‘Will I be deported before I get to Oxford?’
Adopted from a Zimbabwean orphanage by a British family, Brian White is now marooned on the cusp of a dream. Joe Shute reports
Brian White recalls with a shy smile the moment he discovered he was going to Oxford University. He was sitting in the canteen at Highfields School in Wolverhampton when he received an email telling him he had been accepted to read chemistry at Lady Margaret Hall. “I told some of my friends and they went absolutely crazy and everybody started clapping,” he says. “It was pretty awesome.”
Last summer he received his grades: three A*s in chemistry, physics and biology and an A in maths, more than enough to meet his offer. But Brian never went to Oxford. Instead, he finds himself still stuck in Wolverhampton – facing the terrifying prospect of being taken away from his family and deported to a country he hardly knows.
This week Brian’s plight has come to national attention. A petition launched by a former school friend, Luke Wilcox, has been signed nearly 100,000 times (at the time of writing), including by the author Philip Pullman and Eleanor Smith, MP for Wolverhampton South West. Oxford University has already held his place for 12 months (while he has been volunteering at his old school) but as the new academic year approaches they now want an answer.
The Home Office insists it is aware of the urgency of his case and looking to “resolve the issue as quickly as possible”. “It weighs the whole time,” Brian says. “There has always been this question mark over where I am from and who I am. I can’t think about my future because I don’t know where I’m going to be three months down the line.”
Brian, now 21, was born in Zimbabwe and given up by his biological parents at birth. He knows nothing else of them; the only scrap of his former life is a piece of paper detailing his first name and particulars of his birth. Raised in an orphanage called the Thembiso Children’s Home in the city of Bulawayo, sharing a dormitory room with 20 other boys, he wore whatever ill-fitting clothes were passed his way.
Food was porridge or sadza, dense balls of corn meal. On special occasions rice was served. When Brian was five, a US missionary volunteering at the orphanage called Kerry Cook noticed his aptitude for learning and introduced him to an English family who lived nearby.
Peter White had settled in Zimbabwe and established a small printing business. He had married Thoko, a Zimbabwean teacher, in 1996, and the pair already had two young boys together: John, two years older than Brian, and Stephen, who was a year younger. Brian recalls being introduced to the Whites at the orphanage before he moved into their large house overlooking a park. “One of my earliest memories was toothpaste, because I had never seen it before and hated the taste,” he says. “I remember riding a bike for the first time and hitting Mum’s car because I couldn’t use the brakes. Having a bed with a warm blanket. Toys that were my own. It was just a real feeling of safety.” At first Brian could only speak
‘One of my earliest memories was toothpaste … I had never seen it before’
the local language, Ndebele, and only communicated with his adopted mother. Now he can hardly recall a word.
After a few years, disturbed by the economic instability and political climate of the Mugabe regime, the family moved to Botswana and Brian was officially adopted. Then in 2012 his father, who is 84 years old, four decades older than his mother, moved them back to Britain.
Peter White went first with their two sons while Thoko stayed in Botswana with Brian to sort his visa out. That September, she too had to travel to the UK as her entry visa would otherwise expire. Brian was