In 1974 I stepped off the plane into an oven. with waves of heat coming off the tarmac it was stifling, on leaving the UK we (my sisters and I) thought we would be living in mud huts but were surprised to find a very modern city, in not time at all we came across our first wild life in the guise of a cockroach measuring about two inches we were surprised to say the least.
On moving into the suburbs of Johannesburg it was disturbing to see metal bars on all the windows and a small house at the bottom of the garden apparently for the house cleaner and garden boy, servants? of cause my mother being a Brit, straight off the plane, wasn't having no strange woman in her house.
For me school was different too as apart from the fact it was all white the kids seemed to have a code, me being disabled and used to getting picked on by the British schooling system found that no one said a bad word to me, finding out later that if anyone was to pick on someone disabled then they would have been quietly taken aside and shown the error of they're ways, to say the least it was refreshing.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
White in Africa
My Name Is Steve,
I'm a student in Livingston, Scotland doing a course on computing and I'd like to share a little about my growing up days.
In 1974 the family moved to South Africa, it was a very different place than it is now. Power was given to the minority and the majority were subjected to keep the minority in power. it was said that they we not ready for power. For a 12 year old boy, having been brought up in Britain i didn't understand the concept that you were not to talk to African's as equals. Over the next ten years we travelled all over South Africa, going to school and still was told that the African was a sub-species. (I know, moronic)
Ended up in Rhodesia and still at school learning the Rhodesian point of view and as a child, excepting it, who was i to argue with adults, in time i grew up, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and at last I was under the impression that the African would now be our equal, but generations of breading to think your better that others are hard to ignore and resentment for being kept down by the barrel of a gun for so many generations is a bitten pill to swallow.
When I finally left, I came back to Brittan a very confused adult, i felt an outsider in Britain, and I wasn't South African, Rhodesian or Zimbabwean.
I have lived in Scotland now for 24 years and funny enough i am not accepted by women as English, they would much prefer to let others think I’m African.
Where do i belong, who knows?
I'm a student in Livingston, Scotland doing a course on computing and I'd like to share a little about my growing up days.
In 1974 the family moved to South Africa, it was a very different place than it is now. Power was given to the minority and the majority were subjected to keep the minority in power. it was said that they we not ready for power. For a 12 year old boy, having been brought up in Britain i didn't understand the concept that you were not to talk to African's as equals. Over the next ten years we travelled all over South Africa, going to school and still was told that the African was a sub-species. (I know, moronic)
Ended up in Rhodesia and still at school learning the Rhodesian point of view and as a child, excepting it, who was i to argue with adults, in time i grew up, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and at last I was under the impression that the African would now be our equal, but generations of breading to think your better that others are hard to ignore and resentment for being kept down by the barrel of a gun for so many generations is a bitten pill to swallow.
When I finally left, I came back to Brittan a very confused adult, i felt an outsider in Britain, and I wasn't South African, Rhodesian or Zimbabwean.
I have lived in Scotland now for 24 years and funny enough i am not accepted by women as English, they would much prefer to let others think I’m African.
Where do i belong, who knows?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)