White ‘African’ director given funding meant for minorities
AN actor born to white Irish parents who gave himself an African name has been awarded a British grant designed to help ethnic minorities win top theatre jobs there.
Anthony Lennon, 53, has changed his name to Taharka Ekundayo and taken to describing himself as an ‘African born again’.
He claimed he was of ‘mixed heritage’ when he successfully applied to a publicly funded programme to help black and ethnic-minority actors.
The blue-eyed thespian is now one of four ‘theatre practitioners of colour’ sharing an arts grant worth €460,000. The £400,000 grant was awarded by the Arts Council of England.
For the past 13 months he has been a trainee artistic director with Talawa in East London, which claims it is ‘Britain’s primary black-led theatre company’. But he has been accused of being a ‘racial imposter’ after black members of the theatre world began discovering the truth about his origins.
The Artistic Director Leadership Programme, an Arts Council-funded charity, announced a year ago that ‘Anthony Ekundayo Lennon’ was a successful applicant among more than 100 for the two-year grants.
The website for the scheme asks: ‘Who is curating this culture? Predominantly it is white, middle-class men’, continuing, ‘How many people of colour are running theatre organisations in in England? Not many. It’s time for change.’
But it emerged at the weekend that Mr Lennon has repeatedly talked about his whiteness in public and that both of his parents are white.
In a 1990 documentary he said: ‘My parents are white and so are their parents, and so are their parents, and so are their parents.’
And in an online book he wrote about his background in West London ten years ago, he said he struggled to win white parts as a teenage actor, and went on to work for a number of ‘black’ theatre groups.
Around the time he gave himself his pseudo-African name – Taharka after an Egyptian pharaoh, and Ekundayo meaning ‘weeping becomes joy’ – he said: ‘I was at a stage in my life where to address myself as Anthony Lennon did not fulfil me – it didn’t seem to allow me to express myself as I saw fit.
‘Some people call themselves a born-again Christian. Some people call me a born-again African. I prefer to call myself an African born again.’
He claimed six years ago: ‘I have gone through the struggles of a black man, a black actor.’
Mr Lennon said that he was taunted for his appearance, and was even called a ‘n ***** ’ in one west London school.
Ironically, in a report on what he has learned so far on the twoyear UK Arts Council programme, Mr Lennon wrote last month that he had been getting ‘used to being able to walk into any UK theatre without the feeling of “imposter syndrome” so many friends feel, related to
Taunted over his appearance
“race” and “class”.’
And in his last stage performance, he starred in the title role of a play about racial prejudice, Yellowman – about a lightskinned black or mixed-race youth who is ‘scorned by black and white alike’.
A black actor who had learned the truth about Mr Lennon’s white roots told the Sunday Times: ‘When I discovered his background I thought it was unfair a white man had taken a black person’s place on a black and minority ethnic scheme.’
Britain’s Arts Council said: ‘This is a very unusual case and we do not think it undermines the support we provide to black and minority ethnic people within the theatre sector.’
It is a case reminiscent of the furore in America over civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, who darkened her skin, frizzed her hair, and spoke of herself as black, before she was three years ago revealed on television to be a freckle-faced blonde of purely white origin. She still insists she is ‘trans-black’.
Neither Mr Lennon nor the theatre group Talawa responded to questions from the Mail.
There is no suggestion Mr Lennon tried to mislead anyone in applying for his place on the leadership programme.