Childhood: And we were sent away

Parental Angst Versus Child Welfare

I observed two news stories from afar until I found myself commenting on a Facebook post, to which the author suggested my comment should be an essay.

Previously, I had written about my parents’ decision to send me to secondary boarding school after the cloistered bubble of an international primary school education. I will not dwell on that matter, but there are many facets to not being born and raised within the traditions, culture, and lands of one’s parents’ birth.

Blog - Childhood: When Parents Think They Know Best

For that, there was a term coined: Third-Culture Kids. This comes with many connotations, including the conflicts of environments, the anxiety and angst of our parents, the issues of not finding belonging in any place, and all the attendant psychological challenges that are somewhat ignored because our parents assume time will eventually resolve things and make everything work.

Send Them Home to Learn 

What bothers ethnic minority parents today is what might happen to their kids in the UK, where I am somewhat more familiar with the situation, and in the Americas. The tendency among parents who have the means is to extricate their kids from abroad and place them in the sometimes-harsh environments of their home countries, usually in West Africa, where they hope to address the lapses in discipline, educational attainment, purpose, and character that they have observed in or around their children.

Recently, a child took his parents to court to compel them to return him to the UK after he was apparently deceived into going to Ghana to see a sick relative. We all have variations of the same plot. He lost his case, the judge empathising but ultimately siding with the parents. [BBC News: Son Loses Case Against Parents Over Move to Africa]

Continuing with the narrative, some men have come forward to share their own stories about being sent home and how, in hindsight, it saved them. It probably did save all of us, one way or the other. However, it is never comfortable during that absence from what the kids call home. [BBC News: I Was Duped Into Leaving London for School in Ghana - But It Saved Me]

Before I share my comment, many kids have been brought up in the UK and the US and have thrived; this is great credit to their parents and communities that nurtured them. All these stories need to be told.

My Facebook Comment 

I suppose this is another aspect of split upbringing that is rarely discussed.

We returned to Nigeria when I was hardly six years old; however, because I was with my parents, I had the pleasure of attending primary schools filled with foreign-looking but Nigerian-born schoolmates, while many of us black kids were foreign-born.

It was the secondary boarding experience that was brutal, but I survived, despite the lasting scars of that environment.

You eventually become streetwise without losing the kind of daring that some people regularly said we Ajebotas [Kids who eat bread and butter rather than local fare; a pejorative term for lacking experience in local customs.] have.

The longstanding benefit of my early education and experiences in Nigeria meant building resilience, grit, and, mostly, self-esteem, while retaining the precocity I always had.

Upon my return to the UK, my blackness was always a part of me; no one could racially abuse me and get the upper hand, as I had a better retort, coupled with wit.

Escaping the race and deprivation politics of the inner cities and suburbs, which would have found me in Walsall and Birmingham in the 1970s and well into the 1980s, meant I never had the sometimes-invisible baggage or chip-on-the-shoulder that affected ethnic minority kids who never left.

I left Nigeria with just an OND and built an IT career that was earning top rates by the mid-1990s, before the extraordinary fortune of being invited to pursue a master’s degree after providing a character reference for a friend.

Moreover, unlike the scolding in Nigeria that implied one wouldn’t amount to anything and spurred you on, in England at that time, it was a limit on your horizons, pushing you towards low achievement and menial roles.

My parents left after qualifying in their respective professions; even though my dad placed third overall in his accountancy finals, his colleagues suggested that they never thought he was that bright, instead of congratulating him on his success.

I assume they both decided that the England of Enoch Powell, whom my father once challenged in a pub, was not a suitable place for them or for their boy—and the children that came after me.

Now, each experience is different; I cannot suggest that any of these actions are in the best interests of any child, but having the agency to intervene when you see things going awry is a privilege of opportunity that many do not have.

I even had my own personal intervention; after a relationship breakup in 1999 left me lost and listless, I packed my bags and started anew in the Netherlands, where I remained for almost 13 years.

Our parents mean well; whether they were right is another conversation altogether.

I cannot argue against being immersed in a totally different culture; it presents opportunities that we often fail to fully appreciate until later in life, as the men have suggested in the article.

Childhood: When parents think they know best

Classic inadvertent abandonment

I happened upon a Facebook status at the end of last year, where there was a discussion about some parents sending their foreign-born kids back to Nigeria to apparently teach the kids discipline and resilience along with avoiding any possibility of their kids being dragged into inner city issues like drugs, gangs, and crime.

After reading some of the comments one especially of a parent who had successfully reared kids in America and could not countenance the idea of sending their children into the care of strangers, be they relations, paid guardians, or strict/conservative boarding schools, I offered a perspective of my own experience.

The lifelong consequence

Imagine being sent from a private primary school environment with a majority international pupillage in Kaduna to a boarding school in Sagamu, Ogun State, at the age of ten. It could have been worse as I had admissions to even more remote places.

The lasting effects of that experience apart from feeling abandoned even if it helped make me both independent and resilient, not that it was unachievable at home, but my parents knew best.

As a child, I was quite outgoing, precocious, and inquisitive, with independent views. I have decidedly refused to associate with old student activities at my secondary school, nor do I retain any enduring friendships from that time. The scars are lifelong.

A rash of parental control

I suffered serious child psychological issues just months before I was shipped off and then in the first term at boarding school, that my parents' closest friends pled with them to bring me back home, those appeals fell on deaf ears, as if they had not learnt from the experiences of being placed with foster parents in England, one of such even starved me, much of that, I have blanked out of my mind.

