THE REBEL IN ME
I am a rebel. You are a rebel too. Look at it this way, all human beings and all living creatures are rebels. Rebellion may be defined as an act of defiance against, or resistance to, authority or order. Amongst humans, the first visible act of rebellion occurs when a baby is unceremoniously ejected from the warmth and security of a mother’s womb and thrust into a harsh and uncertain external environment. With a shriek and the kick and thrust of feet and arms, the baby registers the first act of defiance. To be a rebel is usually perceived in a negative light; especially since those who are the target of defiance most commonly use the word. It is not, however, gospel truth when viewed from the point of view of those that feel unjustly persecuted and give the word the positive twist of a resistance to injustice. In an ideal situation, authority or orders ought to be legal, lawful and justified. But cases abound where, in fact, none of these criteria are met. One could argue that if the authority or order is not legal, lawful and justified, then the rebellion against such authority or order acquires the de facto stamp of legality, lawfulness and justice. The Rhodesian regime, in the context of the laws it had inherited from Britain, became illegal when it announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965. By this act, the regime was rebelling against the colonial authority, Britain, that for years it represented.
The justification or lack of it for a rebellion depends on which side of the moral equation one belongs. Rebellion may take various forms, including passive resistance, helpless submission, open but peaceful defiance and, in extreme cases, violent resistance. In the case of Rhodesia, all these different forms came into play.
I was born into a Christian family and, in my youth, I regularly attended Sunday church services for children. As I grew up I continued the tradition of going to church. The preachers in most of their sermons would exhort their flock to be meek and to endure with humility the poverty and hardships on earth, for ‘your kingdom is in heaven’.* It is against God’s will, they emphasised, to seek retribution against your enemies. When your enemy strikes you on one cheek, instead of striking back, you should give him another cheek to strike; a convenient justification for maintaining the subservience of Rhodesia’s black people. Outside the Church, the doctrine of humility, subservience and forgiveness was observed in our own home. Almost every evening after supper the family was fed on a diet of Christian teachings. My late parents used to alternate reading and expounding verses from the Holy Bible. We were made to memorise those verses they deemed illustrative and significant to the message they wanted to impart to their children. To this day I can recite scores of verses from the Holy Bible that were imprinted in my mind decades ago. Every child in the family knew exactly which among all the verses was the most revered by either our father or our mother – the verse that would be inscribed on their respective tombstones when they died. When my father died eight years after the attainment of our independence, we inscribed on his tombstone his favourite verse – Psalms 23 Vs 4.* In fact, we went beyond that. Beneath his favourite verse and on the same tombstone, we inscribed my mother’s favourite verse – Galatians 6 Vs 9.† It is not customary to do this during the lifetime of the person to whom the inscription relates. But we did so to honor a pledge they publicly declared while attending my wedding ceremony, and recorded on video, that irrespective of who died first, they wanted to be buried in the same grave. When my mother’s journey on earth came to an end eighteen years later, we laid her body side by side, in the same grave, with the remains of her beloved husband, our adored father. Not even death could separate them. As we laid the remains of our mother by the side of her husband in fulfilment of their declared wish, we prayed to God Almighty that her spirit be joyfully reunited with that of her husband in eternal peace in God’s heavenly kingdom.
My father was a medical orderly. When he was on day duty he would leave for work at 7.30 am. At 10 am he would return from the hospital to have breakfast and would have with him a newspaper tucked under his arm or rolled and held in his hand. The rest of the family had adjusted its timeline for having breakfast to coincide with Dad’s preferred time.
A normal working day in the life of my mother began around 5 am when most housewives were asleep and the inadequacy of natural light restricted the chores she could engage in during the first one to one and half morning hours. By the time my father left for work, a five-minute walk from our house, my mother would have finished tidying the house and the yard surrounding it. Mom had a reputation of being extremely smart and organised. If Dad had wanted to have his breakfast earlier in the morning, Mom had lots of time to spare and would not have had problems providing the breakfast even as early as 6.30 am.
Except in rainy weather, breakfast was always served on the veranda that faced the east. The veranda enabled us to appreciate the scenic beauty that spread before and beyond our eyes. There were the rolling grasslands with scattered trees that ultimately fell into the valley about two kilometres from our house. The grasslands then rose again from the other side of the valley and in splendid undulations rolled into the distance, finally melting and disappearing into the mountain ranges far beyond.
We would take our breakfast seated on the floor of the veranda where we would be bathed by the warm sunshine that climbed above the distant mountain ranges. No chairs were provided and the warmth from the sun, absorbed by the concrete floor of the veranda, would radiate back into us, producing a warm and pleasant sensation.
