White Nanny Black Child

A record of a meeting between a group of British-Nigerians who were fostered in the Sixties and Seventies, White Nanny Black Child takes a similar form to films like The Work. At times, the film is raw and unsparing in its testimonies. Mostly though, it’s a film that surprises, stresses, but also pleasures, as you see the group find support through sharing their experiences. And despite the group setting, as much as they find they have in common with one another, their stories of being fostered, and their perspectives on those memories, told from the vantage point of adulthood, are each unique. Director Andy Mundy-Castle resists easy consensus.

Narrowing the focus of the title to one Black British group, those with Nigerian parents, he swiftly sketches the historical background to explain how thousands of Nigerian children were fostered in the UK, often the result of students unable to look after their children in the UK as they studied and worked. Through archive audio interviews, we hear a little from these parents (who knew the children would be taken in by white families) and the women who stepped in to look after the children, but Mundy-Castle places accounts from the children (as adults) front and centre. Though the title might seem to imply otherwise, the film doesn’t explicitly weigh in on the question of whether Black children should only be placed with parents of the same background, leaving it to the viewer to make their own judgement on whether a foster parent needs to have the same background as the children they are caring for.

Complications of race, nationality and identity against the backdrop of Seventies and Eighties Britain are understood by everyone here, but there are also shared stories about the ruptures in the parent-child relationship that occurred as they were passed from blood parents to fosterers, then in some cases, back again, with little interest in the children’s own feelings. Some of the most difficult memories recalled in the film involve a lack of sensitivity from adults towards the children about these sudden changes, even when the intentions behind them were positive.

By putting those at the core of this history at the centre of the film, White Nanny Black Child strikes a reparative chord, but might leave the inquisitive viewer wondering about those at the periphery of the film: the parents who put their kids forward for fostering, the families who took them in, those in social care or fostering agencies who made these arrangements happen. Without that, it seems like only a partial picture of something that affected a huge number - some 70,000 – of children from the Fifties to the Nineties. But then, this isn’t an investigative documentary, it’s a film about healing. If the aim was to avoid anything resembling misery-porn, White Nanny Black Child does a fine job of showing the power of support from those whose experiences mirror your own.