Judy's Journey from Apartheid to Ubuntu

2019/04/01 PSW revised: 2024/09/30


                                                                        Judy's Journey:  

                                     From Apartheid to Ubuntu - Before, Between, and After

  I was a war-baby, born April 1941 in Cornwall, England, and spent my early years in the little town of Shiplake [ck] near the Thames River.  I spent ten years of my childhood, from age 7 to 17, in South Africa,

    In 1948, with my two younger sisters Patricia (age 5) and Jocelyn, (age 3) our family emigrated to South Africa by boat - across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and down Africa's east coast to Durban.  Dad had received approval from American Express Company to open a South African branch of the travel agency in Johannesburg, and the family settled in Jo'burg's northern suburb, Dunkeld West. 

Racial apartheid was in full-force at the time, and we children lived a privilaged life - two black servants, a backyard swimming pool and tennis-court

., as I became aware of a significant focus in the collection of my stories from the 1990s with details and backstories of many months of PhD research in northeast Zimbabwe, and travel across southern Africa.

(This title for my memoir was revised recently from "One Woman's Journey from Apartheid to Ubuntu.".

 
    During the ten years of my childhood in South Africa, from 1948 to 1958 (the first decade of official apartheid) I was immersed in a life of white privilege. Our two-storey family home had a large back porch alongside a thirty-foot swimming pool and a tennis court at the back of the garden.  My sisters and I went to Roedean, one of the top private girls’ schools in Johannesburg.  During the school-holidays in August each year, we went on safari to a game reserve near or far.  

    It was in the senior-school history class at Roedean that I began to sense something missing in the lessons we were getting from ‘Dickie Bird’ (as we nick-named our history teacher). Although I had no way to explain the problem, I knew it was real. Then, with two years to go before matriculation (graduation) I had an option. I made the choice to take art and art history instead. And while I was certainly not one of our class’s top artists, it turned out to be an excellent decision. In addition to time     for painting, sculpture and pottery, the art history class covered many eras, aptly named in our textbook, Art Through the Ages.

     The book, which sits on a shelf in my library to this day, has over eight-hundred pages; sixty pages of glossary and index; with sections devoted to different eras and cultural regions of the world. Only five pages in the entire book are on African Art, under the subheading “Primitive Art” and within those few pages, sections only for West African Sculpture and ‘Bushman’ Painting. Despite this ‘all-but-Africa’ bias, I found art history intriguing, and was happy to leave Dickie-Bird’s class behind.

 
    As I recount in this memoir, four decades later, in 1993, I return to Southern Africa - to Zimbabwe - and one of my first excursions was to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

     There is a photo of me, standing on the carved steps to the Upper Ruins, my hands outstretched, the expression on my face not hard to interpret:

 
“How come our history teacher never taught us about the African origins of this architectural wonder?”

    In the apartheid era, during my high-school years in South Africa in history class, the ruins were ascribed to the Queen of Sheba. They could not possibly have been the work of an African civilization.    It was only in 1980, when the ‘Second Chimurenga’ (struggle) ended, and Southern Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe, that the archeological information was allowed to be published. Great Zimbabwe was just the first of my 1990s “truth lessons” about African culture. 

This memoir recounts many more. [and ‘Ubuntu’? … more to come]