around loads of people with really serious drug and alcohol dependency issues.”
Olumide has talked before about the pressures of growing up as one of the very few black children in her community. Her strict mother made sure she didn’t go off the rails herself.
She had been born in Scotland after her parents had moved here from Nigeria when her father accepted a posting to Rosyth with the British navy. She later moved to Wester Hailes.
“My mum was a hardcore African parent,” she says. “You could get away with nothing. You couldn’t sneak out the house. She was really strict, which was a lifesaver.
“I’m first generation born in Scotland, and so when I was in my house, everything would change. The food would change, the language would change, the sense of humour.
“And I was always travelling to West Africa from a really young age and remember trying to work out why I could just pick fruit there and eat it, but when I was in Scotland, I had to pay money for it. I remember being bamboozled by that.”
Instead of being drawn into a culture of drink and drugs like many of her contemporaries, she became involved with various charities helping young people who had been attracted to that lifestyle.
“Coming from that kind of background, that kind of a circle of deprivation, you can feel like there’s nowhere else for you to go,” she says.
“I think that people perceive Edinburgh as a place where there is no danger and no bad things happening, which is not true. I would probably say Edinburgh is worse [than Glasgow], because the city’s housing schemes are more isolated and there is a stronger sense of community in Glasgow.”
She came to see hip-hop as a way of reaching and teaching the young people from her community.
“I felt it had a remarkable way of galvanising young people. And when you’re in a situation where people feel like they don’t count, or they’re not important in society, or don’t have a good example or support at home, I felt this music was a means to help people in my community.
“Hip-hop was the music of my generation. To me, it was literally about saving people’s lives. It was something that we could all do that would take our minds off our reality.
“There are different aspects of hip-hop culture. There’s the graffiti aspect, which has been widely adopted worldwide by people who are not into hip-hop and by people who are.
“You’ve got the breakdancing, because the dance was a huge part of the culture when it was invented in New York City. Then there is the rap, which is the poetry of it.
“But what I tend to find is that outside of the Afro-Caribbean community, another element is always erased. That missing element is consciousness.
"When you study the history of hip-hop, it was a cultural art form that was created by Afro-Caribbean people predominantly in the United States of America, by black people who were coming out of the Nixon era and the war on drugs, who were coming out of almost apartheid and getting their civil rights. It was also a peaceful means of protest against police brutality.
“It was in opposition to the lifestyle of drugs and illegality. It was probably the only thing other than the church that really spoke to people in a positive way, taking them away from dangerous lifestyles.
“But pretty much after the 1990s, that [element] kind of got hijacked. Rap became extremely commercial, and the focus was more on gangsterism and the glorification of material possessions and the consciousness was lost.”
Olumide sees parallels between the wider adoption of hip-hop and elements of traditional Scottish culture.
“It’s a colonisation and the loss of folklore … this idea that it doesn’t matter, because it’s not written down. With a lot of Afro-Caribbean cultural institutions or creations, they’re not seen as Afro-Caribbean. They’re seen as just something that anyone can use in the same way that I could do with Scottish dancing or playing the bagpipes.
“I personally think – and I’m not forcing this on anyone, or saying that that other people are wrong – that if I want to play the bagpipes or if I want to do Scottish traditional dancing it makes sense that I should have some understanding and knowledge of the culture of Scotland, and possibly respect for the history of this dance or this instrument, and an understanding of what it means. I think that’s quite important, but it’s not in the world that we live in today.”
Olumide got involved in collaborations with a wide range of hip-hop and reggae artists, including Roots Manuva, Mos Def and Damian Marley. She also teamed up with Glasgow reggae and dub outfit Mungo’s Hi Fi on an album which earned a place in a list of the seminal albums in the 50 years of hip-hop, the only Scottish album mentioned. While she was making music anonymously, she was also carving out a reputation in a very different world as one of Britain’s top models, walking global catwalks for the top designers and appearing in the pages of the world’s most glamorous magazines.
"I was never into fashion. I was definitely not a girl who wore make-up or was particularly girly. I loved sports … football, basketball and athletics. I didn’t like fashion until I found a new appreciation for it. What I do like about it is that it is creating art.
“I just used to get scouted a lot everywhere I went. And eventually, when I was around 15, I was like, ‘oh, give it a go’. Honestly, it was so simplistic when I was really young. I worked in this luxury high-end store but eventually I thought it didn’t make sense.
“If I worked in the shop, I needed to get dressed up and wear makeup and stand for eight hours a day. I earned less money than I did at a fashion show where I only had to dress up for a few hours that day.”
