Zimbabwean With Football Dreams To Be Kicked Out Of UK

Christopher Arundell, who grew up in the UK and once dreamt of playing professional football, is set to be deported to Zimbabwe, despite a cross-party appeal to the home secretary to stop his removal – and those of others in his position.

“This is the only place I’ve had a life. What do you remember from when you’re five?” said the 26-year-old, who was born in Zimbabwe and lived there until the age of five.

“I don’t know anything but the UK. I went to school here, all my friends are here, all my family is here,” he explained to the BBC over the phone from Brook House detention centre, near Gatwick Airport, where he has been held since late last month.

“If I have to go back – I’m basically dead.”

Chris’s family have become British citizens, including his two younger siblings.

But his father kept putting off paying the money to sort out his citizenship so he dropped out of the football academy that had accepted him after leaving school and ended up getting into trouble and going to prison for drug offences.

The Arundells left Zimbabwe after they experienced three frightening burglaries – moving house after each incident. The last one in particular was brutal.

“I was taken out by a maid to go to the shops and then thieves came to the house, tied my mum up, and held her hostage and pepper-sprayed her and my six-month-old sister, while they removed goods from our house and took our car.”

Chris is not clear if the family were being specifically targeted – but for his mother he says it proved too much and she left with her two young children first to Botswana, then the UK – where her architect husband later joined her in 2001.

He is of mixed heritage: his mother is half Indian and his father grew up as an orphan in Zimbabwe.

Chris speaks English but neither of Zimbabwe’s two main local languages, Shona or Ndebele.

Any relatives the family left behind have long since gone during what have been a turbulent two decades in Zimbabwe

BBC