Rhodesia and my knowledge deficit: Even as an adult, I was often very insecure about my knowledge of the world. That was because everything I'd grown up with had been defined in extremely patriarchal terms. Both men and women had authority in every aspect of life in my childhood. Women's authority was on a par with that of their male counterparts. The only difference was that men knew about politics in a way that women didn't. The men went to war and it was forbidden to tell the women back home everything they had experienced. To this degree, women were on a par with children -- although they were authoritative in public life, they were not expected to carry the emotional burden of war.
The structure of colonial society was hierarchical in terms of knowledge. As it seems to me now, there was a cabal who knew what was really going on with regard to the war and the likelihood of winning it. Then, there were those like my father, who went along with the program because it was the decent thing to do. As in the second world war, the lack of men around the place meant women had fairly high status, being those who were able to manage the running of institutions with an old-fashioned whip-hand.
They had greater power than women have today, when men are present and competing with them (which leads to gender war and psychological strategies to demoralize the other). Despite this, they did not speak of the war "we" were prosecuting, and indeed, in the high school I attended it was forbidden to speak of it.
That was how it came about that my peers and I grew up with a traditional British education, but remained wholly naïve about politics. We studied the history of Europe but we did not study recent, colonial history. When "Rhodesia" became "Zimbabwe" and an uncensored version of "The Herald" began to appear on the library lectern, we sometimes used to flip its pages with a sense of fascination and complete incomprehension. The tactile sensation of flipping the pages and observing the strange imagery in the late morning sun was enough for me.
Children were a step below "women" in the Rhodesian hierarchy, so we occupied a world of our own. We were not to know anything at all, but to be protected from it. That was the role of the strong Rhodesian male -- to protect the (white) women and children from too much knowledge.
The structure of the antiquated society explains everything about my attitudes as I became an adult and understood that I was suffering from a knowledge deficit. I had a number of strategies to try to cope with this, most of which failed me.
One was to try to get adults to tell me what I was missing -- to fill in the gaps that comprised my knowledge failures. This was a wholly failed strategy. After migration, whenever I went to see a psychological counselor of person of that nature (which I did sporadically, at various points in time), I generally wanted to draw from them the knowledge I'd been lacking. I had a feeling that if I could get the knowledge I didn't have, I'd be able to piece together all sorts of aspects of my reality that didn't make sense before.
Needless to say, the psychological counselors I saw were not trained to fill in the gaps of your missing knowledge and it was hard even for me to try to gauge what knowledge I had to get to make reality into a coherent whole. A lack of substantive knowledge can become a psychological problem, interfering with one's way of interacting with the world, but contemporary psychology doesn't recognize this as a fact. I would inevitably talk at cross-purposes with such helpers -- and then leave feeling that I hadn't obtained much of what I'd hoped for.
The problem was: I never had a psychological problem so much as a deficiency in understanding, which made me seem like an idiot, walking into walls that others already seemed to know were there. I'd tripped up on too many barriers due to my worldly ignorance (which also related to sexual matters).
Much of what had led to this was that my Rhodesian engendered superego defined my limits. I couldn't do the work to find out what was "out there" because to be quiet and accepting of all sorts of boundaries was my acculturated norm.
To "transgress" authoritative boundaries, whilst defying the superego, became my means to escape from the Rhodesian cultural identity that had failed me.
The structure of colonial society was hierarchical in terms of knowledge. As it seems to me now, there was a cabal who knew what was really going on with regard to the war and the likelihood of winning it. Then, there were those like my father, who went along with the program because it was the decent thing to do. As in the second world war, the lack of men around the place meant women had fairly high status, being those who were able to manage the running of institutions with an old-fashioned whip-hand.
They had greater power than women have today, when men are present and competing with them (which leads to gender war and psychological strategies to demoralize the other). Despite this, they did not speak of the war "we" were prosecuting, and indeed, in the high school I attended it was forbidden to speak of it.
That was how it came about that my peers and I grew up with a traditional British education, but remained wholly naïve about politics. We studied the history of Europe but we did not study recent, colonial history. When "Rhodesia" became "Zimbabwe" and an uncensored version of "The Herald" began to appear on the library lectern, we sometimes used to flip its pages with a sense of fascination and complete incomprehension. The tactile sensation of flipping the pages and observing the strange imagery in the late morning sun was enough for me.
Children were a step below "women" in the Rhodesian hierarchy, so we occupied a world of our own. We were not to know anything at all, but to be protected from it. That was the role of the strong Rhodesian male -- to protect the (white) women and children from too much knowledge.
The structure of the antiquated society explains everything about my attitudes as I became an adult and understood that I was suffering from a knowledge deficit. I had a number of strategies to try to cope with this, most of which failed me.
One was to try to get adults to tell me what I was missing -- to fill in the gaps that comprised my knowledge failures. This was a wholly failed strategy. After migration, whenever I went to see a psychological counselor of person of that nature (which I did sporadically, at various points in time), I generally wanted to draw from them the knowledge I'd been lacking. I had a feeling that if I could get the knowledge I didn't have, I'd be able to piece together all sorts of aspects of my reality that didn't make sense before.
Needless to say, the psychological counselors I saw were not trained to fill in the gaps of your missing knowledge and it was hard even for me to try to gauge what knowledge I had to get to make reality into a coherent whole. A lack of substantive knowledge can become a psychological problem, interfering with one's way of interacting with the world, but contemporary psychology doesn't recognize this as a fact. I would inevitably talk at cross-purposes with such helpers -- and then leave feeling that I hadn't obtained much of what I'd hoped for.
The problem was: I never had a psychological problem so much as a deficiency in understanding, which made me seem like an idiot, walking into walls that others already seemed to know were there. I'd tripped up on too many barriers due to my worldly ignorance (which also related to sexual matters).
Much of what had led to this was that my Rhodesian engendered superego defined my limits. I couldn't do the work to find out what was "out there" because to be quiet and accepting of all sorts of boundaries was my acculturated norm.
To "transgress" authoritative boundaries, whilst defying the superego, became my means to escape from the Rhodesian cultural identity that had failed me.
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