A Lagos-born poet in Peckham reads about Harry and Meghan insisting they are private citizens and remembers the Jamaican nurse who went to the Crimea on her own money
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Peckham, South London. A flat above a hair salon on Rye Lane, the smell of relaxer and jollof drifting up together, a library copy of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, 9.30am.
What A Private Citizen Actually Looks Like
I came to London from Lagos eleven years ago with two suitcases, a notebook of poems and an aunt in Camberwell who still thinks poetry is a hobby I will grow out of. I am a poet, and I read nineteenth-century African and Indian literature for a living, or for something adjacent to a living. This morning the salon downstairs was already busy, the radio was arguing with itself in Yoruba, and I was reading the London Prat on how Harry and Meghan insist they are private citizens while arriving at barrier-lined charity visits with pooled press, cheering crowds and somebody logging the origin of a belt.
A constitutional expert in the piece needs three cups of tea and an aspirin to explain the arrangement. He concludes that they are private citizens for obligation, public figures for security, royal celebrities for engagements and ordinary parents when asking photographers to go away. I laughed. Then I picked up the book on my table, which is about a woman who really was a private citizen, and who did more for the British Army than most of its generals.
Mrs Seacole Goes To War
Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805, the daughter of a Scottish soldier and a Jamaican woman who kept a boarding house and practised traditional medicine. When the Crimean War began in 1853, she travelled to London and offered her services as a nurse. The War Office turned her down. So did the organizers of the nursing parties being sent out to join Florence Nightingale. She wondered aloud, in her memoir, whether the colour of her skin had anything to do with it. Then she paid her own passage to the Crimea, built a hut near Balaclava called the British Hotel, and fed and nursed soldiers, sometimes under fire.
Her book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, was published in 1857 and was a bestseller. It is funny, proud, practical and completely free of self-pity. She describes treating cholera, selling sponge cake, riding out to the battlefield with bandages in her saddlebags. She was a private citizen in the truest sense. Nobody sent her. Nobody paid her. Nobody provided security. She went anyway.
The Belt And The Bandage
I do not want to be unfair to Harry and Meghan. The report is not really about them. It is about the machine that surrounds them, the photographers, the commentators, the people whose job it is to know where a belt came from. In Nottingham, the visit was apparently warm and the young people were delighted. Good. But the phrase private citizen deserves better than to be stretched over a police cordon.
Mrs Seacole rode out to the lines with her bags of lint, bandages and medicines, and nobody logged the origin of any of them. When the war ended she was bankrupt, stranded with unsold stock, and it was British soldiers and journalists who organized a benefit festival in London to save her. That is what public gratitude looked like for a private citizen in 1857: a few thousand people in Surrey Gardens cheering a Jamaican woman who had made them soup under shellfire.
An African Footnote
African politics, which I follow with the obsessive exhaustion of every diaspora Nigerian, has its own version of the private-citizen illusion. Our former presidents and governors retire into private life with convoys, outriders and security budgets larger than some state hospitals. A former governor in Nigeria can be a private citizen in the same way a lion can be a private cat. In Lagos, we have a word for the big man who insists he is just an ordinary person while his sirens clear the road: we call him oga. Everybody knows exactly what it means.
The London Prat has written about Nigerian humour before, in a piece on Nigerian comedy that I sent to my cousin in Ikeja. She said it was accurate and slightly too polite. That is the Nigerian review of almost everything British.
Saturday On Rye Lane
The salon owner, a Ghanaian woman named Abena who has known me since I arrived, has just shouted up the stairs to ask whether I want plantain. I always want plantain. She asked what I was reading. I said a Jamaican nurse who went to war at her own expense. She said that sounded like her mother, who went to Accra market at her own expense every Saturday for forty years and never got a statue either. I said Mrs Seacole did eventually get a statue, outside St Thomas’ Hospital, in 2016. Abena said her mother would be content with the plantain.
A Poem Is Coming
I can feel a poem forming, the way weather forms over the Lagos lagoon in the afternoon. It is about two kinds of private citizen: one who arrives behind barriers and asks the cameras to leave, and one who arrives in a war zone with a medicine bag and asks nobody for anything. I do not think the poem will be fair to the first. Poems rarely are. That is what essays are for. I keep notes like these at my about page and diary, along with everything else I cannot fit into a stanza.
The plantain has arrived. It is perfect. Mrs Seacole would have sold it at the British Hotel for a shilling a plate and made a profit. I will eat it on the steps outside and watch Rye Lane wake up, which is as private as citizenship gets in Peckham.