Princess Anne declines invitation to learn how to rap
The Princess Royal was offered the chance to learn how to rap as a teacher who is using lyrics to help “prevent social tragedies” was made an MBE.
The offer came from Bhishma Asare, 34, who formed Rap Therapy as a way to teach young people to be creative and positively express themselves through rap.
He was honoured for services to education and mental health awareness at a ceremony at St James's Palace yesterday (pictured).
Mr Asare, who is an English teacher at the Royal Russell School in Croydon and has been a long-time rapper, said: “I was explaining the process and saying that we get children to write about a specific emotion, to explicitly mention that emotion so they can decipher those feelings.
“Then I said to her 'maybe I could teach you to rap?'
“She said she used to sing and that is about it.”
He added: “She kind of declined and said her time is up.”
Mr Asare said rap is a popular and powerful tool that helps people to communicate and express themselves.
Since 2018, the plan has been “to grow and reach as many children as possible” and “I feel like this MBE is for me but I also feel that it is for the community that I serve”.
He said: “I think one of the best things about the MBE is that it gets us in spaces to have discussions where we would not necessarily have been able to have got into those spaces.
"The overall mission is to help prevent social tragedies – things like ending up in mental health institutes, in prisons, not having the right outlets for expressions or even ending up dead sometimes, or in gangs.”