Rafiqul Alam obituary

The Guardian

11-04-2025

My father, Rafiqul Alam, who has died aged 97, became a history teacher in Essex after moving to the UK from the Indian subcontinent in the early 1960s.
Later he taught children in London whose first language was not English, before returning for a decade to his homeland to set up and run a primary school in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
Rafiqul was born in Narayanganj, in what was then the British Raj but is now Bangladesh, to Abdul Shamsuzzoha, a teacher and schools inspector, and his wife, Shamsunnissa Begum. Soon after leaving Nabakumar high school in Dhaka, and still a teenager, on a visit to Kolkata he witnessed starvation caused by the Bengal famine. Then came communal riots after partition, and in 1947 he joined the Communist party, a move that saw him jailed without charge on three occasions by the government of the newly formed territory of East Pakistan. He and his comrades protested via a hunger strike and were force fed by prison staff.
Rafiqul married Sultana Banu in 1953, became a pharmaceuticals salesman, tried his hand at exporting fish and making furniture, and then went to Dhaka University, where he gained a history degree followed by a master's. That allowed him to find a civil service job at the Ministry for Social Welfare in Karachi until, in 1961, he moved to London to take an MPhil at the School of Oriental and African Studies (now Soas University of London), while working for British Rail.
His wife and young family joined him in 1962, and on the completion of his studies in 1965, he taught history at St Edward's comprehensive school in Romford, Essex, where he introduced social studies, British constitution and sociology into the curriculum.
In 1979 he left for Nigeria to take a job training teachers there, and on his return in 1981, after a period of unemployment, he was appointed by the London borough of Waltham Forest's English language service to teach children whose first language was not English.
In 1988 he went back to Bangladesh to look after his elderly father and to fulfil his dream of starting a school for primary children there, establishing and running his own Redland school in Dhaka for the next decade. On his retirement he moved back to the UK, where he took on part-time tutoring work with primary schoolchildren in Hertfordshire. He only stopped teaching altogether around 2009 to care for Sultana, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. She died in 2018.
In 2019 Rafiqul embarked on his last educational adventure when he took part in the intergenerational dementia project at Downshall primary school in east London, which brings together older adults and young children to improve the quality of life and opportunities for both.
He is survived by three children, Rita, Apu and me, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.