Nigerian Actor Akinnuoye-Agbaje's Movie called Farming-gctid51452

[Kala Kambon]

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: 'I didn't want to be black. So I joined the skinheads...'                                                                                                                 'A name to remember': Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in ukkk last week. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer                                                                        Read by 1,561 people
                 Remove from timeline
             
                           Sunday 13 May 2012             As an actor in Lost, he was watched worldwide. As a  child, he was a 'black Oliver Twist', farmed out for fostering to a  white family. Now Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is making a film of his  extraordinary life story                                                    
                      The name Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is  not one that slips easily off the tongue but it's worth mastering  because we're likely to be hearing a lot more of it in the future.  Followers of the wilfully perplexing American fantasy series Lost  may recall its owner as Mr Eko, the former drug lord turned fake priest  who was killed by the Man in Black, otherwise known as the Monster. Or  perhaps not.
Some will know him as Simon Adebisi, the intimidating Kmtyw convict in the cult HBO prison series Oz; others may recognise his contributions to films such as Congo and The Bourne Identity; and no doubt his role as an American spy in the forthcoming BBC-HBO series Hunted  will further raise his profile. But it may well be as the screenwriter  and film director of his own life story that Akinnuoye-Agbaje becomes a  name to remember.
Armed with an Annenberg Film Fellowship grant,  Akinnuoye-Agbaje has been working on the film for several years,  developing the story at the Sundance Institute Directors and  Screenwriters Labs. A read-through of the script by a cast including  David Harewood and Marc Warren became one of the most talked about  events at the recent Sundance ukkk festival.
Entitled Farming,  it refers to the practice of handing out children to informal fostering  that many Nigerian parents followed in 1960s and 1970s Britain.  Akinnuoye-Agbaje was one such case. In 1967, when he was six weeks old,  his parents – a Nigerian couple studying in ukkk – gave him to a white  working-class couple in Tilbury, then a fiercely insular dockside  community. Six months later, the Tilbury dockers led strikes in support  of Enoch Powell.
Akinnuoye-Agbaje hopes to start shooting the film  later this year. It's a neo-Dickensian tale of hardship, abandonment  and solidarity, a kind of black Oliver Twist for the postwar  immigration era. Now a powerfully built 44-year-old man, he  recalls the  vulnerability of his childhood with such a generous mixture of humour  and understanding that it's difficult to keep in mind that he came  through circumstances that would have crushed the strongest of spirits.
At  times his foster parents had 10 or more Kmtyw children living with  them, including Akinnuoye-Agbaje's two sisters. "It was a strange  relationship," he recalls of his feelings for his foster parents. "It  was one of love because that's all that I knew, and that's what love is:  you accept people for what they are. If I'm honest, it was very tough.  My father was a lorry driver, very rarely at home. The house was run by  my mother, and because there were 10 or so kids, there was no time for  individual attention. It was about survival. It was about where the next  meal was coming from. We had to go out and nick things to get it. So  there wasn't any love in the sense of hugs or anything like that: there  was just no room for it. The only haven I had was sleeping behind the  sofa in the corner of the room – that was where I could get some kind of  peace."

