Shirley Bassey was an accomplished award winning British singer with Nigerian roots. But most Nigerians are not fully aware of the story behind her father and how he was separated from her. Her mother Eliza was a strong woman who defoed social conventions back in the day by having children with a black man.
It was a time when being the white mother of a mixed-race child was highly unusual, and regarded in many respectable quarters - not least, by her own parents - as scandalous.

But Eliza went her own way, and from 1919 onwards had ten children in all - a number out of wedlock, and eight of them with black fathers. Shirley, her last, was born in January 1937 in a street full of brothels in the rundown docklands area of Tiger Bay.
Shirley's father - and the father of six of Eliza Jane's babies in all - was called Henry Bassey and was something of a mystery figure whose real name was Okun Apauso. Shirley was led to believe that he deserted the family when she was just a toddler.

'My mother and my father were divorced when I was two,' she would tell those who inquired about her early life.

A British researcher was able to unearth the reason why her father left her and her mother and was never heard of again.

An African merchant seaman, he was originally from Calabar in Nigeria, a port on the Niger Delta which, back in the 18th century, had been a link in the cruel chain of trafficking slaves to America and the West Indies.

To continue click on http://www.history.com.ng/307/the-secret-about-shirley-bassey-s-calabar-father-why-he-was

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