It felt like a kidnap…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 [birth] parents thought there was something wrong with me, thought I was possessed…

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It felt like a kidnap…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 [birth] parents thought there was something wrong with me, thought I was possessed…

On being taken back to Nigeria after living abroad for years in England in “Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: 'I didn't want to be black. So I joined the skinheads…'” in The Guardian (2012 May 13)