There is a restaurant in my neighbourhood, a cosmopolitan sort of place, which I visit more often than my budget allows. I love the food, and the seemingly bottomless glasses of wine have been the beginning of many happy evenings. While the food and the drink are good, the service is often slow and sometimes nonexistent. Having been largely ignored by the black waiters one too many times, my drinking buddies have chosen to avoid it. The waiters are racist they say.

On a visit to the post office to pick up a long awaited parcel, I had to wait my turn in a short queue for the one man behind the counter. A few moments after I arrived, a woman walked in with her daughter, fresh from the afternoon school run. Rather than going to the back of the queue, the woman went to the window next to the one occupied by the single postal worker and demanded that he serve her because she was in a hurry. This he did, to my surprise, without complaint. Everyone in the queue looked at each other and murmured ‘mtch! varungu vanonetsa..‘ under their breath and waited restlessly.

I remember a form three class discussion regarding race. The black girls said the white girls smelt funny, and the white girls said we smelt funny to them too. We asked what the fascination with Marmite sandwiches was, and they asked if deep down, really deep down, we wanted to be white because we put extensions in our hair. There was no anger in that conversation, just a group of girls trying to understand each other.

I wonder sometimes, if at independence in Zimbabwe, we had confronted our issues regarding race, would we still be trying to sidestep the obvious white elephant three decades later? We’re all careful around each other, tiptoeing, trying not to tell that joke, or saying that thing. But in private, in a safe space where we are certain people share the same sentiments and feelings as we do, the gloves come off.  Race is not a polite thing to talk about in mixed company, but I think it’s time we started.

This entry was posted on July 18th, 2011 at 11:10 am by Upenyu Makoni-Muchemwa and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.