Maud (*1933)
My great grandmother was Mzondwazi Khumalo, younger sister to [Ndebele King] Lobengula. My great grandfather was William Usher, a tradesman from Scotland, Lobengula’s interpreter and close friend. When Queen Victoria visited, she brought Lobengula a throne. He said to Usher, "I can’t sit on it, I am used to my little stool, so now when you come here, that is the chair you’re going to sit on".
Photo: William Usher
William Usher had six children: my granny Baby Ann was one of them, born in the late 1800s. Granny married my grandfather, a Welshman brought into the country to train the settlers in gold mining. The bit that I know is growing up under the African culture. Not the bit – that was the stronger part in fact. Granny was very good to me, of all her grandchildren, I knew her best. She used to send me and another little girl to the shops over the hill to buy sugar. Now me and that child, our mouths would be covered with sugar when we got back! We used to swim in the river too...it flowed, unlike today. I grew up with the Africans in Old Bulawayo, where Lobengula had his village, until I went to [the Coloured mission school] Embakwe.
Photos: King Lobengula (L), Baby Ann Usher (R)
My father had me with a white Afrikaner woman. The family were against it. So, my mother was taken out to a farm where her sister was, to give birth to me. My mother said I must be given to my uncle, but because he wasn’t married at the time, I was handed over to Granny. I stayed for four years and was then taken to Embakwe mission. I remember going there with the other Usher children by ox wagon. At the time, there were a lot of children that came from a Matabele background. I couldn’t speak any English, only siNdebele. I love that language. Even today, I sometimes can’t understand what I’m reading in English.
I used to ask my aunt as a teenager, what does my mother look like? She would make me stand in front of the old dressing table. She would say, look in the mirror.
Walking in town, I used to look at all the White women and wonder if they were my mother.
I remember one incident at the city hall. I was going to pay my rates and taxes, and went to the counter for senior citizens. There was a queue, but the cashier said to me in siNdebele, "just wait Granny, let me serve two or three people and then you come, just stand there." This one woman in the queue then turned around and said to the others, "I wonder who the hell she thinks she is, their time is over, it’s our time! She must go and queue at the back." She thought I was White. So I went to that lady and said to her in siNdebele, "if your granny didn’t sleep with a White man, I wouldn’t be here". I am born from Black and White. I know, and admit, that I’ve got Black blood in me.
God has been good to me, but growing up without love, you don’t know what love is. I was blessed, though I was a plastic bag, that blew from one thorn tree to another…
