A visit to her parents' Yemeni homeland taught TV presenter Ella Al-Shamahi how to live with risk
15 December 2020 • 3:40pm
Ella Al-Shamahi dreams of returning to Yemen
My parents emigrated to Birmingham from Yemen before I was born, and Yemeni culture was constantly on the agenda. We’ve always eaten Yemeni food and even my nan, who is white and from Liverpool, has adopted a kind of Yemeni-ness, so I grew up feeling as much Yemeni as I did British.
Apart from the odd summer visit, I’d never explored the country properly until my mother and a group of her friends – some Yemeni, some not – decided it was time to embark on a crazy road trip. I was about 22 at the time and Yemen was on the Foreign Office’s risk list as kidnappings were rife, so 10 to 15 of us – friends, family and my ex-husband – set off in convoy in a minibus and a hire car. All of the Yemenis in the group were like, “We’re going to show you our ancestral homeland,” and our parents said, “Good, because we need to show you your ancestral homeland.”