(*1944)
My father came from Scotland to help control the Matabele uprising in the late 1800s. He was a colonel in the army and was given a dairy farm near Gweru by the government in return for his service. A local Shona chief gave him three wives. The funny thing about my dad – he would tell us to never marry a Black person, yet he had African wives.
We were about 32 children in total. Wherever my father made kids, he collected them. He never left them behind. Because in those days if Coloureds were left in the reserves, the Catholic church or the army would come and collect them, and send them to missions, because they didn’t want us to live in the rural areas. One of my mother’s sisters heard about a Coloured mission school called Embakwe. It was a boarding school run by German nuns. So, we were sent there. I went at the age of eight.
Photos: Embakwe school and classroom interior in the 1930s. Courtesy of the Catholic Archdiocese of Bulawayo.
Coloureds are still suffering…Sometimes you feel nervous to be amongst certain people, you rather be by yourself and quiet. Because of the names you get called and so on.
Our father used to speak to his wives in pidgin Shona and to us in English. I spoke Shona with my mother. I remember one holiday when we came home from Embakwe, my mother was upset because my father was ill-treating her. You see, he had new, younger wives. Mother left him and took us to the rural area but the African people there said to us, "we don’t want maBushmanni here". So, we had to go back. We felt not wanted by the Africans, and not wanted by the Whites, who were ashamed of us. We were called MaKharadi, Ninety-nines, maBushmanni…You get tired of it. I feel God was unfair, he made me a Coloured that nobody wanted.
