Repost

Hard to understand for some people, I know — but identity (including racial identity) — was far more of an ideologically entrenched affair in industrialized Western culture, than it was for me under Rhodesian colonialism. It really is like well meaning Westerners have to bend over backwards to combat their own entrenched ideas about race, because the categories that define identity here are so absolute. In my generation’s experience of Rhodesian culture (which was different from that of my parents), racial difference was more organically (rather than mechanistically — as in the West) defined. So, we could traverse boundaries through social interaction without feeling that we were taking up any particular political position in doing so. This was, of course, in the case of my generation — and of course there were variations, I suppose, in different individuals’ behaviour, but it was more or less along this line. I only learned later that I was supposed to have the negative and profoundly condescending attitudes towards blacks that westerns harboured themselves, and which they were keen to combat within themselves. I was not psychologically constructed in such a way that I felt the need to combat some kind of a priori presupposition of superiority within myself. Being brought up during war time in Rhodesia, I already felt that difference (virtually of any sort) was a manifestation of creativity in the world. My favourite compliment for someone was that they were “mad”. I had a very different way of looking at things way before I came to the Western environment. I couldn’t believe the stiffness of people here, and their deeply held intentions to prove themselves in every way to be ‘not mad’.