Madonna takes adopted son David Banda to meet his father

Within hours of landing in Malawi, where she has travelled to seek court permission to adopt another child, Madonna took her three-year-old adopted son, David Banda, to see his natural father for the first time since she took the boy out of the country in October 2006. The emotional reunion with Yohane Banda, a peasant farmer, took place at a safari lodge outside the capital, Lilongwe.

Staff at the lodge said Yohane Banda was thrilled to see his son again. "He was hopping from foot to foot, you could see he was very happy," one employee told the Times by telephone.

The reunion will be first of many: under the terms of the controversial adoption, only declared legal in May 2008, Madonna has to bring David back regularly to see his natural father. "I just wish I could see him more often," Yohane Banda had told the Times in an interview last week. "But I know one day my prayers will be answered and he will come back and live here."

He said he had been worried about his son's future when he heard stories about her divorce from Guy Ritchie, but that he had been reassured by staff at the singer charity Raising Malawi.

Madonna, who arrived at the safari lodge in a convoy of 4x4s, got the full pop star treatment, with staff having to hand over their mobile phones and roadblocks erected on the approaches to the lodge.

She was accompanied on the trip by 12-year-old Lourdes (pictured with her mother), her daughter by her relationship with personal fitness trainer Carlos Leon, and eight-year-old Rocco, her son by her ex-husband Guy Ritchie. They later toured the nearby village of Chinkhota where she refused to answer journalists' questions about whether she was in Malawi to adopt a four-year-old girl, Mercy James, from the same Mchinji orphanage where she found David.

But a High Court official in Lilongwe has told the press said that Madonna's Malawian lawyer, Alan Chinula, will file adoption papers today at a procedural hearing for Mercy.

A New York spokesman for the singer said she would not be responding to comments made by a Save the Children official that Madonna risked sending the wrong message by her insistence on adopting a second child in Malawi.

"International adoption can actually exacerbate the problem it hopes to solve," Dominic Nutt said. "The very existence of orphanages encourages poor parents to abandon children in the hope that they will have a better life."