These seemingly benign parental decisions still affect my relationship with them, and they are both octogenarians. There might be an immediate benefit to fostering your children out to strict environments, but the long-term break in the familial bonds would scarcely ever be repaired.

While there are parents who still think the boarding school experience is a rite of passage that is wholesome and germane to child development, if I was blessed with offspring, I would have totally negated some of the decisions taken as part of my upbringing. I know many parents of my generation did not repeat that vicious cycle.

I speak as someone who will be fifty-nine in less than a week. I charted my own course and chose what was good for me in the scheme of things. Some memories are best left unrecalled. [This was drafted before my birthday in December 2024.]

Childhood: How fostering or adoption shaped us

Children assuaging parenting yearning

It is the dichotomy of perception between privilege and deprivation that at this end of viewing things almost allows for the manifest evil of the past to be excused as a function of those times.

What is rarely considered is how singularly or even more certain experiences have shaped character, shifted identity, and quite possibly left one fortunate, there are positives and negatives, both of which need to be explored.

At the onset, after reading about adoptions instigated from the Netherlands for presumed orphans from Bangladesh against whom paperwork suggested tragedy or adversity, the apparently falsified documentation has been exposed as such.

The adoptees are now finding out they have or had parents, siblings, and relationships from which they were extricated for the market satisfaction (it had to have money involved, a kind of transaction that everyone deigns to forget) of the craving for parenting in the West. [The Guardian: The stranger across from me was my sister: how one adoptee uncovered a tragic past]

Every kind of living away from kin

It is in a spectrum, some situations not as bad as others in adoptions, fostering with the extreme case of farming, childminding, care homes, or orphanages, if I were to limit the scope of the options available for caring for children over a generation ago. [The Guardian: ‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?]

The enthusiasm with which I started to write soon was overwhelmed by the gravity of the matter, it cannot be captured in a single story, rather, it is the bringing together of many experiences that can begin to create a picture of what really went on. I decided to press on if only to start a conversation.

The privilege over deprivation construct

I remember a friend on a walk around the shores of the lagoon bordering the University of Lagos saying to me that those of us born abroad just seem to have a daring and boldness that others do not naturally exhibit.

In myself, when I was in Nigeria, I suppose there were exhibitions of precociousness, questioning, challenge, and fearlessness that might have set me apart, at times advantageous, especially in expressing oneself but could be disadvantageous in not understanding norms, values, traditions, or the culture.

“As an adoptee you often hear, ‘You’re lucky, now you have a good life.’ But you cannot really compare the two,” says Kana. “In one sense I feel lucky that I have the best of both worlds. But nothing makes up for the loss you had to endure. Because I lost my family and my real identity.” Kana Verheul in the article.

My father would say, “You have always thought like a westerner.”, my brother did say in passing, “You are not one of us.” The fact is I belonged without actually belonging. The sanguineous ties are pulled asunder by other influences that in the experience of life can make us such radically different people.

The boy was starved

My parents as students in England had me quite early in many ways, I arrived 10 weeks prematurely, which meant for survival I was in incubation in another city for over 2 months.

Then primarily, my father was here for his accountancy qualifications and my mother had to work and, in the process, get an education too, not necessarily encouraged by him, at least, that is the story I am told.

My mother travelled around England into Wales seeking the appropriate kind of family to care for me whilst they were busy trying to better themselves. I cannot remember any of the people I supposedly stayed with, we called them nannies, but all the times I had with my parents in that childhood along with their friends and the siblings of their friends who were babysitters, I seem to recall.

One narrative I heard from my mum was on a visit back home from my foster parents, I was sneaking out to the refrigerator to steal food. She caught me a few times and could not understand why I would be stealing food until she found out that my wonderful foster parents were starving me. And these were people paid for the service, it was not a charity mission.

Radical consequences of childhood experiences

The consequences of the fear of hunger registered and were impactful long after we returned to Nigeria, and I was living with my parents along with having house helps to manage things when they were away. I do remember snatching food out of lunch boxes of fellow students, in fact, there were a few of us that did that.

Indeed, on balance, my whole life has been a wonderful experience marked by interesting events and circumstances. There are very many character traits and inflexions I could almost definitely trace to something that happened in my childhood, some of which I have written about in my blogs. I do need to get a move on with my story.

However, what is evident from many of the stories people are sharing is the illegality and criminality that thrived in the trading of children for different levels of convenience in the view that the children were being given a better life to the exclusion of an environment that would give them an identity or present them with a serious identity crisis.

Finding our way regardless

We almost always faced some sort of discrimination because of differences, however, minute and I recall the time a slow development of my motor skills left me not as agile as one would expect someone of my age it annoyed my dad and he coined a phrase for it that suggested a kind of impairment, someone at school somewhat deduced I was prematurely born and decided to make fun of me, he never did again, after I was finished.

Concerning the topic in discussion, it was my accent that set me apart as probably those of a mixed-race provenance would have been, then talk of brown babies or children in largely white neighbourhoods and schools. At home or abroad and there was no clear definition of either, you tried to fit in, you could not account for the cards you were dealt, you played the game you were in.

Closure for many would simply be coming to terms with who they are, and possibly finding out about relationships they never knew they had. It is unlikely that any of the people who were involved in the abuse of the children would ever see justice, even if they are still alive.

References

British Council: Farming (film)

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