Race is never not a part of my interactions and
identity in Zim. And I’m constantly gob-smacked when I encounter a person
living his/her life in oblivion to the colour of their own skin and the weight
of history that it carries, the invisible implications etched all over, and the
reality of their own prejudices.
The other day, I crossed from one side of Harare to the other; from one racial and social existence to another, from one world and life to another.
It was a little strange
to realize that I don’t belong in either world.
On Wednesday, I spent a
few hours “down-down-town”, shopping with a friend in the part of town where streets
are crammed and crowded with people. We bumped and wended our way through the
striding, shouting, grabbing masses, being called after to buy coat-hangers,
phone-lines, onions, men’s belts, passport-holders… you name it. It’s the part
of town where you can buy flats/pumps for $4, where you don’t hear a word of
English being chatted, where shouts of “hey sissi” (sister) and “I love you,
baby” follow you around if you happen to be female. Oh yeah, and white. There
is nary a white person around, downtown. Except that day, there was me; a
shining beacon of whiteness that didn’t belong among the brown bodies flowing
and shouting their way through the streets. My friend and I drew stares and
comments and whistles. Oh the joys of being female. My friend – a stunning black
girl with high-cheek bones, smooth, dark skin and a fashion sense I envy – was
the perfect companion and guide. We laughed at some comments, shook our heads
at others, ignored most. A few times, however, when I refused to engage with
some idiot male, someone would shout after us in Shona and she would interpret:
“You with the dark skin, tell the other pretty one to come here” or, from a man
leaning out the window of a kombi, “why is it that one is born light and the
other born dark?” Appraised and valued like goats or hats, all based on the
colour of our skins.
And then from there I
drove across town to Borrowdale Village – a shopping centre with prosperous
businesses, high-end shops, fancy restaurants and the city’s newest cinemas.
It’s the part of Harare where pumps/flats cost $20-50, where white ladies meet
for tea and black business men for lunch, where money is no object, and brand-name-clothed
teens stroll through the shops with iPhones in hand. In the coffee shop where I
parked myself for the afternoon to write e-mails, the waiters are all black and
the only person working the cash register was (and is always) a white guy. (OK,
maybe that was callous, but it’s reality). It’s actually one of my favourite
coffee places – the service is excellent, the food and drink good and the wifi
decent. I can sit myself there for a few, uninterrupted hours with my computer.
But. It’s also a place
where I feel the scratchy, sticky feeling of being a rich, white young woman – there
is always a keen and heavy social/racial divide between myself and the waiter who
serves me. I feel just as uncomfortable and out-of-place there as I do downtown.
The waiter speaks to my whiteness, my assumed wealth, my supposed higher social
standing. Server and Served live in separate realities and only interact as
goods and money exchange hands, relating as through an unbreakable window of
one-way glass. There’s no relationship, no conversation as equals, no way for
me to cross over or reach out. Once again, I, we, are appraised and dismissed
by the colour of our skin.
