Fostering Nigerian Children

From the collection of

Established in 1992, the South West Film & Television Archive collection spans from 1893 to the present day containing more than 250,000 items. Formed from a variety of depositors, including broadcast news and programmes material from the Westward and TSW archive. In 2018 the archive collection transferred to The Box in Plymouth.

Fostering Nigerian Children

The Box
Fremington
1965-02-09
Sound
7m

Nigerian children find a home with the Arnetts in Fremington

Mr and Mrs Arnett foster Nigerian children at their home in Fremington. This enables the birth parents to work or study. The Arnetts discuss the realities of government underfunding and lack of local authority aid for foster carers in Devon.

The British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) created a research-based British Adoption Project that ran between 1965 and 1969. In all, 53 children of Black Caribbean, African, Asian or mixed heritage were placed into 51 adoptive or fostering families around the UK and the BAAF conducted follow-up interviews with the families between 1974 and 1981. The BAAF also offer adopted adults who were involved in this project a means of contacting birth relatives. In the 1950s and 1960s it was not unusual for West Africans to use private foster carers while they worked or studied because they had no family support network.

Black Lives

Portraits of public and private lives against the shifting social climate of 20th century Britain.

Black communities, like many Global majority groups, have long been ill-served by a mainstream British media accustomed to reflecting predominantly white, middle-class lives - a problem entrenched in the second half of the 20th century with the rise of television. Yet a rich tapestry of work from across the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, film and TV, made for (though not always by) black people, does exist. This selection contains many surprises – some joyous, some sobering, some heartbreaking – and highlights the often painfully slow progress in addressing negative representations and stereotypes on screen. Impassioned and sometimes violent dispatches from the front line in the fight for racial equality can be found here, but so too can records of progress: in the pioneers breaking new ground in culture, politics and sport, and in the more mundane glimpses of everyday life. And this story is not just London’s story: the selection takes a journey around Britain, to a Nigerian wedding in 1960s Cornwall, an ‘African village’ in Essex and a Caribbean restaurant opening in West Bromwich; Newcastle