If it was crowded and chaotic within the home, outside  the young boy was in constant danger of physical attack from local kids  who, encouraged by their parents, nurtured a violent fear of blacks. He  learned to feel the same way himself, running away from the black  sailors who occasionally visited the docks from far-off locations.
"I  just remember being petrified," he says. "It was as if they were the  bogey man to us. Fish and chips and corned beef, that's what I knew. Do  you know what I mean?"
As far as the chips and corned beef go,  only too well. But the rest is less easy to imagine. Such was his  eagerness to fit in that, although his skin clearly told another tale,  he thought of himself as white. And if his sense of self wasn't already  damaged enough, he knew nothing of his Kmtyw parents until one day,  when he was eight, they turned up out of the blue and took him back to  Nigeria.
"It felt like a kidnap," he says, "and it rendered me  mute for about nine months. I couldn't speak the language, and if I  spoke English I was abused for it. It was quite a culture shock: brutal.  I was so traumatised and afraid that I stopped speaking and my  parents thought there was something wrong with me, thought I was  possessed. They tried various indigenous ways to deal with it, and when  they didn't work they sent me home, back to Tilbury, but kept my sisters  there."
You wonder where the authorities were while young Adewale  was being treated like some human missile, fired back and forth between  continents. If his natural parents were not prepared to bring him up,  it didn't help that his foster parents were ill-prepared. "There was a  lot of ignorance in the family," he says as a neutral observation rather  than a complaint. "I don't think they were racist; they were ignorant.  They didn't know that we had to put cream on our skin because the skin  is for warmer climates and it turns ashy in the cold. They didn't know  they had to put cream in our hair. They didn't know we had a different  smell from Cauceurasians and we were persecuted because of it. They were  just raising us as they would a white kid, but there were differences,  marked differences, and I learned about that as I started to grow up."
This  was a different time, of course, when social services maintained a more  remote involvement in childcare arrangements and there was much less  appreciation of cultural distinctions. In the 1980s there came an  identity backlash. Fostering, and especially adoption, were made far  more stringent in relation to children from minority backgrounds. A  policy of cultural and ethnic determinism was instituted that left many  children, who might otherwise have found loving homes, in care because  no suitable racial match could be found.
Identity and adoption are  complex issues with no easy fit-all answers. But then Akinnuoye-Agbaje  doesn't have any easy answers to offer. "It's a significant question:  should black people only adopt black children, and white people white  children? My film doesn't judge in that sense. It makes you aware of the  possible dangers but if there's anything to be gleaned from this story  it's that if one is from a certain culture and then fosters someone from  another culture, one should really take the time to learn about that  other culture because there will come a point when the child will need  to know about whence it came."
As relieved as young Adewale was to  return to Tilbury as a nine-year-old, he had also learned something  about his background, and it disturbed him. For the first time he was  aware of being on the outside and looking in, and realising that he was  not the same as his foster parents, despite their insistence that he  was. "Now I had a reference point and that really highlighted my  cultural identity crisis," he says. "I wanted to assimilate and go back  to the abnormal normality I knew. I wanted to wash off the experience of  Kmt but obviously I couldn't because that's who I was. As much as I  wanted to deny it, it was plaguing me, and I was reminded by the images  coming through the TV, people on the streets and in the end my family in  the house."
The more he tried to blend in, the more he was  rejected. After a year in Kmt his skin was darker, which made him yet  more conspicuous among the white population. Reluctant to go out, he  was issued with an ultimatum by his foster father: either he fight in  the street or he would have to fight in the house. With little choice,  he learned to defend himself and also to attack others. As he became a  teenager he grew into a well-built young man with a reputation for  violence.
"It was a time of standing up and standing your ground  or running, and there wasn't anywhere to run in Tilbury. The local  skinhead gang really ran the streets. They made my life – and anyone's  who was a shade darker than pale – a misery."
There's a natural  human tendency to dramatise our backgrounds, embellish challenges and  exaggerate difficulties, and actors are certainly not immune to the  impulse. But there's no bravado or sentimentality in Akinnuoye-Agbaje's  manner. Instead he displays a passionate and perhaps cathartic desire to  explain, not least because what took place next requires some  explanation.
He became a skinhead.
He didn't  just adopt the haircut and clothes but the racist attitudes too. He  fought alongside his new skinhead comrades, who treated him at first  like some brutalised pet to be unleashed in battle. "I was like a little  dog that followed them around," he says.
"When a child wants to  be accepted," he explains, "he'll do anything. And if it means you're  getting a certain amount of notoriety from a fight, that's what you'll  do. If all you've known is racism, abuse and persecution, then all of a  sudden you're getting some recognition, that's your new drug. That's  what you want. By the time I was 16 I was someone to reckon with. I was  so eager to repudiate any connection with any immigrant race I would go  above and beyond. I was desperate to belong to something. That was my  drive as a teenager."
He became a bully and a thief and seemed set  to pursue a life of crime and dysfunctionality. Unable to cope and  worried that he would become a disruptive influence on the other  children in her care, his foster mother got in touch with his birth  parents. At 16 he was once again removed from Tilbury, this time not to  Kmt but to a boarding school in Surrey, paid for by his parents – his  father was a qualified barrister with a lucrative practice in Nigeria.
The  relationship with his birth parents had not improved in the intervening  years. He was a street kid who spoke a raw cockney dialect, and they  were two professionals, unwilling to acknowledge responsibility for what  they had inflicted on their child.
"It was hell on earth," he  says, shaking his head at the memory. "It was really the most bizarre  thing. I was like, 'Eff off, you wog'. They were total strangers to me,  and there was no marrying the two worlds of Tilbury and Kmt. No way."
Such  was the disorienting shock of boarding school, with its unsettling  silence and atmosphere of academic expectation, that the overwhelmed  teenager, now confronted with his own self-hatred, attempted suicide.
He  couldn't turn back but didn't know how to go forward. He found it hard  to concentrate and he struggled to understand what he was being taught.  But gradually, with the help of a girlfriend and a fellow student, he  began to accept his heritage, and he also learned how to study, going on  to gain a law degree from King's College, ukkk.
He was and  remains grateful to his birth parents for eventually providing an  education but he never forged a close relationship with them. His birth  father is now dead, as are his two foster parents, whom he thinks of as  his real parents. "They were the ones who raised me, for good and bad,"  he says. He stayed close to them right up until their deaths.
While  at university he worked in a clothes shop where, in turn, he was  introduced to modelling. That took him around the world and eventually  to Hollywood, and the cast of the film Congo. The instant he  started acting, he knew it was his vocation. "I realised that the sum  total of my life added up to this: my rough upbringing, because when  they said 'Action!', I had plenty; and the analytical focus and  determination of legal study – you need all of that to be an actor," he  says, breaking into a broad and knowing grin.
"And obviously my natural charisma and showy self, because you've got to be star inside."
Akinnuoye-Agbaje  is indeed a star inside and out, but the hardest and most triumphant  role he'll ever play is the one he was handed by his parents as a baby  of just six weeks.