“Me as a person, as a human being. I believe I have the choice to be who I want to be. And that’s how I’ve lived my life.”
TRQ: Michele Aboro, Born July 17, 1967
Professional boxer of Nigerian descent, Michele Aboro was born in Hammersmith, West London, UK on July 17, 1967. At the age of two, she moved to Peckham, in South London, after her parents separated.
As Aboro describes, “[Peckham] was quite a rough area but growing up there, I got used to it. It was in the newspapers for being a no-go area. The police didn’t even want to go there. But I found it a really tight-knit family community. You knew everybody and everybody knew you and looked out for you, so I had a wonderful childhood there.”
From an early age, Aboro participated in combat sports like kickboxing and Muay Thai. Even though it was illegal for females to be boxers at the time, she secretly trained in boxing to gain an advantage over her kickboxing opponents. This contributed to her winning one European, three world, and five British kickboxing world titles.
Aboro explained to the Global Times, “To me, combat sport is like a chess game. It’s about out-smarting your opponent, it’s not about strength. It’s about accuracy and technique.”
On March 4, 1995, Aboro was finally able to launch her professional boxing career with a string of first-round knockouts. In fact, Aboro retired from her boxing career in 2002 as an undefeated Women’s International Boxing Federation Super Bantamweight champion. She fought and defeated world champions like Daisy Lang, Brigitte Pastor, Galina Gumliiska, Eva Jones and Kelsey Jeffries.
Aboro has explained that she knew that she was a lesbian from the age of four or five, when she had a “play girlfriend.”
As she once explained, “We used to kiss each other. It was very innocent and sweet but it was very genuine, too. I still have contact with her today.”
It was only at the age of 13 did Aboro consider the potential risk in living openly as a lesbian, when a lesbian couple moved into her neighborhood. “It could be a bad thing that you could get into trouble because of it, because of loving somebody of your own sex. But before that, I never heard anyone talk about it or put it down.”
After she retired from combat sports in 2002, Aboro went back to school to study sound engineering. Beginning a career in the music industry was a challenge, she found.
“This really taught me how to serve other people. For 20 years I competed at the very top of professional sport [where] people looked after me. Monitoring the sound on stage and in concert halls was very down to the ground. I looked after people. It was a total turnaround of roles,” she says.
Successfully navigating the adjustment, Aboro went on to work with The White Stripes, Amy Winehouse, Antony and the Johnsons and other well known musical acts.
In 2009 Aboro moved to Shanghai and co-founded a boxing gym, the Aboro Academy. She trains boxers in a system that brings the mind and body into cooperation.
In 2012, she was diagnosed with cancer, and a year later she co-founded the Aboro Foundation with her partner Masca Yuen, a photographer, in order to provide health and nutrition education to young people.
Aboro and Yuen married in 2016, and had a daughter soon after. In 2019, Aboro’s journey from her early life in London to her life in Shanghai was the subject a documentary film by Dalton Lai.
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