Madge Has Only Borrowed The Baby

The father of the 13-month-old baby that Madonna is trying to adopt is now saying that he understood she was only taking the child until it’s grown up.

“Our understanding was that [Madonna and her British film-maker husband Guy Ritchie] would educate and take care of our son just as they were doing at the orphanage,” Yohane Banda told BBC television news.

Although he signed the adoption papers that cleared the way for a judge to grant the celebrity couple a temporary order to take the now much-photographed “Baby David” back to the U.K., Banda said the authorities had not made it clear to him that he was giving up his only son “for good.”

As far as he understood, he explained to the BBC cameras, the child would be brought up and educated and then he’d come home to Malawi and Lipunga Village.

Madonna’s decision to adopt a Malawian child has angered some of the country’s human rights groups. A coalition of 67 organiztions has gone to court to argue that Malawi’s adoption laws have been flouted.

The group points out that foreigners must be resident in Malawi for 18 months before being allowed to adopt.

– John Gammon