Jimi and the virtue of courage

Bravery is a curious thing. True bravery is in short supply in this new millennium, and yet the word bravery is bandied about with abandon. Celebs are called ‘brave’ for giving tell-all interviews. Meghan Markle’s televised chat with her billionaire friend Oprah Winfrey was the height of bravery, apparently. Phillip Schofield was hailed as brave for coming out as gay at the age of 58. Rose McGowan titled her self-congratulating memoir Brave. We are so battered by puffed-up claims of bravery that it can be hard to distinguish the real thing from the pretensions of it.

Folajimi Olubunmi-Adewole was brave. If you want to know what true bravery is, look away from the memoir shelves in Waterstone’s and the gushing feature articles in celebrity magazines, and consider what this young man did. Twenty-year-old Jimi, as he was known to his friends and loved ones, jumped into the Thames at midnight on Saturday to help a woman who had fallen in. His friend went in with him. The woman was crying out: ‘Help me, help me, I’m gonna die.’ Jimi turned to his friend and said, ‘We can look for her’, and then threw himself into the pitch-black freezing waters. What happened next was deeply tragic: the woman and Jimi’s friend were rescued by the Met Police’s marine unit, but Jimi died.

Jimi’s act of extraordinary bravery has touched the nation. His father said: ‘He is a very unique and angelic soul and I am proud of him. He is a hero, and always will be.’ What has struck many people about Jimi’s valiant effort to save a stranger’s life is how selfless it was. He didn’t pause to conduct a risk assessment. He didn’t allow the obvious danger of leaping into the Thames at night to distract him from what he thought needed to be done. Instead he put someone else before himself, someone he didn’t even know. He put a stranger’s life-and-death concerns before his own fears and took a risk.

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