A conversation with YouTuber and girls’ education activist Vee Kativhu
Italian student Chiara Longo interviews YouTuber and girls’ education activist Vee Kativhu. (Courtesy of Chiara Longo)
Vee discusses fighting for every girl’s right to learn, graduating during a pandemic and more.
This time last year, Vee Kativhu was at a crossroads. She had just graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in classical archaeology and ancient history, had her hands full with her popular YouTube channel and was trying to decide if she would accept an offer to a master’s programme in international education policy at Harvard University. Vee knew it would be difficult completing a degree in another country in another time zone during the pandemic — but she has never been one to shy away from a challenge.
“I was looking at all the difficulties and then I was like, wait, let's think about all the positives here,” Vee explains. “Like, you are going to get to study the degree of your dreams. You're going to get to be working in the education space during a pandemic where education was at one of its most vital moments, where a lot of students couldn't be at school, a lot of students had to stay home. … I felt like if you are serious about wanting to be in this education space where you're helping with equality and stuff, you can't shy away just because you might have to stay up a little later to go to classes.”
Vee enrolled in Harvard, often staying up until 3 a.m. to complete her classes. But her hard work paid off and in June Vee graduated with her master’s. She documented the entire journey on her YouTube channel where she posts about tips to take on university, book reviews and conversations with inspiring activists.
Vee graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in classical archaeology and ancient history in 2020 and from Harvard University with a master’s in international education policy in 2021. (Courtesy of Vee Kativhu)
I started following Vee in late 2019 as a source of inspiration. I was initially drawn to her videos because of the strength and determination she demonstrated during her exam sessions and advocacy projects. Her honesty and work for girls’ education gave me hope and inspired me to take even more action on the issues I am passionate about. I love her channel as it gives me a boost of positive energy. Her videos are so different from anyone else’s; she educates and empowers at the same time.
Getting to interview Vee for Assembly was an incredible experience. Our conversation made me feel more inspired, more confident but most of all, more aware of the changes we need to see in the world and how young women can help make them.
Chiara Longo (CL): I was hoping if you could tell me a little about founding your YouTube channel and what initially attracted you to the platform and the world of social media.
Vee Kativhu (VK): Of course. Firstly, thank you so much for having me. I'm so inspired by young people like you and I think you're doing an amazing job. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Now, how did I found my YouTube channel? Well, it began when I went to Oxford. I got there and I just realized that nobody around me was looking like me or sounding like me. It just all didn't feel very fair, because if you're telling me that, you know, this is the space where you're going to have young leaders that are going to come and help you change the world, you're going to produce these incredible right-minded people. But I'm looking around and there's only one kind of person I see. There's a lack of diversity. There's a lack of different schools of thought and different kinds of people. I didn't like that. So for me, I was like, I must start this YouTube channel so that other young people from different backgrounds and different walks of life like myself can watch these videos and be inspired to come and attend places like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Durham, any of these incredible schools, because it just didn't feel very fair. It felt like the information was being held for one group of people, and I didn't like that. So the inspiration came from anger. I'll be honest, I was angry about the lack of diversity, and I felt that I had to do something. So that's where my channel began. And then there were 200 students that subscribed, and 500 subscribed. Then 10,000, 100,000 and now there are over 200,000, which is insane to me, but it just shows the power of young people and how much they want to learn.
CL: I mean I follow your videos and I'm just so impressed by your commitment and by your good, positive energies. What do you hope that the students, particularly Black students and students of colour, feel when they watch your videos?
VK: I really hope that they, especially young Black girls, feel empowered to kind of take ownership of their narrative and not allow society to put them in a box. I hope that a young Black girl that watches my videos feels like: I deserve nothing but the best in this world, and I don't have to hold myself back just because other people don't believe in me. I want her to find her voice. I want her to feel proud of her skin, her background, where she comes from, and to feel like, “Actually this can be a source of empowerment for myself, where I can use my different experiences to kind of bring something new to the table.” Because I think more often than not young Black people from underrepresented backgrounds or young Black and Brown and Asian minority students feel like they have to hide where they come from. Or if they come from an underprivileged background, then that's a bad thing — and it's not a bad thing. This is just where you were born. You can't help that. But what we're going to do is take any of the lemons that life has thrown at us and make that lemonade, turn it the other way so that you can benefit from that and you can make your own narrative. So I hope that when young students of Black and ethnic minority backgrounds are watching my channel, they feel like they feel seen. They feel heard. They feel like they've got the power to do what they want to do. And I'm hoping that I can provide those resources or share the different opportunities and give them the head start that they need. And then they just show up, and show their talent and go and be amazing. So I really hope that students that watch my channel just feel like when they finish watching the video that they can do it, that they are finally being told they can do it.
“I hope that a young Black girl that watches my videos feels like: I deserve nothing but the best in this world, and I don’t have to hold myself back just because other people don’t believe in me.”
