Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, Edward Kobina Enninful, has recalled how his family fled his motherland Ghana in a coup d'état that witnessed the overthrow of then-president Ignatius Acheampong.
His father, Major Crosby Enninful, a military officer under Acheampong, moved his family - a wife and six children - to the United Kingdom overnight due to the growing insecurity at the time.
"We had to flee from Ghana because my dad was in the military and there was a coup so we had to flee overnight. We came to England and we didn't know where we were. I'd never seen white people before, maybe I've seen a couple. So that was a shock in itself.
"Immigrant families you are thought to work hard, work ten times as hard. I got that sort of discipline from my parents," the Vogue editor detailed how he suffered and climbed to fame by becoming fashion director of British fashion magazine i-D at the age of 17.
In an excerpt from his memoir, Enninful, the fifth of six children recalled how his mother, made dresses for the wife of the president together with some high-profile personalities.
"I spent as much time as I could at my mother’s atelier, where she made dresses and suits for actresses, society ladies and wives of diplomats and heads of state. From 1972 to 1978, before he too was deposed in a coup, the president was Ignatius Acheampong and his wife was one of my mother’s favorite clients. I’d go with her for fittings to the presidential palace, with its high stone walls and air conditioner blasting," he disclosed in his memoir, Edward Enninful Revisits His Childhood in Ghana.
