Thank You Mrs G: A Colonised Mindset to Total Emancipation

By Nohle Makiwa

In 2010 when I joined Facebook, it was an exciting time for me. However, as I reconnected with my old schoolmates, one thing became evident; my childhood in the colonial era had impacted my life in ways I was not aware of until now. I realised even though I am black, I was a staunch believer in white supremacy or at least my behaviour testified to it. Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 had not changed this. My journey to self-awareness and ultimately self-determination as I studied my History, is what birthed this book. If you are African, I pray this book becomes a healing balm for you and awakens you to your greatness as an African.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781665582056

Nohle Makiwa

I was born in Apartheid South Africa and raised in Rhodesia now Zimbabwe. I moved to England in the early 90’s. I relocated to Ireland in the late 90’s where I lived and worked in Finance for most of the 18 years I was there. I have been living and working in UK for the past five years.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

BRAINWASHED FROM THE WOMB

CHILDHOOD

I was born in apartheid South Africa to a Rhodesian father, whose mother, number 5 of 6 wives, died when he was an infant and a South African, (Xhosa) mother who came from a very large affluent family. My maternal grandfather, who had 2 wives, owned 5 farms which were seized from him by the Boers when the controversial 1913 land act was passed in South Africa triggering a ripple effect of related acts until 1950. These acts sought to completely confiscate fertile land from black South Africans.

A school was named after my grandfather only in recent years and a little financial reparation was given to his descendants but it’s inadequate restitution.

I come from a family of seven, with one set of twins, and I am the sixth child. When I was about six years old my family moved from South Africa to Rhodesia where segregation had a somewhat softer tone but fundamentally upheld the same belief: Africans were lesser humans, or less evolved humans. The Prime Minister of Rhodesia then until just before our independence in 1979 was Ian Smith. Mr Smith believed colonisation was a wonderful thing because before it came we had no written language. Even though the Bantu people built Great Zimbabwe in the 11th Century, Mr Smith didn’t believe it and he and others sought to discredit us for many years until scientific research proved it.

Which is why back then, in the seventies, when we moved, black people literally had no voting rights. Only a few black Rhodesians could vote. We were segregated from whites just like it was in South Africa. It was the African version of the American Jim Crow laws which had ceased in America in 1965 with the introduction of Civil Rights Laws. In Southern Africa they were still very much a part of our lives. At the age of six my rights were essentially no different from those of my parents who were middle aged at the time. My parents were very good citizens which in those days translated to them being fully submitted to white authority, they were like obedient children.

The ‘learned’ Dr Samuel Cartwright had said

Like children, Negroes require government in everything … or they will run into excesses,

And so it was, that throughout my childhood I saw my father diminish himself into a nonentity as he communicated with White people. This figure of authority in my home that I loved and revered so much became a little boy when communicating to white people. Most of them were endeared to him, he played the game well. He was a good ‘boy’ as they called him back then even though he was also my father. He was a good Christian man who never questioned the ‘ways of God’. Ways which we later found out were the ways of those who saw themselves as ‘gods’ as we got revelation.

When we moved to the country named after Cecil Rhodes, Rhodesia, my father’s country of birth, it took us 18 months to get our own home. In between we moved about four times. One time into a two roomed house where my 3 brothers and my 2 sisters and I share a small little bedroom. We finally moved into what we then thought was our permanent home which we loved. It had two bedrooms and a living room. Two of my three brothers slept in the living room while the third slept with my parents in the main bedroom. He was about two when we moved there. My two sisters and I slept in the second bedroom. What I still cannot get my head around is the fact that we always had relatives who came to visit and stay for weeks on end but I cannot remember what the sleeping arrangements were but it worked.

The Superiority of a white man was well drilled into my mind already at that age, I believed that was set by God. As religious as my family was, I never questioned why we were lower than the other race. I might have believed God put them above because everywhere I went in religious circles they were given honour.

We were meant to be ‘Hewers of wood and drawers of water’ (Bible Joshua 9:21). There were pictures of a ‘white Jesus’ all over. Somehow no one I knew seemed to challenge the idea of a European Jesus despite him being Jewish. It served its purpose, we believed Jesus was white.

