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The only black person that I grew up interacting with was the family<br />
domestic worker. I should not even call it interaction. We gave her<br />
orders and she obeyed. She used to call me sir although she was<br />
old enough to be my grandmother. It never occurred to me that<br />
she was a human being with children of her own as I never saw<br />
them and as she hardly went to her own home. She was not supposed<br />
to look after her own children; she was supposed to look<br />
after us. She was a house-girl (a ‘girl’ in her 50s).<br />
26<br />
I used to look at nanny, as we called her, and wonder if she really<br />
loved herself deeply as a black woman, if she loved her body and<br />
if she glorified in it. It was black, pitch black, how could she love it?<br />
I saw many of her friends trying to be white by using skin-lightening<br />
creams. I sympathised but understood. Who did not want to be<br />
white? To me nanny was just there, she belonged to a race that ate<br />
food that we despised. We made fun of her language and her<br />
culture. I always thought that she was lucky to have an opportunity<br />
to be close to a higher race, my race. I never thought that nanny,<br />
as an African, had her own standards when it came to dress,<br />
hairstyle, and other aspects of her culture. We despised her and<br />
her entire race for doing things differently. We would get rattled by<br />
her own way of doing things since our notion of what we regarded<br />
as appropriate was the only valid view. My mum and her friends<br />
would sit and discuss blacks as ‘they’. In actual fact, in my mothers<br />
circles of friends, ‘they’ and ‘them’ referred to blacks. It was<br />
always ‘they eat this’, ‘they comb their hair this way’,.. To my<br />
mother and her friends and in fact to all of us, all blacks were the<br />
same, they only differed in names. One was Rudo and the other<br />
Chido-such heathen names! They needed to be given civilised<br />
names, Christian names such as John, Mary, and James. How could<br />
one claim to be Christian without a Christian name? The kaffir<br />
names are not in the bible. We had to rename all our servants at<br />
home. Their native names were as complicated as they were weird.<br />
I grew up knowing that blacks were either too much of this or not<br />
enough of the other, they behaved in such and such manner,<br />
they…the list was endless. We whites were the better and superior<br />
race and we were ordained to be above others. This kind of