Abstract: For the first twenty years of my life this is what I knew of my family background: I was born in Eritrea. My mother died in childbirth, my father not long afterwards. I was placed in an orphanage in Asmara, the capital, by a relative or neighbour. Six months later, adopted by a British academic, I grew up in a white family in Manchester. And then one day I received a letter from my brother in Asmara, the one I never knew I had. My story is what happened next: how I went to Africa to meet the family I never knew existed. How it was to be twenty-nine before I looked into the eyes of a blood relative - and of what it's like to have two fathers.