2019/04/01 PSW
One
Woman’s Journey towards Truth and Reconciliation.
This title
for my memoir came to me only recently, as I became aware of a significant
focus in the collection of my stories from the 1990s with details and
backstories of many months of PhD research in northeast Zimbabwe, and travel
across southern Africa.
During
ten years of my childhood in South Africa – the first decade of official
apartheid - from 1948 to 1958, I was immersed in a life of white
privilege. Our family home had a thirty-foot
swimming pool and a tennis court in the back garden; we took yearly safaris to
game reserves in the August holidays; and my sisters and I went to Roedean, one
of the top private girls’ schools in Johannesburg.
It was
in the senior-school history class at Roedean that I began to sense something
missing in the lessons we were getting from ‘Dickie Bird’ (as we nick-named our
history teacher). Although I had no way
to explain the problem, I knew it was real. Then, with two years to go before
matriculation (graduation) I had an option.
I made the choice to take art and art history instead. And while I was
certainly not one of our class’s top artists, it turned out to be an excellent
decision. In addition to time for painting,
sculpture and pottery, the art history class covered many eras, aptly named in
our textbook, Art Through the Ages.
The book, which sits on a shelf in my
library to this day, has over eight-hundred
pages; sixty pages of glossary and index; with sections devoted to different
eras and cultural regions of the world.
Only five pages in the entire book are on African Art, under the subheading
“Primitive Art” and within those few pages, sections only for West African
Sculpture and ‘Bushman’ Painting. Despite
this ‘all-but-Africa’ bias, I found art history intriguing, and was happy to
leave Dickie-Bird’s class behind.
As I
recount in this memoir, four decades later, in 1993, I return to Southern
Africa - to Zimbabwe - and one of my first excursions was to the ruins of Great
Zimbabwe.
There (p…) is a photo of me, standing on the carved steps to
the Upper Ruins, my hands outstretched, the expression on my face not hard to
interpret:
“How
come no-one ever told me about the
origins of this architectural wonder”
In the apartheid era, during my high-school years in South
Africa, the ruins were ascribed to the Queen of Sheba. They could not possibly have been the work of
an African civilization. It was only in
1980, when the ‘Second Chimurenga’
(struggle) ended, and Southern Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe, that the
archeological information was allowed to be published. Great Zimbabwe was just the first of my 1990s
“truth lessons” about African culture.
This memoir recounts many more.
[and ‘Reconciliation’? … more to come]
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