Friendship message from the Cyborg Cat


Long before becoming a Paralympian, journalist or children’s author, Ade Adepitan’s life was full of challenge and adventure. Now his optimism and life experience come alive in his children’s fiction.


CYBORG Cat and the Masked Marauder starts with the Parsons Road Gang raising money for a sports wheelchair for one of its members – the eponymous Ade – so he can play for the basketball team. But the money has gone and, in its place, a mask and message that all the plans of the Parsons Road Gang will be foiled. “It’s a bit of a caper,” the real Ade says, but it is rooted in a rich autobiographical landscape. “One of the battles that I had, and that Ade in the book had, was to convince my parents that playing wheelchair basketball was OK and a legitimate path to follow. There was this battle about the fact that my disability was a part of me and not to be ashamed of it – but I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, and coming from Africa, they were worried that if I got in a wheelchair [until then he walked using calipers] it would suddenly allow people to judge me. They worried that people will have these preconditioned ideas of who I was, and it would hold me back in my life. I had that constant battle with them, and with myself, about my disability. That battle is very prominent throughout the book in terms of how my parents responded to me when I first got my wheelchair and how I respond back. I


Autumn-Winter 2020


think all children have that. There will be something that they want to do and maybe their parents won’t agree – their parents want them to be doctors and they want to be an artist, or they want to be comedians and their parents want them to be engineers. We all have that battle. For me it was around my disability.”


Writing


When the idea of publishing an autobiography was suggested by his friends, Ade sent a test chapter to some publishers. Bonnier came back positively but during later talks they “talked about this big gap in the children’s market for diverse books,” Ade said, adding: “It made me think ‘what was it like when I was growing up? Did any of the books have disabled characters in them?’ It was hard to think of any. Children’s books started to make sense to me because I want to change things, to have an impact on the next generation.” Cyborg Cat – Rise of the Parsons Road Gang, was the outcome (followed by Cyborg Cat and the Night Spider, then the latest, Cyborg Cat and the Masked Marauder) and Ade says the risks and rewards of writing children’s fiction put it on a level with the adrenalin rush of sport. “Sport is amazing, and it’s been well documented about my passion for it but there is something really special about seeing a young kid reading something that you’ve written, their legs crossed totally engrossed in your book. They’ve allowed you to become part of their lives. I find that really exciting and it is a real adrenalin buzz. But it’s frightening as well because the


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