Antoinette Fernandez’ path into politics was the opposite of the rags-to-riches experience many of her peers had. As the daughter of the Queen Mother of Lagos and her diplomat husband, the Nigerian-born writer, activist and newly-elected Green Party candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington had a privileged upbringing, boarding at Millfield School in Somerset before a master’s degree at the London Film School and starting out as a film director.
Fernandez’ father Oloye Antonio Oladeinde Fernandez — the late business magnate and UN ambassador, once considered one of the richest men in Africa — was helping to fund her creative career through a trust at the time, but became involved in a public feud and asked Fernandez to take his side in newspaper interviews. She refused and “literally, overnight, got cut off” from the family fortune at the age of 31. “I was no longer able to afford to be a film director, because you need money for that, and I suddenly became someone who desperately needed a job,” she tells me now, 15 years on.
