Ian Burrell, The Independent (UK)
- By comparison with the rich heritage of Saskia Nava, who weighed in at 6lbs 13oz at London’s Royal Free Hospital last month, Barack Obama’s mixed ancestry appears so mundane that it might struggle to arouse the interest of producers on Who Do You Think You Are?
Young Saskia, like her four-year-old sister Cassima, is a mix of Pakistani and Barbadian, indigenous South American, African-Mexican, Austrian and Dutch. Her grandparents followed a spectrum of faiths: Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish Theosophist.
Yet these sisters, light brown in complexion, fit in easily among the growing mixed-race population in modern Britain. “In Cassima’s school, I think mixed-race kids are almost in the majority,” says their father, Orson Nava, 42, a lecturer and film-maker who lives with his partner, Jreena Greene, in Hackney, east London. “It’s more and more the norm, and I don’t think it surprises anyone that someone is mixed race these days.”
