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.