Acrobat PDF - Kubatana

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