It must have been difficult reconciling the glamorous world of fashion with the more “roots” world of conscious hip-hop and reggae, where Olumide says she would very consciously “dress in the most unattractive ways possible” as an antidote to the way many women are portrayed in the more commercial world of successful hip-hop, which she describes as ‘’hypersexualised’’.
She kept the two worlds apart because she believes music should be more about talent than appearance. “The fashion industry is one where I can understand if someone says, ‘I want this type of look, this specific look, this is my customer … so I need someone that looks like this.’
“Whereas with music, there has traditionally been quite a strong sense of discrimination. You could look at any kind of pop music, standards for females are totally different than for men. Males can get away with wearing anything and doing anything, whereas females have to be a certain size, have a certain look.
“For me, music was never something to make money with. It was always something that I really cared about and something that I felt helped people. I didn’t really want to do anything that would change that even if it meant turning down deals, very good deals, which people think is crazy. They’re like, ‘if you could be a multi-millionaire and be a British Rihanna, why would you not do that?’ I love talents like Rihanna but do you think the world needs more of that?
"That's not to criticise you if you’re a female and you want to use your body ... that’s nothing to do with me. I believe in free will. But for me personally, I just felt like there were too many examples of that.
“There has only been one properly successful female rapper who was conscious, and that was Lauryn Hill. Look at the abuse and cancellation she’s had to put up with in her career.
“People tell me that I’ve been way ahead of my time, that I’m doing stuff when no-one else is doing it, and it’s just too much for them, they just can’t handle it. Life is about timing, you know, and you could be the best thing in the world, but if people are not ready, there’s not much you can do about it.”
Olumide’s determination to campaign for social awareness is also apparent in her fashion work. which has embraced sustainability campaigns, a tribute to the Windrush generation at London Fashion Week and even a much-praised book, How To Get Into Fashion.
“Even in my fashion career, I only work with brands that I really believe in, with that kind of social justice background,” she says. “All the work I do is influenced by my core beliefs.”
But all this activism comes with a price tag. “I think most successful artists avoid saying anything remotely political,” she said. “Most people are not going to do or say anything which could result in them losing an income. Artists that really stand for things and have a cause can lose their label, they can lose their deal. They get dropped by agents.
“In the world we live in today, it’s OK to make music that’s not in-depth, music that is more about just enjoying the moment and hedonism. That is acceptable in society. It’s not really acceptable to talk about serious political issues. People don’t really like it. If you don’t do anything that rocks the boat or stand for anything, you’re likely to become much more successful. I really have suffered in my career ... you do when you actually stand for something.”
Other factors have also made life difficult on occasion. There aren’t many Scottish rappers and even fewer of those are women. And Olumide has also faced racism.
“When I started booking concerts, and I brought everyone from Busta Rhymes to Coolio to Scotland, people used to rip down my posters and give me abuse like the N word and ‘go back home to your own country’. That really affected me, mentally and physically. It was really intense. It was like, you’re Scottish, you’re a female, you’re Afro-Caribbean … I basically had all the things.”
She’s seen big changes in Scotland over the years. “Scotland, 20, 30 years ago, was totally different to how it is now. In terms of supporting people from difficult backgrounds, or issues of race and racism, or equality, I’m quite proud of where Scotland is now. It is actually a leader in Western society for how to do things properly.
“When you look at geopolitics, and you look at the reality of some of the actions larger nations are engaging in, I don’t think that those are the same values or the same agendas that most Scottish people are interested in or want to be involved in. I think we’re living at a certain time where there’s some really serious political issues.
“It could be argued that the world might be going into a third world war. When you’re a nation that doesn’t have sovereignty, you don’t have control over certain things. Scotland is such a small country that it’s not in its interest to be in a situation where it can’t take actions that benefit its people.
“If someone says to me, ‘do you think Scotland could be independent?’ I say of course it can. Why could it not?”
As for the future, there is no sign of her easing off on that work any time soon. “I feel like I’m operating at about 10% of my potential and always have been. I’ve never really felt like I’ve had enough opportunity to kind of actually show how much I have to give and share.
“But I’m now old enough to say: If no-one else wants to allow me to demonstrate and show what I can do, then I’ll just do it on my own.
“It’s not necessarily that I always want to do everything on my own. It’s more that I’m not going to wait for people to give me opportunities.
“If I’ve worked hard enough and I’m experienced and professional enough to do a job, then I’ll just do it. I don’t really believe in kind of sitting around waiting.”
Olumide's shows are below:
