How would you have felt, Madonna?
The superstar’s adoption case has shown the powerlessness of an entire African people faced with the might of a single American woman, says Melissa Kite Imagine the scene. Florence Okosieme, wife of a wealthy tribal leader from Nigeria, touches down at Wayne County Airport, Detroit. A limousine awaits to whisk her through the grimy streets of ‘Murder City’ to the suburb of Pontiac, where a poor family awaits her help. She grimaces as the stretch limo passes abandoned and burnt-out shells of buildings where drug gangs hover. When the car pulls up at a tiny house, she pulls her fur coat around her as if to ward off the robbers and rapists that she has heard prowl these streets at night, untroubled by an inept police force. The average annual household income in this city is less than the amount her husband spends on tailoring each year. The outlook for children who grow up here is bleak. If they do not fall prey to drugs or crime, they are unlikely to get a decent education in the struggling public schools.
For one child at least, all that is about to change. Florence is here to adopt a girl whose mother has died of cancer. Her father cannot cope and has allowed his daughter to be advertised for adoption with the international agency Childlink. It was the name which first caught Florence’s attention: Madonna Louise. Now she has adoption papers and a private jet waiting to take the little girl back to Africa.
So what if she will be the only ItalianAmerican-born white child in the neighbourhood? A life of luxury awaits her, with cooks, butlers and private tutors to cater to her every whim. Florence, who has longed for another child for years but is too old, will love her as her own.
I have only made up half this story. It is a fact that Madonna, born into a blue-collar family, was left motherless aged five and that her father Silvio felt unable to look after her and her five siblings. He did not go so far as to put them up for adoption, but he did send them away to stay with relatives. When he took them back, he had remarried and insisted that the children call his new wife ‘mother’. Would it not be staggering if, given this history, Madonna had not made some comparison in her mind between her own childhood bereavement and abandonment and that of David Banda, the Malawian child she now strains every sinew to adopt?
And wouldn’t it be odd if the question never raised itself: how would she have felt if a rich woman from another country had rocked up on her doorstep all those years ago and offered to take her off her father’s hands? I suspect she would have grown up wondering why her blood family had abandoned her, her pain not much mitigated by the luxury of a gated mansion.
I don’t doubt there is more than meets the eye to the saga of David Banda. The willingness of his family to abandon him is shocking. But let us assume for a moment that the people of Malawi, having rather a lot to worry about at the moment, are just a little behind the West in the indulgent field of child psychology. It may be that from where they are sitting it seems reasonable to assume, as we used to, that a formal education is more important than the presence of family. But we know better, don’t we? Isn’t it our responsibility not to take advantage of their desperation?
David’s father, a farmer called Yohane Banda who can barely read or write, has now admitted that he did not fully understand what was happening when he went to court in his best clothes to meet the woman who was offering his 13-month-old a new life. Perhaps he thought he would only be going to England for a few years to get an education. Who knows?
He now says his intention when he parked Davie in an orphanage after his wife died was that he would one day return to live at home. Perhaps this is so.
Unfortunately he was not given the benefit of the doubt: the child was offered for adoption without his father’s knowledge when his picture was sent, along with those of 12 other ‘suitable’ male babies, by email to the world’s most famous pop star.
In Malawi the law prohibits adoptions by non-residents, and human rights groups have quite rightly cried foul. The whole ugly mess has been played out in the glare of the media, showcasing the powerlessness of an entire African people when faced with the might of one rich woman from the West.
Off the top of my head, here are two alternative solutions which would have trampled less on a nation’s dignity. One: privately give the Banda family some money each month so that they can look after and educate Davie.
I realise this may be unglamorous. If you’re the type of person who can throw $3 million at a new charity linked to your own website, you are unlikely to be tempted by the prospect of arranging a standing order of £18 a month to keep a child in his proper environment. After all, sponsoring a child is what mere mortals do after seeing an advertisement on daytime telly. It’s not for the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (who prefer to bring theirs back from Cambodia and Ethiopia) or Meg Ryan (from China), or Ewan McGregor (from Mongolia) or Mia Farrow (from Vietnam).
Which brings me to solution number two. Some 65,000 children are in care in England and Wales. Only 4,000 will find adoptive families this year. A good many of them are black or of mixed heritage. The internet is heaving with sites — from Barnardo’s to local councils from Hackney to Lambeth begging prospective families to come forward. If celebrities want to do something really pioneering, they should adopt a child from Brixton. Anyone in doubt of how worthy a project this would be should consider the shocking statistic that only 1 per cent of children in care in this country ever go to university. How’s that for a crummy life chance?
The government has even made it easier. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 enables all kinds of people to adopt: older people, same-sex couples, single people. I dare say they would even consider pop stars. The bottom line is that you do not have to go to Malawi and circumvent complicated laws to bring a lonely, needy child home.
In years to come, when we in the West have evolved a little, we will come to see cross-border adoption as we now view the slave trade. In 20 years’ time, maybe a lot less, we will look back and say, ‘Do you remember when rich people used to get babies from Africa? My God, did that really happen?’ It would be better still if we woke up to this outrage now.
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