My country was named after a great hero. I was raised in Rhodesia, last outpost of our marvellous empire, only country in the world to ever be named after a man, my hero Cecil Rhodes.
He would have called it Cecilland, but the double l would have made it sound Welsh, which was foreign, and gay which in those days was punishable by being thrown into a prickly ditch at the very least. Actually, they’d just kill you. Hunting accident.
Yes, Cecil was my hero. Such a proud legacy he left.
”You can relax in the sure knowledge that having been born British you have already won first first prize in the race of life.”
what a relief…
Yeah, how cool is that…?
One day I found myself pointing guns at people out of my legacy of specialness. In protection of our divinely sanctioned ripping off of other people’s stuff and I caught myself, teetering on the brink like a drunk on a clifftop.
I later found out that Rhodes ran a secret white supremacist club called ‘Eugenics’, headed up by himself and lord Alfred Milner, an horrendous, murdering bastard..
but special..
that my proud boarding house was named after at school. They were to the Afrikaaners what the Afrikaaners were to the African and killed thousands of them, women and children, in concentration camps during the Boer war about 1905.
Like Hitler..
I said 1905. Hitler got the idea, and permission, from them, I mean us.
When Milner arrived in Southern Matabeleland, where I grew up, his diplomacy was exemplified in a single gesture, he rounded up the entire royal family and hung them.
Because they were evil?
No, because they were in his way.
My upbringing was seeped in having greater rights than others. The African, as a representative of anyone who was not me, was inferior.
hardly out of the trees..
it never occured to me that almost every African I ever met spoke four languages…
The majority of us superior people were raised by Africans who were mostly unspoilt by our tyranny so we kids got what we needed from them. They gave us the good stuff regardless..
my nanny was called Suzannah and I loved her….
…whilst I was taught to hate her family…
of which I was a part.
Of course, it was common knowledge that kaffirs were stupid. All except the one who looked after you, who was your mother and of course she was ok. Your own nanny was different from all the stupid ones.
and/or, my mother is inferior and so am I.
Imagine being raised in two worlds that regard each other with complete incomprehension.
What do you see in the mirror?
Now imagine going through that period of time, 3,500 BC when the whole known world was like that and suddenly half the community, those that worshipped The Great Mother,, were cut off and outlawed/exiled.
I remember my Mother, sort of..
No-one speaks Her name…
and if your name is not spoken,…
you cease to exist.
No-one speaks her name.
And no-one talks about Grampa Lawes being jewish and found lying dead on a mountain of beans.
I’m 40 years old when it occurs to me one day that I’m jewish.
WTF?
Piece it together, grampa lawes is found dead in his posh house in the Hove all sprawled on his beans. paternal mother’s maiden name was..what?
went to the library..
jewish.
I called my dad
yeah, maybe, on your mother’s side..
Maybe? Are you fucking kidding me?!
What the hell do you mean, maybe.
How can anyone forget who they are? How can EVERYONE forget?
In three generations we forgot who we were. And if we can do that on the ground what does it take for She Who Mustn’t Be Named….
IUJG<JHNG<JH<MHJNMHJ
to slip from consciousness.
Not long.
For some years the church fathers rather naively put many of her books in the Apocrypha, tacked on at the back of the bible as if it were okay so long as nobody spoke Her..
KFKHGFKGHF
The estranged spouses lived at different ends of the house until the Apocrypha was ousted to her own separate appartment in down town Antiquities. The last hard back copy I saw had, ‘Last copy in the County’, stamped in the flyleaf.
Many other of her books, like those dead Sea scrolls found at Nag Hammadi are now under lock and key in the bowels of the Vatican.
In the dungeon, mon!
Yeah, but thankyou hey, really, for who would you incarcerate but the opposition, tacitly conveying the significance of the prisoner…?
and thankyou to Cecil for giving me something to kick against that I might one day find myself. But not before swallowing his narcissistic bullshit hook, line and sinker.
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