Becoming Visible

By Abi Osho

A black baby girl fostered by a white family at the tender age of 5 weeks old, shares her moving story of the search for identity and acceptance, whilst experiencing the power of resilience and forgiveness.

The opportunity to seemingly create a better life for themselves and their children by moving from Nigeri

• Language: English
• Publisher: Soul Melanin Ltd
• Release date: Mar 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739659615

Book preview

Introduction: Setting the Scene

When I first thought of writing my story, I knew I wasn’t the only one to engage in a narrative that included the subject of private fostering, the practice of leaving a child in the temporary care of a (usually) lower middle-class white family, under a private fostering arrangement began in the 19 th century. The foster family assumed the care of young, pregnant women whose newborn babies they auctioned off to the highest bidder. Movies like The Last Tree, written and directed by Shola Amoo in 2019, highlighted the individual West African experience of being in private foster care. Kriss Akabusi, a British silver medallist in the 1984 Olympics as part of the 4x400m relay team, was another high-profile personality who came out with his story about being privately fostered from the age of four, together with his brother Riba. Like me, they are both of Nigerian heritage.

Historically, there was a term used called baby farming, which began back in late-Victorian England. The term itself was often used as an insult to imply that foster parents mistreated the children under their care. It is not a term that I care for, therefore it will not be used again, but it’s important to have an insight about where this term came from. In the early days, both foster children and foster families were usually white, so the tension came about mostly from socioeconomic imbalances rather than from anything else. It wasn’t a surprise that such a conservative society gave rise to the phenomenon. Despite the stereotype of frigid Victorian women, illegitimate children were still being born and baby farmers were eager to assume custody of them for a fair amount of money to keep them away from unwanted attention. The social stigma was just too great a price to pay for many families at that time.

However, it wasn’t always an avoidance of societal judgement that led wealthy women to leave their babies in the care of poor villagers. Sometimes, it was just convenient to have a wet nurse take the infant through the early months of its life before being returned to its biological mother.

There was nothing new or unusual then when the popularity of baby farming (now shortened to farming or changed to the politically correct term of private fostering or private foster care) picked up again in the 1950s, specifically catering to the babies of West African students flocking to the UK for a chance at a supposedly better university education post-independence from Britain. (The former coloniser had cooked up a plan to educate the best of the best from its former colonies, so they could return to their home countries, armed with sufficient training for running their own governments. My Nigerian parents were two of those students, with the country having gained independence on the first of October 1960.) More recently, there was a film called Farming, directed by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, which tells his story as a foster child growing up in private foster care and joining a white skinhead gang led by a white supremacist.

Initially, many of the African students who took advantage of the plan were male, but the geographical separation from their families and the traditional, community-based extended family culture was apparently too much for them. Many of these men developed psychological problems that the British government needed to address urgently. It became clear that their visitors’ plight could improve only if they had their wives with them as moral, physical, and social support. Before long, the next wave of incoming guests from countries like Ghana and Nigeria was composed of the male scholars’ female partners.

By 1960, there were eleven thousand African students in the UK and five thousand of their own children had already been sent into the private fostering system. Unlike its public counterpart, the private foster care system wasn’t an entity regulated closely by the government. It still had some degree of checks and balances in place, but many private foster families were likely rejects under the government-run scheme, seen as unfit under the latter’s stricter guidelines. Whether anyone liked it or not though, private foster care was a necessity. There was no stopping the increase in the number of foreign students and their families coming in.

The renewed interest in private foster care that started in 1955 came about when an ad was posted in the childcare journal, Nursery World, specifically offering a private home for fostering West African babies. It was targeted at the one group that needed it the most, what with their hands and minds full already with work and study and responsibilities awaiting them back in their home countries. From there, a network formed and grew mostly from word-of-mouth recommendations or homes wanted advertisements: a friend of a friend’s aunt’s church-mate knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. No matter how tangled up the connections were, they were followed through because there was no one else. Grandparents, uncles, and older cousins were thousands of kilometres away on an entirely different continent. Many of these foster homes were found in places like East Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and other areas around the UK—far away from London where majority of West African parents lived, worked, and studied.