While donning the cloak of Christian purity, my father was also a rebel. My mother was a rebel too. Dad, with his feet resting on the steps leading to the veranda would, between sips of hot tea, read to Mom pre-selected news clips from the Rhodesia Herald. Mostly, these snippets highlighted the humiliation that blacks suffered at the hands of the whites and the white government. There were stories about dogs being unleashed against university students peacefully demonstrating for an improvement to the squalid conditions under which they lived. There were stories of black Africans who had been arrested and detained for trespassing into a ‘whites only’ restaurant or swimming pool. Then, of course, there were occasions when my father would read about new laws that further dispossessed blacks of their land and placed it in the hands of the whites, mostly of British descent. Black Africans were moved, in many cases, to unproductive and often more remote land, to which they did not have title. Such land was designated as Tribal Trust Lands. In other words, the land was merely entrusted to the blacks and they could be moved and removed at the behest of the white controlled local administrations. Because of my youth, I missed much of the significance of these early legislative changes that caused much sorrow and hardship among blacks.
But each day, it seemed, brought new and disturbing revelations about the mistreatment of blacks. Mom and Dad would share and openly express between themselves their disgust and revulsion at these various acts of humiliation. Sometimes I would idly reflect that the attitudes Mom and Dad displayed at these ‘morning tea-time briefings’ seemed to contradict their teachings of ‘turning the other cheek.’
Mom and Dad did not realise then that as they diagnosed and digested disparaging remarks about blacks from the newspapers, they were in fact sowing seeds of rebellion. And, ‘some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places; where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop – a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.’* My parents are thus my first heroes. It is they who gave birth to the rebel in me.
At age 16 I was attending boarding school and during holidays I would go home to be with my parents. I went to the same places I had been to before and saw the exact things I had seen before, but they now looked different. Not because they had changed, but because I had changed.
One early morning during one such holiday, my Mom sent me to buy meat from her favorite butchery in Bindura town. I used the same route I always used. The road went past Bindura School, situated to the right. Some Europeans were driving into the schoolyard to drop off their children, while others who had arrived earlier were driving out of the school gate after leaving their children. Some black chaperones were escorting, on foot, a few white children to school. I had witnessed this routine many times before and had seen nothing abnormal about it. On this occasion, however, I began questioning myself as to why there should be no black children studying at this school, and no black teachers either.
I was still brooding over the supremacist arrogance of the whites when I was confronted by further confirmation of that arrogance. Ahead of me, on the left side just about half a kilometre away from the town centre, there was a swimming pool located inside a six-foot high perimeter wall. From outside it was not possible to see the pool or the bar and restaurant that the wall kept hidden from ‘unauthorised’ eyes. On the wall next to the entrance was a big black board with large and brightly contrasting white letters, ‘WHITES ONLY – Trespassers will be prosecuted’. The last words were written in small print. The black man who stood guard at the entrance was a superfluous presence as no black could dare challenge the writing on the wall.
By the time I got to the butchery, I had worked myself into a cold fury. It was as if, up to now, I had been blind to the injustices perpetrated against the black people and suddenly my vision had been restored and I could now see the depth and ugliness of white supremacy, every minute detail of it, as if through a magnifying glass. The seeds my parents had sown had inadvertently fallen on good soil and were beginning to germinate.
As I entered the butchery the squeaking sound of the door caused the six white customers to look in my direction. Surprised by what they saw, they exchanged quizzical glances before turning their questioning faces towards the butcher. He had been busy punching figures on the till, but looked up in time to register the appeals of his (white) customers and, at the same time, to see me moving towards his counter. The customers’ eyes moved back and forth between the butcher and the black apparition, inviting the butcher to take action.
I ignored the quizzical glances and reached the counter. The butcher demanded, “what do you think you are doing you kaffir,* coming in like this?”
“I am not a kaffir,” I countered, “and I want to buy some meat.”
“Get out of this place now! Kaffirs are served from outside through the window. Can’t you see the others queuing outside?”
The window alluded to was an opening in the wall through which blacks were served, but only after all white customers had been served. While blacks could buy any kind of meat, generally they could only afford the sort sold to whites to feed their dogs. Queuing patiently outside for their turn to be served were between 12 and 18 black customers.
“I said get out now or I will call the police.” The butcher was now getting visibly agitated. I was not intimidated and stood my ground. Though outwardly I remained calm and composed, inwardly I was seething with anger.
I was no stranger to the expected protocol at this butchery, which favoured whites before blacks. However, something had changed in me and I was determined to defy the status quo. The butcher started punching numbers, this time not on the till but on the telephone. The voice on the other end of the line was faint but clear from where I stood. “Bindura Police Station, can I help you?” The butcher quickly identified himself and his present location and in an agitated voice proceeded to report, “Please, this is urgent. A black man is causing a commotion in my butchery. It seems he is armed and I fear for the safety of my (white) customers.” The response from the other end was immediate and expected. “We are sending a Quick Reaction Squad right away. They should be there in about five to ten minutes.” They did not bother to get the identity of the black man or a description of what he could be armed with.
Seven minutes from the time the call was made and a hundred metres away from the ‘crime scene’, the Quick Reaction Squad comprising ten heavily armed policemen sped past me on its way to the butchery. I was going in the opposite direction. I watched the drama unfold from a safe distance as the policemen assaulted innocent bystanders and a few of the (black) customers before shoving five ‘suspects’ into the police truck and taking them to the police station for questioning. The butcher could not identify the black man who was causing a commotion because ‘they all look alike.’
Now I was grown up and was no longer a passive listener as my father continued the tradition of reading selected news clips to my mother. The influence of my parents and my association with other students, who abhorred the segregated system of government and its treatment of blacks, radicalised my views regarding the racial inequalities so pervasive in our society. Whenever I listened to my father expressing his views, I now could discern beneath the veneer of Christian purity the rumble of a deep hatred towards white supremacist attitudes. I became convinced that there was heredity in the manner my father’s emotions were affected and expressed.
As far as I knew, my father’s career began in Selukwe (now Shurugwi) where he worked as a medical orderly at a clinic called Sebanga. Except for the first and last-born of his 10 children, all the others were born there. When my father was transferred from Selukwe in 1960 his clinic that specialised in the treatment of venereal diseases (VD) and tuberculosis (TB) was closed. In its place a village was built and named after him (Mutambara Village), in honor of his lengthy and faithful service at this clinic and to the surrounding community.
I later learned that in fact my father had begun his working life as a teacher at Morgenster, a mission school in Fort Victoria (now Masvingo). While teaching there his young brother, called Taruvinga, was also studying at the same school. One day Taruvinga was involved in some indiscipline and was expelled from the school, without the knowledge of his elder brother. When the news reached my father, he was incensed that the white principal could expel his brother without the courtesy of informing him first, a member of staff at the same school. Mr Mutambara sought an appointment with the principal to get clarification, but the request was denied. The rebel in my father took charge of his emotions and his actions. He went to the principal’s house, but the principal, who had sensed danger, had locked himself in. Dad could not be stopped. He went to the back of the house and gained entry by breaking a window. The principal, on seeing my father’s forced entry into his house, unlocked the main door and bolted out. Other black members of staff, who had correctly interpreted Mr Mutambara’s state of mind and had been following him, were able to subdue him before he could commit a crime that might have cost him his life. For daring to challenge the white man, Mr Mutambara was summarily dismissed from the school and blacklisted from the teaching profession.
The rebel in me is hereditary too. In 1961 at the age of ten I enrolled at Charles Wraith Government School in Selukwe town to do my Standard 1 (Grade 3 equivalent). It was accepted tradition amongst school children that, during the first three to four months, the already established students would mistreat newcomers to varying degrees. In my case my tormentor was a boy in my class, called Alfred, who was about my age but taller and leaner. Each morning before classes began, or during lunch hour, he would deride me, especially when there were girls around. “Young boy” he usually began, “go and fetch me some water to drink.” Using the cup I always carried with me from home I would rush to the tap to get him some water. On my return he would make a show of inspecting my cup before throwing its contents into my face.
“Stupid boy, how dare you give me water in a dirty cup!” He would feign anger to the merriment of the other children.
For two months the pattern of abuse continued. Alfred would ask me to walk on all fours and bark like a dog. Sometimes I would be asked to ‘mate a locust and produce children’. The obscene things I was expected to perform ranged from ludicrous to perverted. One day he called me to a room where he was bragging about himself before four girls and two boys. As I entered, his air of superiority reached new heights. With an exaggerated cough he ordered, “Young boy, remove all your clothes and masturbate.”
“What?” I asked incredulously.
“You heard what I said. Just do it.”
“No I won’t!”
“Yes you will!”
“I said, NO, I won’t,” I responded.
My firm and decisive refusal took him aback. The hereditary rebel in me had been awakened. Like my father at the mission school, I saw the order as an affront to my dignity and it could not go unchallenged.
“You filthy little boy, your father failed to discipline you. I shall do the task for him today,” he sneered.
“Say another bad word against my father and I will rip you apart like a rag.” My bravado took everyone, including myself, by surprise.
The die had been cast. Every child at school knew that any challenge proffered and accepted at school was never settled at the school. An abattoir about two kilometres from school was the venue where challenges were resolved at the end of the school day.
By the time Alfred and I arrived there, a gathering of over twenty school children was already waiting to witness the duel. Two tiny earth heaps; one representing the mamma of Alfred’s mother and the other my mother’s mamma had already been mounded. To destroy the mamma of your adversary’s mother was a declaration of war. For the adversary to reciprocate the gesture became the trigger that sparked off the war.
