6/21/2023 0 Comments Taking flight by michaela deprince![]() ![]() There couldn’t be a better family for these 6 year old girls. ![]() White American parents come to adopt the other Mabinty and at the eleventh hour take Mabinty Bangura as well. She is smitten by the white ballerina dressed in pink and en pointe photographed on the page. Mabinty finds the cover of Dance Magazine blowing in the dust. Fortunately the head of the orphanage observes Mabinty’s intelligence. The other orphans and her caretaker, Fatima, consider her ugly due to her spots, and she becomes known as the “devil child.” Eventually she wins over the orphans but not Fatima. The uncle walks Mabinty to an orphanage where she befriends a girl with her same given name Mabinty Suma. When her mother takes ill, rather than getting care for her, the uncle lets her die. So Mabinty and her mother become part of her uncle’s family. First her father is gunned down in the diamond mines where he works. The degree of hardship that Mabinty, one of so many war orphans, endures, is difficult for a white middle class American, such as myself, to fathom. She’s ridiculed in her tribe due to her skin pigment condition, vitiligo, which makes her skin appear spotted. Mabinty Bangura is born to loving parents in war-torn Sierra Leone. “Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina” (Knopf 2014) by Michaela DePrince is a memoir co-written with her adoptive mother Elaine DePrince. ![]()
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