Petina Gappah - Birth of a Nation

 

I'm from a very small African country called Zimbabwe. It's a country that's been in the news very recently for very many bad reasons. The one thing you might not know about Zimbabwe is that it's one of the youngest democracies in the world. Well, democracy is perhaps not the right word. [audience chuckle] So let me say [laughs] it's one of the youngest countries in the world. It's only 29 years old. And the big year of change in my country, the big year of change in my family, and the big year of change for me was 1980, when my country finally became independent.

 

Those of you, and I'm sure there are many of you here who are experts in African history, will know that in the late '50s and the early '60s, Britain, France, and the other colonial powers were giving up their colonies for a number of reasons. So, countries like Nigeria became independent, Ghana became independent, but not Rhodesia. The white minority government in Rhodesia, led by somebody called Ian Smith, had other ideas for the kind of country they wanted to live in. And one of the very firm ideas they had was that they didn't want to live in a country ruled by black people.

 

So they declared a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, the colonial power and the result of this was that the country was isolated from the outside. On the inside, there was a civil war between the white minority on the one side and the black majority, led by black freedom fighters. And after about 14 years of war and negotiations in England, we finally became an independent republic called Zimbabwe.

 

I have very vivid memories of that time. We lived in the township, which were these African areas. Rhodesia was segregated along the same lines as South Africa, but on a smaller scale. So, we lived in the township where, I remember around the time of independence, there was so much music. Everybody was singing, everybody was dancing. It was almost like you could actually touch the joy in the air. And the song that everybody was singing, if you'll allow me to sing it, is a song by Bob Marley called Zimbabwe. Do you know it? Then join in. [giggles] [sings] Africa shall liberate Zimbabwe. Africa shall liberate Zimbabwe. It was a song that was on everybody's lips. Then the biggest thing that happened that year for a lot of people in Harare was that Bob Marley himself came to Salisbury to give a concert, an independence concert. He came all the way from Kingston with his Wailers.

 

But that was not the biggest thing that happened to me, because the biggest thing that happened to me was that the white areas, the formerly white areas, the suburbs, began to open up and my father finally achieved the dream of a lifetime. He moved us out of the township into the suburbs to live with the white people, the good area. So, imagine what it meant for a family from the township, where the only road that was tarred was the road to town. And all the other little roads were dusty, full of mud, full of dust. There was no electricity at night in some parts of the township. So, imagine us in this new environment where the roads are lined with beautiful trees. In the morning, the milkman deposits two bottles of milk outside your door. One silver, one gold, depending on the amount of cream you want in your milk. The breadman rings the bell in the morning to tell you that your fresh Lobel's bread is ready for you outside. And the newspaper boy throws his newspaper over the wall for you to read in the morning.

 

I went to a school called Alfred Beit, where I found myself as one of 24 children in the classroom. Twenty of them were white. Now, I had been at a school in the township where we had something called hot seating, which meant that 48 of us came to school in the morning and then went home to make room for another 48 people who came in the afternoon. So, this was absolute paradise to me. A class of only 24 children. 

 

But the very first thing I did in my new classroom was the wrong thing. My teacher, Ms. Callan, called me to her desk and as a well-trained little African girl who had been brought up well by her teachers, I knelt before her. "What are you, a goat?" she said. I still remember the surprised laughter of the whole class. And it was a sound that I became very familiar with as the year went on. Because it seemed everything about me was wrong. Everything I did was wrong. My hair, for instance. Not this hair. Well, this is my hair in the sense that I paid for it [laughs]. [audience laughter] But my hair was too curly. It was too close to my head. My English, when it came, was too slow, and the accent was very strange. And then there was the small matter of the sandwiches.

 

You see, my mother made us egg sandwiches every morning for school. So, she fried eggs, put them between buttered slices of bread. But that was the wrong food to take to school, because what the white children ate was something called Polony, which really stank. [audience laughter] And then they had something else called Marmite, which is a yeast extract, and it's the foulest tasting substance known to man. [audience chuckles] And I really wanted this stinky, horrible food [audience chuckles] because I thought that if I ate the same food that the other people ate, if I had the same kind of hair, then I would fit in somehow. But of course, that didn't happen.

 

So every day I had Russell Webb laughing at my hair. I had Carrie Treloar laughing at my hair. I had Natasha Russell refusing to share her Smarties with me that she bought on holiday in South Africa. The only time that I really felt I belonged to Alfred Beit, my new school, was in the mornings at assembly. We would sit cross-legged on the floor and Ms. Roberts, our headmistress, would play the piano and lead us in the school song. It was a song about valor, about duty, about honor. It was a song about commitment and dedication. And I sang it at the top of my voice because it was the one moment when I knew peace at my school, when there was no laughter, when there was no mockery on the playground. It was a song about the pioneer column who colonized my country and turned it into Rhodesia.

 

So there I was, a 10-year-old African child in a newly independent country called Zimbabwe, singing this song in which God regarded the conquest of my country as an act of honor [chuckles]. This was a song celebrating the conquest of a kingdom in Zimbabwe. It was a song celebrating the fact that many thousands of people had been made landless. The song was called Thou who didst Guide Our Father's feet. And the last sentence was, “As thou has done, do once again.” I love that song. [audience laughter]

 

As you can imagine, we didn't sing it for very long. My friend Jessie Majome, who has gone on to greater things and is now actually the Deputy Minister of Justice in my country, told her father about the song that we were made to sing every morning. And her father called The Herald, which was the state newspaper. And I remember the Herald journalist coming to the school and Ms. Roberts rushing across the quadrangle. And she was quite baffled by the whole thing. "I'm not a racialist," she insisted. "I have black children in my school. What do you mean I'm a racist? That's not it at all. It's just a tradition. It's like the school motto. It's like the recorder lessons. It's just a tradition. It doesn't mean anything."

 

I think that this was the moment that the teachers at my school and Ms. Roberts finally had to confront what it meant to live in an independent African country. It wasn't just about changing the name of the country from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, changing the name of the capital from Salisbury to Harare. It meant that not only did we have to start relating to each other differently across the racial divide, but we also had to start re-evaluating our history.

 

And for some of the teachers, I think that was a step too far, because about a year later came the Great White Flight when a lot of teachers left the school and a lot of children left the school as well. I'm not really sure that I can relate the white flight to this particular incident, but what I know is that after about a year at my new school, it finally began to resemble the kind of school you'd expect to find in an independent African country. So, I finally found myself being part of a school that had all the amenities that my old township lacked, but that truly looked like a Zimbabwean school. And this is how independence came to me. Thank you.