.png){kind=small}
.png)
Silver Oshobule Ee
Updated: 4 hours ago
Identity Ambition and a New Generation of Black British Heritage in Medway
TENS-2026-010 | 10 Black Voices of Medway 2026
Silver Oshobule Ee brings a younger perspective to TENS through a conversation about mixed-race identity, sport and the future.
Speaking with Michi Masumi at twenty, he reflects on growing up in Medway and on the different sense of possibility he experiences in London.
He also discusses competitive weightlifting and engineering studies.
These subjects belong together within his account.
Questions about belonging are part of a life that also includes training, family support, friendships and decisions about the work he hopes to do.
Growing up in Medway
Silver describes his experience with qualification and care. There were difficulties, particularly around fitting into different social groups, but there were also parents and older siblings who helped prepare him for life. He does not present his childhood as wholly negative or claim that everyone around him behaved in the same way.
Being mixed race is central to how he explains some of those difficulties. He reflects on being read differently from his siblings because of skin tone and appearance. Other people's assumptions do not always correspond with how he understands his own family background.
This creates a complicated relationship with visibility. A person may encounter fewer assumptions in one situation while also finding that an important part of their identity goes unrecognised. Silver's account allows both experiences to remain present without requiring a simple conclusion about whether being seen in a particular way is always easier.
Different places and different possibilities
London provides a point of comparison. Silver has extended family there and has spent time visiting them. As a young adult, he also experiences the city through social life and going out. He describes a different scale of diversity and a wider range of people and cultural representation.
These comparisons are his observations from moving between places. They do not establish that every London setting is inclusive or that every part of Medway is the same. What they show is how surroundings can affect a person's sense of ease and the availability of people with whom they feel a connection.
He also recognises that Medway has changed since his earlier school years. The conversation leaves room for that movement. A local heritage record can preserve someone's experience at a particular point without fixing the place permanently within that description.
Beginning weightlifting
Sport offers another strand of his story. Silver's interview summary records that he began Olympic weightlifting at eleven and later competed at national and international levels.
The sport became a significant commitment across his adolescence and into early adulthood. In the interview material, he describes appearances at European and World competitions, British championship successes and age or weight-category records.
These achievements are reported from his account; this article does not add competition totals or rankings from unrelated online profiles. His experience matters beyond the list of results. A sustained sporting practice involves training, responding to setbacks and learning to work with other people. The record gives Silver space to explain the relationships around that work rather than presenting him only through medals.
Family and coaching relationships
Silver credits family and coaches as important sources of support. His summary names Made Slow. Weightlifting, while the conversation also reflects on how well a coach can come to understand an athlete. Communication may become easier when people have spent a long time working together.
He notices that a newer coaching relationship can require more explanation. Someone who knows him well may understand signals that another coach would need him to put into words. That observation offers a practical view of sporting support: trust is developed through familiarity and communication, not simply through the presence of an expert.
The conversation also mentions injury. It is acknowledged here as part of the experience of training, without treating a recorded health detail as a permanent description of his condition. Sporting life includes periods when plans have to respond to the body rather than to ambition alone.
Engineering and the next stage
Alongside sport, Silver is studying engineering. The interview summary records an interest in automotive engineering and applications for placement opportunities.
His future is therefore being considered through more than one route. An athlete can also be a student preparing for a profession with its own demands and possibilities.
Michi raises possible diversity initiatives within motorsport during the conversation. This is a suggestion made in the interview, not evidence of an offer, affiliation or confirmed career destination.
Keeping that distinction allows the record to preserve aspiration without turning it into an achievement that has not happened. His account captures a stage of life in which important decisions are still open.
Heritage does not have to wait until someone has completed a career before recognising their experience. Recording a young adult's perspective preserves what they understand now and what they hope might become possible.
Being heard on his own terms
When discussing wider concerns, Silver's summary emphasises ethics, kindness and openness. His reflections suggest a wish for generations to understand one another more carefully. They also return the conversation to the conditions that allow a young person to feel accepted and to develop.
Michi shares some of her own experiences of mixed heritage during the interview, creating a conversation across generations. Those experiences remain hers; they are not substituted for Silver's. The value of the exchange lies partly in the differences between them and in the opportunity to listen across those differences.
Within TENS, Silver's record joins Medway's present to its future. His story includes uncertainty as well as accomplishment, local attachment as well as criticism, and personal ambition alongside the relationships supporting it. It preserves a young resident's voice while his life continues to develop, allowing future readers to encounter him as a person with several interests and possibilities.
His inclusion also broadens the timescale of the collection. Alongside accounts looking back over decades, a young adult describes memories that are still close and ambitions whose outcomes remain unknown. Future readers may recognise changes that Silver cannot yet see. Preserving his perspective now means those readers can hear what mattered at this stage, including the important personal questions he was asking, rather than encountering only a later summary shaped by whatever happened next.
About this collection
An edited account based on the supplied oral-history transcript extract and interview summary. Personal recollections are attributed to the narrator; this article is not a verbatim transcript.
Supported by the Medway Heritage Place Project, with funding from Medway Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. With thanks to National Lottery players.
Interview, editorial adaptation and project direction by Michi Masumi — Anthropology, Art & AI. Published through the Benjamin Zephaniah Digital Archives & Library, an initiative led by Michi Masumi. Portrait photography by Michi Masumi unless otherwise credited; Leslie Haynes family photographs supplied through Russell Haynes, with original photographers credited where known.
Copyright © Michi Masumi 2026. All rights reserved. Copyright in individual contributions and third-party material remains with the respective rights holders.
Comments