When surveys were made around the mid-1960s, many doctors highlighted the poor mental and physical health of fostered African babies living with white families. Almost like a curse, the condition of the fathers came to visit upon their children. Many had delays in acquiring speech and social skills, which put to question the entire private fostering system. Seen from the bigger picture, it wasn’t just African children who were affected physically and emotionally but white kids as well. African babies simply came to occupy the foreground of the studies because they did form the majority. Of the ten thousand foster kids identified, six thousand were of African ethnicity.

When the British government realised the detrimental nature of the private fostering system, they created several new policies to change things and bring them under better control. One policy discouraged African students from studying in the UK if their chosen tertiary course was also available in their home countries. It was a way of keeping their family units intact. There was also a fresh emphasis on having flesh-and-blood family and relatives take care of the students’ babies. In practice, this meant sending babies back to West Africa.

The feedback on private fostering was initially positive. African parents expressed gratitude that their white foster families were taking very good care of their children. However, the tone soon changed to something highly negative, with each side accusing the other of abuses and neglect. Some white foster families also presented an added hurdle to their African wards because of their latent or open racism. Either way, the hurt manifested itself very plainly in the miserable upbringing of many foster children. They were often the receivers of tasteless and vicious verbal assaults from their own foster parents and siblings.

To many white foster families, the intake of African babies was nothing more than an alternative income stream for their households. It didn’t seem to take much to raise somebody else’s kids. With the birth parents far away in London, they just had to meet the bare minimum of food, shelter, and some clothing, and all was right in their world. Had they tried to get certified for the formal setup strictly regulated by the government, they wouldn’t have passed, let alone as foster care givers. They would have probably triggered too many red flags with the haphazard way they ran their households. However, by offering to be such outside official channels, they didn’t have to be accountable to higher authorities.

Assuming the care of African children was a respectable undertaking for many of these foster families, beyond the financial gain. It was a way of validating themselves, raising their social capital. If they were good enough to be entrusted with the babies of complete strangers, they were good enough to occupy their space in the neighbourhood, in society. Being given the responsibility of raising a coloured baby was a status symbol for them. It was the same for African parents, who would inform their families back home that their children were being cared for by a white nanny, the preferred term used among African families who had their children fostered in the UK. It was a complete role reversal for all parties concerned.

At the time that I was fostered together with my older brother, no one knew what the long-term effects were going to be on the individuals, families, and communities involved on both sides of the arrangement. It was still a period when people could afford to think the very best of their fellow human beings. Foster care was supposed to be a place for finding wholesome people who gave a damn about somebody else’s babies. While it was not the indigenous custom of West Africans like my parents (that’s what blood relatives were for), it was the available means within the United Kingdom at that time, just when they needed an extra pair of hands to help them. As it turned out, because of the mother-child separation that gave rise to abandonment, which resulted in many psychological issues, many—not all—African foster children ended up getting involved in juvenile delinquency, thefts, and violence. I’m not proud to say that I was guilty of some of these things. However, many years have now passed since they were a part of my life. How I came from there all the way to here is the heart and soul of my story.

Chapter 1

The Invisible Child

I was once an invisible child. If you meet me face-to-face now, you might not be able to tell because I appear outgoing, friendly, and upbeat to you. But there was indeed a time when people didn’t see me. Or if they did see me, they saw the very features I didn’t want them to focus on about me. The saddest thing about my situation then was that I didn’t have a choice or voice over the matter. It was simply something that happened to me because I was in the care of another woman and her three adult children far away from my own biological parents. They lived in London; I came to live in Hastings.