CL: You started this motto, "The game is the game and we came to play." How did that concept come about?
VK: Well, I was sitting in my room and I had all of this work to do and it was so difficult. And I was just like, I thought, like giving up. And then I always kind of talk to myself; I always speak to myself. I think my favourite person is myself because I just love having conversations with myself, looking in the mirror, talking out loud. And I was like, “Vee, you can't quit because there's a whole group of people that are counting on you, that you're going to be able to do this. So you've got to keep on going. But what? How do I describe this? What is this?” And I was like, this is just a game. This is a big game that you've got to figure out how to play, because education is not easy, but it's going to help you access the things you want to access in the world. So if you look at education as this game that can give you access to the next levels, then you've just got to. The game is never going to change. It's always going to be the way that it is. So that's where the game is. The game is simply the game and you can't change it. So you just need to be ready to play and just be ready to access each level. And then I just started saying to myself, like, “Oh, the game is the game, the game is the game.” And then eventually I was like, “Oh! And we came to play.” We are here to play this game and to win because everything in my mind has a system like even getting into Oxford, getting into Harvard and accessing amazing universities is all just one big game, just one big system. And if you know the codes to it and you know how to play it, then you can play.
CL: You recently graduated from Harvard. Congratulations! As a young Black woman, what was your experience like attending the traditionally non-Black academic spaces and excelling in them?
VK: Before I started attending Oxford, I had this notion in my mind that, like I said earlier, why shouldn't I have something that I want in life? We all have one life in this world, and surely the aim here is to live it to the fullest. So why shouldn't I have that chance? And if I say I want to take education very seriously, and I'm looking at Oxford, why can't I? If I’ve got the passion, the academic mindset and I've got the grades, then why should that be closed off to me? So when I got to those spaces like Oxford, I was like, OK, this is odd because the lack of diversity was just screaming at me. It was so glaringly obvious and I could tell that traditionally this place was not made for someone like me. And it was hard at first. I'd say it was difficult at first, because you start to wonder, like maybe are they right? Is there a reason why that was ever made for me? Is there a reason why there were not a lot of people like me here? But I think I had to find strength in myself to say, no, you deserve the best in the world.
If you want to be here, you can occupy a space here. And no one and no building, no professor, no one should make you feel otherwise. So I think I'd say it was difficult. And obviously it's difficult for me to talk about Harvard because I didn't get to be there physically. It was via Zoom. So I guess I'm just going to just think that the experience has been the same at Harvard, but I don't really know. But with Oxford, I just kind of challenged it. So it felt strange being in a space where there's not a lot of diversity, and I just don't get why. It just doesn't make sense to me. Why would you not want a diverse student body and have different ideas and different people thinking together to create solutions? To help end things like world hunger, educational inequality, the environmental crisis — why wouldn't you want a massive, diverse group of students? So I think for me, I started to challenge it. It felt odd to be in a space that didn't traditionally want me there, but I kind of fought through.
CL: And I saw that it was really hard to get into Harvard due to the different times you had classes. In this moment, I really understood that if you want to do something, you have to face difficulties.
VK: I don't know if you remember this time last year when I was debating whether or not I should take the offer and I was like, man, it's going to have different time zones. I'm never going to meet my friends in real life! This is going to be so difficult. And I was looking at all the difficulties, and then I was like, “Wait, let's think about all the positives here. You are going to get to study the degree of your dreams. You're going to get to be working in the education space during a pandemic where education was at its one of its most vital moments — where a lot of students couldn't be at school, a lot of students had to stay home. There was domestic abuse happening. There was so much going on that I felt like if you are serious about wanting to be in this education space where you're helping with equality and stuff, you can't shy away just because you might have to stay up a little later to go to classes.” And it felt like there was a little personal sacrifice I had to make in order of actually being involved in something so pivotal in the education space. So for me, it was like a small sacrifice for a greater outcome. And I learned so much and we worked on so many projects to do with girls’ education during that time and helping lots of people around the world in different countries with the pandemic and stuff. So for me, that experience at Harvard was so worthwhile despite it being online.
CL: You care so much about girls getting access to education, to quality education. And when did you first start speaking out about girls' education and why you are so passionate about this big issue?
VK: I was so young when I began, but I just didn't realize what I was doing. I think Malala put it perfectly when she says that her father was a feminist before he knew what the word feminist meant. So I think for me, I was fighting for this before I even knew the extent of what I was doing. And it began for me after I'd taken a trip to Zimbabwe before that. But the moment that I can pinpoint is when I was taking the trip back to my home country in Zimbabwe, and I was talking to my cousins and they were telling me the different things that are in their way just because they're girls. It wasn't just about a lack of money or a lack of resources. It was gender-based. They were like, because I have a girl in the family, I'm expected to stay at home and to have children by the age of 14 and to not have an education. And that was blowing my mind because I just didn't think it was fair. So I decided to take their stories and hear their words and ask them, what would you like done differently? And from those conversations, and from visiting different orphanages where I met girls who couldn't go to school as well, I was like, OK, this is really, really vital, critical and important.
