British national runner Sir Mohamed “Mo” Farah revealed his moving life story for BBC Documentary. The four-time Olympic champion and holder of the Order of the British Empire was smuggled into Britain as a child without his parents and under a false name, he writes BBC.
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The name Mohamed Farah was given to him by a woman he did not know before and with whom he traveled to Great Britain. His real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin. Farah’s parents have never been to Britain – his mother and two brothers live on the family farm in internationally unrecognized Somaliland, the northern part of Somalia that declared independence in 1991.
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“Most people know me as Moa Farah, but that’s not my real name, that’s not reality. The real story is that I was born in Somaliland north of Somalia as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what I’ve said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK,” he says.
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When he was 4 years old, his father Abdi became a victim of violence in Somalia. At the age of eight or nine, he was said to have been taken from home to live with his family in neighboring Djibouti. He subsequently flew to the UK with a woman he had never seen before and to whom he was not related in any way.
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He was told he would be going to Europe to live with relatives, which he said he was “excited about”. “I had never flown in an airplane before,” he says.
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The woman told him to claim his name was Muhammad. She also carried fake documents with his photo marked “Mohamed Farah”. When they arrived at her flat in west London, the woman took the paper with his relatives’ contacts and destroyed it.
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“Right in front of me, she tore up the paper and threw it in the trash. That’s when I knew I was in trouble,” says Farah.
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Young Mo was then forced to take care of the household and the children if he wanted to get food. The woman warned him not to tell anyone about the situation if he ever wanted to see his own parents again.
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“I often just locked myself in the bathroom and cried,” he says.
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Oval as liberation
His new “family” did not allow him to go to school at first, but at the age of 12 he enrolled at Feltham Community College in Hounslow, a suburb of London. His teacher at the time, Sarah Rennie, told the BBC that he came to school “unkempt and neglected”, spoke little English and was an “emotionally and culturally alienated” child.
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Everything turned around when the boy was noticed by his gym teacher Alan Watkinson. At the athletics oval, young Mo was as if changed, and he finally confided in the teacher his true identity and origin, telling him about the family he was forced to work for. Watkinson then contacted the social services department and helped the boy get into another Somali family.
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“I still missed my real family, but everything got better from then on. I felt liberated and finally myself. That’s when Mo appeared – the real Mo,” says the runner.
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Farah soon began to excel as an athlete, and at the age of 14 he was selected to compete for English schools in a competition in Latvia, but he had no travel documents. His teacher Watkinson subsequently helped him to obtain British citizenship, which was granted to him in June 2000.
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Sir Mo says he wants to tell his story to change public perception of modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
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“I had no idea there were so many people going through exactly the same thing as me. It shows how lucky I was,” he says. “What really saved me, what made me different, was that I could run,” he adds.
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The British authorities could theoretically revoke his citizenship because he obtained it by fraud. However, the Ministry of the Interior has already assured that it is not planning any action against the athlete given that he was smuggled into the country. “We will not take any action against Sir Mo and to suggest otherwise is a mistake,” it said, according to the agency AFP press department of the office.
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The woman who brought little Mo to London declined to comment on the matter. The documentary ‘The Real Mo Farah’ will be broadcast by the BBC on Wednesday.
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