Luka Gakić

Luka Gakić was born in 1985 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and came to London in 1992.  He talks about going to Harrow and Oxford and about how being a refugee was part of what drove him.  

Listen to Luka (mp3, 672kb)

Transcript

'I suppose I’m doing some kind of amateur psychoanalysis on my childhood self here, but I suppose I saw myself as a bit of an underdog, in a never ending game of football. And I suppose, so I’d always try my best, and I had a, I still do have a real pride in where I come from, where I came from.

'And it was actually, funnily enough, yeah, a real stimulating factor is, was and still is, the variety of bad press that Bosnia and Serbia and Croatia got. I think that kind of really spurred me on to show, not everyone but I just wanted to show people around me that not all Serbs are animals, not all Croatians are fascists, you know, not all Bosnians are -. That I suppose, again subconsciously, and maybe even more, more than subconsciously I think, that more prominently than other things, meant that I was, I tried to be as well behaved as possible, as reasonable as possible. And I think this was facilitated by a very good early upbringing when I was in Sarajevo…

'So yeah, I think I was just lucky. But I felt, yeah, I suppose, an underdog in an endless football match is probably a good. I don’t feel like that anymore. I think that’s one thing that’s changed remarkably, most definitely in the last three years, maybe two years. But I suppose on some level, yeah I felt I had something to prove. Not for myself but from the countries that I came from. And that made it easier for me to go the extra mile, I had more of an incentive.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit