Ashwell and the Radio: A Different Perspective

I told Ashwell’s story in my last blog. I told a simple story of a minor offence – Ashwell entered my house and borrowed my radio while working on our high school soccer team’s equipment: without my permission. I noted also that Ashwell might have a different memory of this event than I do. I want to explore briefly some reasons that his memory might differ from mine.

I told the story as though the power differential between us was straightforward: I was the teacher and he the student. Of course, the setting was Rhodesia of about 1973, Smith’s Rhodesia. I grew up as a White Rhodesian. I went to boarding school at Hillside Primary School in Bulawayo at age seven, living in a hostel mostly populated by the children of White farmers. The school was segregated; Black Rhodesians (Africans, as we called them) had their own schools.

I went as far as Form Three in that system (studying at Hillside and then Hamilton High School) and then returned to Pennsylvania with my parents for Grades 11 and 12. In 1967, I went to Messiah College where I studied maths (not so well) and English literature (better). After graduation, I returned to my boyhood home (Smith’s Rhodesia) in January 1972 to teach at Matopo Secondary School, a high school for Black children.

This colonial dynamic – in which I was part of the system run by a White minority government – is missing from my original telling of the story. It is not just that I was a teacher and Ashwell a student; I was also a White Rhodesian (American) and Ashwell was a Black Rhodesian.

I acknowledged this dynamic in the original telling by saying that I lived in Zimbabwe. It was called Rhodesia then, but I named it Zimbabwe to acknowledge that all of us – Black, White, Asian – belong to something larger than the colonial reality. I miss Rhodesia; that is where I grew up. But Rhodesia was fundamentally flawed in its inception. A minority ranging between 2 to 4 % of the total population cannot control the lives of everyone in the country. I do not pursue the question of what we should have done in the 1950s through the 1970s; I simply acknowledge that the colonial reality could not continue.

But when I confronted Ashwell about using my radio, I do not know what that meant to him in light of the fact that I was (in his eyes) a White Rhodesian – by upbringing, if not by citizenship. I was also a missionary, and that is part of the equation; but the relationship between Black and White at that time involved a power dynamic much greater than our relationship as coach and player or as teacher and student.

That is the reason I say I don’t know what Ashwell’s memory of this event is. I do not understand the Black Zimbabwean experience from the inside. I have lived enough with that experience and with its consequences to know something about it, but it was not my lived experience.

I am fortunate to have returned to Zimbabwe as a teacher there before Mugabe’s excesses brought so much suffering to the country. I loved Rhodesia, and I love Zimbabwe. I grieve her current distress, the fruit of corruption and cruelty, and I love her people and my memories of her people. Including my friend, Ashwell the soccer player.