I didn’t know too there were struggles for equality all over Africa and America. A fight for self determination. I didn’t even know there was one in my own country. Although I heard my parents talking about it on rare occasions (not too much lest they are heard). I listened to what I now know was propaganda news about Africa on radio, my School books still upheld white heroes of which Cecil Rhodes and David Livingstone were the best. I also knew about Alexander the Great, perhaps my favourite hero of all. At that young age one thing I knew well was that I was under a white man and my best chances of success in life lay in submitting to him.

Even when my nephew disappeared, they said he had gone to Mozambique to fight for our liberation, it still did not register than I needed to be free.

We had to keep quiet about it. The whole family would be tormented, they said. All I heard were whispers of half truths. Questions tumbled in my head. ‘Was it right to fight the white man who was set above us by God?’ The answer to that question took years to unveil.

Most of my life was lived trying to please people especially those in authority and as I grew older those people were mainly white. The whiter they came the better it was for me because I felt they at least deserved it. I was my parent’s child, I had learnt well the art of appeasing the white man and it worked.

The journey to undoing my mis-education and re educating myself with all the evil that has had a hold on not just me but my whole continent, has been a long and painful one.

To learn that my father’s behaviour was a result of conditioning, it was passed on to him by his parents after Lobengula was tricked into signing away the land. He was ‘mentally altered and brought under Anglo Saxon rule’ in the words of Rhodes (Confession of Faith 1877).

He strongly believed in the superiority of white people and he believed it was his choice to submit.

HOW MY MIND WAS CONDITIONED

Child Development Scientists tell us that from the 3rd trimester in the womb to when we reach the age of seven, our brain waves are very slow, just above sleep mode (theta waves) and at this stage our nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. We are at this very delicate stage in life, just recording what we see and hear and adapting to our environment.

In this critical period we learn survival skills or traits which, if we don’t learn during this period, would be difficult and sometimes impossible to learn later in life. One of these important skills is acquiring our first language. During this sensitive period children can learn up to five different languages and speak them fluently when exposed to the natives of the languages.

When I read this I could not understand why, if my education was going to be delivered in English, why one of the languages introduced to me was not English. Between the age of 5 and puberty language is much more difficult to learn.

At the age of 5, as a black child in Rhodesia, I was completely segregated from my white counterparts. I would only see them in town from a distance and therefore could not learn their language until I started school and they would never learn mine ever.

90% of education funding went to the white students who started school at 5 and preschool before 5 while black children started at 7 years of age. Only 8% of the population in Rhodesia was white. Perhaps this explained why I seemed to be playing catch up with my contemporary white generation. But my lagging behind was instead attributed to my perceived lower IQ as a black person.

If indeed black people were inferior mentally would it not have been them who started school earlier? This system was created to help push the narrative that we have an inferior mental capacity.

All my critical years and part of my teenage years were lived under colonial rule, under this system that was designed to sabotage my self worth and mould me into an obedient follower instead of a leader.

‘Give me a child until he’s seven and I will show you the man’ Attributed to St Ignatius Loyola and Aristotle

A black child in colonial Rhodesia only started school at 7 most could not afford to go to preschool, some could not even start school at 7 due to lack of funds. So the language which would become the mode of delivery for all their classroom learning throughout their academic lives was only introduced after the critical period. They faced an uphill struggle from the day they started their learning. This foreign language would also be the only official language.

The English child on the other hand was introduced to formal education two years prior, at the age of five. Their education being conveniently delivered to them in a language they spoke their first words in.

Every effort was made to make the black child subconsciously convince him or herself that she was indeed DESPICABLE (Confession of Faith Cecil Rhodes 1877).

A black child was fighting against a system that really, was grooming them for the brainless work, enticing them to internalise their own oppression.

Probably the most obvious of these retarding tactics was segregation. African teachers whose mother tongue was not english, teaching African children English? So throughout their lives, both teacher and student, would be striving to speak a language of people they would never organically mix with. The white skin and it’s language represented a superiority that we could only strive for but never reach. A long lasting hierarchy of oppression that still lingers until this day, chipping away at our confidence.