And it's something that I want to put my energies into. And I began doing that. And then I actually learned a lot from Malala because obviously once we got to university together, she was in that space. She's very, very well-versed in that world. So I was learning a lot from her. And now she's realizing, OK, the missions are pretty similar. So I talk to her a lot and it kind of just took on a life of its own, I would say. I began when I was younger based on what I witnessed around me when I was in Zimbabwe, and then it kind of snowballed. And then I was meeting other people like Malala, Yara, different people in my life who are major media activists in this space. And now here we are today. So pretty difficult to answer it, because I honestly can't remember a time when I wasn't concerned about education or speaking about it to someone. But I think obviously it’s getting more public as time goes on.
CL: You have a book coming out on the 2nd of December,
VK: I'm so excited!
CL: I opened the phone up and saw your Instagram and I was like, oh my God, she did that. I was so excited, I preordered it, don't worry. So of course you can't spoil it, but what can readers expect from this book?
VK: Oh my goodness, I'm so nervous because honestly, I think this is definitely the biggest thing I've ever done in my life. I wanted to write a book for so long, so the fact that it's actually coming to life is crazy. I mean, the whole thing is written now. So it's all there. I just need to proofread it, have a few of my friends read it. I'll be sending a massive copy to Malala soon and she'll be giving her feedback, and I just can't wait to see how that goes. But writing the book has been an amazing experience because I've gotten to be able to talk about my own personal experiences I've never, ever spoken about before on my own — which was very difficult because you're talking about things that are very trauma-based, talking about things that were difficult and things I just hadn't processed before. But now I look back, I realize that's what got me to the place that I'm at now. Even speaking about the death of my father, which I mean, I'm more open about that now, but I just never spoke about that before.
Now I’m speaking about that in the book and how that's affected me and how that got me to the space that I was, because everything leads to each other, everything's connected: All of those early life events like what happened in Zimbabwe, why my mom had moved to England and I was still in Zimbabwe for four years. I was apart from her and it was just all so, so difficult. I speak about those moments, but then talk about how I took those sad moments and made them something positive and made that whole “turning lemons into lemonade” kind of thing. In the book, you can expect to see things about dealing with rejection. So I talk openly about the different rejections that I faced and how I overcame them and how it was all directed. Every chapter ends with the practical steps. So you start off with me giving a little anecdote about what happened to me or like how I’ve gotten to the place where I'm at, and then I talk about the lesson I learned from it and then talk about practically how someone else in a similar situation in 2021 or 2022 or whatever can actually, you know, get out of it or flip it or turn it into something that they can actually benefit from or use. Every single chapter is full of advice, resources. I share the different things that I listen to: the podcast I listen to, the people who I get advice from, how I've got my empowerment circle or how I set goals.
There's a whole chapter dedicated to how I set my goals and make sure that I stay on top of them, and it's got everything from goal-setting to how to handle your money. No one ever spoke to me about that either. How do you make sure you're spending your money wisely, in a way that you can make it go further than what it is? And talking about how to have healthy relationships with your friends and family and to make sure you're not dimming yourself down to make other people feel better, and how to be a high achiever but not isolate yourself from other people who might not understand the world you’re in, or how to find your purpose. We talk about that at great length, how to find the things you're passionate about and how to become an activist for something or an advocate for something and to do it safely and to do it so that you're not putting too much strain on yourself. A whole bunch is all about self-empowerment. It's all about self-empowerment and how to just live your best authentic and happy life and just be yourself.
CL: I have the last question for you. What is something you wish you had known before starting university?
VK: Something I wish I had known was to believe in myself more. I just didn't have the strength and confidence that I have now. It's great that I've discovered it now through different life lessons, but I wish I'd had it when I was like 14 or 13 or 12 because, my God, I can't even imagine what I could have done by now if I had just seen myself the way that I see myself now. I would say, believe in yourself when you get in that costume. Don’t be afraid to raise your hand. Don't be afraid to write essays on things you care about. Don't be afraid to take some risks in pushing forward what you want people to hear from you. Don't shy away and hide in the back of the room, because this is your education. It’s going to empower you so much, so you've got to take control of that, take ownership, ask for help. Don't be afraid to ask your professors, your teachers for help, because people often think, “I'm going to sound stupid if I ask for help,” or no one's going to care and you don't even know what's in place that could help you. If you're struggling financially or you're struggling mentally, emotionally, reach out to someone. There are different bodies that are there that can actually help and are literally created to help the situation. Relieve yourself, ask for help and take ownership of your education, because this is something that's going to be yours for life.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Read more
