Over time, this blog has become more of a personal project, and this is mainly because I have had little time to read books or on books lately. Last weekend, however, en route to New York City, I began reading Lauretta Ngcobo's and they didn't die, which I will review briefly for the blog. So far, it intrigues with its authorial directness (occasionally much harsher than I am used to in prose) and its rather powerful storyline which is set in the barren Sabelweni valley in South Africa.
Meanwhile, as the summer days in Princeton come and go with surefire rapidity, I have taken to writing again, and below is an excerpt from a lengthy piece I am working on called "Half-Caste." It is my hope that it will become a mighty book project one day. And I must say this: It cometh to fruition quite slowly, as have many of my curiosities and more realistic dreams.
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At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as “half-caste.” The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in Nigeria.
For a long time—from early childhood to late teens—I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn’t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were “half-caste,” you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The “half-caste” women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.
In the first decades following Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left for their studies—and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, he met my mother and married her in a heady time of some discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union.
At that time, the generalized reactions to the African male in the Soviet union involved a few strongly-held beliefs, most of them informed, arguably, by circulating racist imagery not only in the visual form (picture books) but also in the literary one as well (poetry, nursery rhymes, etc). And there was also the ideologically-driven desire to communize the African, which in and of itself masked an impulse that was not only patronizing but perhaps in some ways very misplaced given that little was known about Africa in the Soviet Union. In fact, at that time, most Russians had been cocooned in their comradeship; very few had traveled to Africa and had gleaned most of their knowledge from biased televised programs, books, stories, and songs. It was said that my grandmother had never laid eyes on a black person before she met my father—and she was not amused by my mother’s decision to marry my father. She is noticeably absent in all photos taken at the wedding ceremony in Kiev.
Yet deeply in love, my parents embraced their stark differences—and their unborn child, my sister, and in the precise moment that my mother fell in love with my father, I believe, her fate was sealed. In 1972, my sister was born into the convoluted world of angst and tears over my mother’s decision to leave Ukraine, indefinitely, for Africa. And so it was that my mother, father, and sister came to live in Vom, once an idyllic colonial enclave, in the northern region of Nigeria. And so it was too that, after I was born in the nearby city of Jos and then raised in Vom, I would come to question the divisive roots of the word, “half-caste.”
More to come...