I remember doing radio lessons in kindergarten. A little green (sometimes blue) radio sat on the teachers desk. The only time we would hear a white voice teaching us. It was precious because it came once a week or once a fortnight and we all had to gather around a little radio and hear ‘Miss Childs’ teach us nursery rhymes and give a few tips on how to speak English ‘properly’. All of us smiling and following the instructions from this lovely voice coming out of a little radio.

I wish they could have added a little more funding for us to own a radio for each class but unfortunately the budget could only allow us to share a radio between two classes. So when we finished our ‘Radio Lesson’’ as we called it, we had to pass it on to the next class.

These radios were battery operated too so when the school couldn’t afford to buy new batteries or fix them when they broke, we would have to miss ‘Miss Childs’ that week.

This is a well known sales strategy when scarcity is used to increase desire. We yearned to hear this white voice that spoke English so musically and effortlessly, a figure we could only dream of being and knew well we could never be. With whites being segregated from us physically, we were happy to contend with a voice. As children our imaginations of Miss Childs was angelic. Sadly this was a voice only to be enjoyed once a week.

I grew up in that system and at the age of fifteen, after independence, when segregation was finally outlawed, I found myself in a class surrounded by white girls. It was quite frightening for me as this was a complete contrast from what I had been accustomed to. Before I started in this school, I was out in a catholic school in rural Zimbabwe, surrounded by people whom we called then ‘SRB’s’ an acronym for Strong Rural Background’. Everybody there was black and 95 of them were raised rural. There we were punished if caught speaking our vernacular. Such was the influence of colonialism: an all black school punishing students for speaking their mother tongue.

The aim was to make us play and think in English and overall pretend as much as possible to be English in order to succeed because there was no real success without the English language.

But now here I was surrounded by a ‘superior’ race, according to my thinking at the time. I found myself battling to be understood and to understand my fellow students in my own country. Battling to speak the language of power, the language of only 8% of the population imposed on the 92% of us.

My English had served me well in an all black environment up until then, amongst those who were obviously struggling with the Queen’s language like myself. My mother was an educated woman so with help from her, I struggled a little less than most. One of my previous black teachers had once called me an ‘English Teacher’ but when suddenly immersed in this new totally English environment, I knew I could never be.

The struggle to read, speak and write this imperial language at that age at the same level as those whose mother tongue was English was real. English was theirs not mine. They had, all their lives, been taught by the owners of this language and they communicated all their emotions in this language all their lives. I, on the other hand, was immersed in a completely different culture altogether until then and only spoke English mostly at school. I wish I was as aware as I am now, that if the aim was for me to really learn English, I would have never been kept away from the Native English people. My struggle was planned. I was introduced to this language after my critical years and I was struggling to learn it. I’ve come to the realisation that this ‘trophy language’ although still being used worldwide, was and still is a tool to control me. English was one of the original tools used to subjugate us and my mastering of it should only bring me pride if I have mastered my own language first.

I wasn’t in doubt about my inferiority in this group of girls because that had been well programmed into my psyche all my life, but not being able to communicate with them or express myself fully made me feel inhibited.

Whenever there was a reading session when we were each expected to read aloud, I sweated. I found it hard to even understand myself because the nerves got the better of me and somehow the words came out wrong. The desire to sound the same as them took over me. My thoughts and my voice somehow were not congruent. Part of it was because my mind was wavering between trying to guess how they wanted me to pronounce words and how I was accustomed to pronouncing them. I was trying to read and think at the same time. It wasn’t working. First time for everything is usually a struggle but this was aggravated by the fact that I was surrounded by what I perceived as a superior race. I was in awe.

As an African child, before I could even find out who I was, I was taught by people like Enid Blyton, the English Author, through her books, that I was inferior and undesirable and somehow that was fine with me. I laughed and listened to nursery rhymes that ridiculed me and internalised my own oppression at that early age. I was comfortable in inferiority. My