Hastings is a seaside town on the south coast of England with a long Anglo-Saxon history dating back to the eleventh century. It was named after the Battle of Hastings, which was a military engagement between French and British armies. Ten centuries later, it has remained an enclave of mostly British and Irish whites at ninety-four percent of the entire town population, which in 2011 stood at about ninety-three thousand five hundred. Even with those numbers and within the twenty-first century, black people numbered just a little over a thousand people. In my childhood, I could imagine the figure being much lesser. I recall being able to count the number of black people with my hands.

Before it became what it is today, a working-class society, Hastings held much potential as a popular seaside resort in the nineteenth century, with the promise of good health to anyone who soaked in its seawater.

It was to this setting that my birth parents handed me over—quite literally—to a woman I was later to know and love dearly as my foster mum. Hastings was my home, my community, my world from the age of five weeks old, which was when I joined my older brother, Jimi, who had been born two years ahead of me. He too was a foster child of the same household I was about to become a part of.

Our foster mum was named Irene, but we called her Mum as opposed to our biological mum whom we referred to as Nigerian Mum. The distinction was as vast a rift as Britain was to Nigeria. Nigerian Mum was a mum only because Mum told my brother and me to call her that. Without her stern instruction, who knows what we would have ended up calling her. Nothing she did or didn’t do in those early years served to create a bond to connect her life to us. As soon as my eyes registered my environment and my mind could understand the movements and characters around me, I knew no other home but Hastings.

It says a lot that I have no concrete recollection of my birth parents. They hardly showed up during the many years I spent with Mum and five other foster kids in her home, including my blood brother. All of us foster children were of Nigerian descent. Other than that commonality, we knew we had no real family ties to bind us together. We were there because our parents thought it fit to leave our care to a stranger. I could probably count with the fingers of one hand the number of times Nigerian Mum came to visit my brother and me in Hastings from London where she lived with my dad. It was a mere two-hour drive by car or a two-and-a-half-hour train ride, but it was as though a whole world separated my parents from my brother and me. Thankfully, our dad made more of an effort to see us, but he was dealing with his own issues and his visits were probably too little too late already.

Mum had three of her own children, but they were over a decade older than we were: Rhona, Calvin, and Rick. Rhona was a young woman with special needs and had problems communicating effectively with the rest of the household. Her handicap was another challenge for all of us because it was one of those things that people latched on to as a reason for teasing or bullying someone else.

No matter how much I tried to understand it at my tender age, I could not wrap my head around the fact that I was given away to somebody else at five weeks old. Not even puppies could be weaned away from their mother at less than eight weeks old. It was such a raw subject for me, not because I was feeling distanced from Africa and my heritage but because I was constantly asked about it by other people and I had no answer to give them. Why was I surrendered to the foster care of another human being when my own parents were capable of taking care of me?

The more people asked me, the more I felt bitter toward Nigerian Mum. To try to make sense of it all, I dug deep into my birth parents’ context. That was when I realised that they were practically babies themselves. Nigerian Mum was nineteen years old, fresh out of secondary school, and Dad was twenty-two, when they emigrated to England in search of a better life. The exiting British had broadcast opportunities for Nigerians in Great Britain to equip them with the skills and knowledge necessary to build a newly independent Nigeria. My parents had made the journey in response to that dangled carrot.

The burden on their shoulders as the hope of the motherland lay heavy. They were to prioritise nation-building ahead of everything else, including their own personal lives. The African proverb—now almost a cliché—of it takes a village to raise a child was something we believed as West Africans, but for some reason, many Yoruba people translated it to mean a licence to involve non-African people in our family affairs.

Although there were other Nigerians in London, many Nigerian parents opted to hand off their babies to people such as those found in Hastings. They were not of the same class of British as those Nigerians interacted with in Lagos, Abuja, and other parts of the homeland. They were people who barely stepped out of their section of middle England. By the decades of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the British families that opened their homes to West African foster kids were generally unemployed or received a low income. They lived a hand-to-mouth existence on government support. They did not have the kind of education that would have given them a decent background on the African continent and its peoples. I doubt very much if they even knew or understood Britain’s presence in Nigeria.

My foster brothers and I may have very well been the first encounter of much of Hastings citizenry to African