Life in Rhodesia -- a question of identity

For the first 16 to 18 years of my life, I did not have a clear and self-conscious identity, not in the Western sense of fitting myself into a particular category.  In this, I was no different from all my Rhodesian friends.

I see a certain resonance regarding all of this in relation to Marechera's life, since in The Black Insider he admits that he never knew that he was black until he encountered racism (presumably "on the threshold of manhood" in Rhodesia, and then as a later reminder, in Britain.)

Similarly, I didn't know I was white. I knew what my skin colour was, but there my understanding of whiteness stopped. It will be hard for those with a very different education in racial politics to understand (just as they don't understand how Marechera could sincerely make the statement that he did), but we both didn't realise the social and political repercussions entailed in our having a certain skin colour, until we were (in my case) an adult or (in his case) on the verge of being an adult.
Yet we both lived in Rhodesia, where popular theory has it, we both should have known better. "How could you not have known?" is the eternal refrain of those whose social and economic systems were entirely different from ours. We didn't know because the machine of culture was very crude and often entirely inept in categorising us down racial lines, unless it had a certain and explicit purpose in mind. If, at any moment, the system did not require to make one the master and the other the master's slave, then both potential master and slave were free to run around quite wild -- until such time as the system had use for one.

As children, we did not feel that we were destined for any particular purpose specifically. Childhood was innocence -- as Marechera points out about his own boyhood. Such innocence was experienced long and late. We both no doubt had Queen Victoria to thank -- who gave her name to a certain philosophy concerning the absolute difference between childhood and adulthood. Therefore we had long childhoods, although at a certain point, perhaps at the point of puberty, things were supposed to snap into place suddenly, so that all necessary adult knowledge would suddenly be in place, equipping one to fulfil one's appropriate social role. Thus it was a puberty that Marechera lingered "on the threshold" unable to cross into his adult role, which would in Rhodesian society have been that of a humiliated servant.

I came to knowledge of the political meaning of my whiteness and femaleness very late. I could not have known, despite the many indications around me, that one was considered by society to be a boon, the other a generally negative quality. I realised that I was happy because the British Empire had given me the possibility to live in Africa. I thought that females were just as free and happy as males -- only God had given males over to playing different sports. I did not consider deeply what fate had ordained, as if it all had something to do with me. The divisions of labour, insofar as they were evident to me, were something fate had ordained.

Beyond my expectation that certain types of people would fulfil certain particular roles, I had not racial nor racialist consciousness. Rather, I was brought up to be timid, and a little unsure of myself -- more so as I approached adulthood. My view was that my peers were the source of all sorts of vicarious adventure, and that I could live other lives, imaginatively, through theirs. My peers and I approached life with a sort of collective consciousness, sensing the environment for what kind of mood it offered for us collectively to share.

It is hard for those who haven't experienced it to imagine, but our deep-seated trust in the authorities, (despite our irreverent and often disruptive gestures), meant that whatever the authorities said was good for us was good. Therefore racial desegregation in the early eighties was for me and every one of my friends (as far as I knew) no more than a little social hiccup. By virtue of being included in my class, the blacks became my friends. They were my peers, since the authorities had deemed it should be so. One does not cut off the possibility of sharing a whole new dimension of exotic life (life itself being a form of the exotic) from another 'self'. That would be like cutting off a part of one's body, or deliberately limiting the range of one's imagination. The blacks in my school were equally, as much as various whites, my friends.

I didn't realise I was white until I came to Australia and wasn't supposed to talk about it. It was expected that it should be an embarrassment for me -- but what was really the embarrassment is that I had lost all my other selves, and therefore had been reduced to a very poor version of my true sense of me.

I didn't realise yet, that I had to grow an ego, and a certain amount of healthy narcissism in order to compensate for my deep personal loss.