Exuding great confidence, Alfred wasted no time destroying my mother’s mamma, much to the delight of the onlookers. I responded immediately in kind. I had underestimated the speed with which Alfred would react to my action. His fist caught me squarely on my face and sent me sprawling to the ground with my nose bleeding. I tried to quickly get up, but again another fist sent me back to the ground. Stars twinkled in my eyes and the roar of amused laughter from the spectators agonisingly filled my ears. Alfred saw the opportunity to finish me off. His right foot swung at lighting speed towards my face. My reflexes were good. I caught his ankle just before his foot could connect with its target and pulled it hard towards me, causing his body to come tumbling down to the ground. We got up at the same time and started trading punches. His punches were hard and painful. On a few occasions I thought I could not stand the pain any more and wanted to give up the fight. Somehow I managed to convince myself to resist a little longer. Finally I decided enough was enough and opened my mouth to declare my surrender. To my utter surprise, Alfred turned away from me at this precise moment, leaped over a thorny shrub, and started running away in pain. The words of surrender that had started forming in my mouth were quickly substituted for taunts as I pursued my adversary with renewed vigor and challenged the coward to stop and fight. From this day onwards, the tables were turned. I became a local hero and Alfred became my whipping boy.
As I grew up, so did the rebel in me. I became more and more intolerant of white supremacist attitudes. In 1969 I completed my GCE ‘O’ Level, but could not get a place to do ‘A’ Level studies, even though my grades were good. The system of education ensured that only a fraction of black children would get the opportunity to progress to ‘A’ Level, and even fewer to university.
In 1970 I was employed as a laboratory assistant at Mazoe Gold Mine, and later the same year I went to do the same job at Cam and Motor Mine in Gatooma (now Kadoma). We were 13 laboratory assistants at this mine, working day and night shifts under the supervision of a German laboratory technician named Schubert. This white man was a real racist and would unnecessarily blow his top at every minor or perceived mistake. Our work was critical to the control of the mining processes, but morale amongst all the laboratory assistants sank to its lowest ebb because of the aggressive and racist attitude of Mr Schubert.
One day in 1971 all laboratory assistants resolved to go on strike to demand the immediate dismissal of Mr Schubert. A crisis situation developed at the mine because of the leverage our laboratory analyses had over the production process. Intensive negotiations to persuade us to resume work were conducted between the mine authorities and ourselves. We stood our ground as our singular condition for ending the strike action remained unambiguously clear – Mr Schubert had to be fired. Neither side wanted to budge. We even refused the offer of having our salaries doubled in return for ending the strike. The authorities then decided to restrict our movements to our places of residence, which were co-located, and police guards were deployed 24 hours a day to ensure we did not break the restriction. I was one of three members of our team chosen to negotiate with the mine authorities and I gained the reputation of being the unyielding extremist in the group. Afterwards, the negotiating tactics were changed and each of us was interviewed separately.
After two weeks of intense but failed negotiations, the authorities at the mine decided to terminate our contracts and we were given only 24 hours to pack and leave the mine premises. We were told that none of us would be allowed to come to the mine or to seek re-employment. All along we had known that ‘blood is thicker than water.’
Later it came to light that during the failed separate negotiations, three members of our group had capitulated and agreed that they would continue to work under the German technician. When we left the mine, the three capitulators returned the following day and became the nucleus for training new recruits to replace all those fired.
The lessons from this experience repeated themselves at various stages in my life. I am alluding to lessons regarding one’s commitment to a cause and its principles. No matter how noble and just the cause or principles, there are those who for some ‘dirty pieces of silver’, or merely for the purpose of ingratiating themselves with superior authority or a perceived superior race, are willing and ready to sacrifice their just cause and lofty principles for the sake of expediency. The struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe is replete with such traitors and quislings.
A few months after leaving Cam and Motor Mine I got a place to train as a Council Secretary/Treasurer (Local Government Officer) at Domboshawa Training Centre. On completion of my course I had a number of in-service attachments before finally being appointed Executive Secretary for Neshuro African Council. The position of Council Secretary carried with it lots of responsibilities and commanded a lot of respect, especially during those early years of African Councils, administered under the African Council’s Act.
One day I was returning from Fort Victoria, the provincial capital of Victoria province, after a banking errand. I was driving a small Mazda 1000 pick-up truck that I had bought six months earlier. My nephew, aged six years, who I had taken to spend a month with me, accompanied me. Forty kilometres from Fort Victoria my nephew was complaining of hunger, causing me to branch off at a shop called Butt to buy him food. A white lady was serving customers and at the same time engaging in a conversation with her hefty white boyfriend, who was a policeman. I bought a plate of rice and stew and gave it to my nephew to eat. I took a spoonful to taste and found the food had little salt and was badly prepared. I complained to the white lady that the food was not good. The policeman, wanting to show off to his girlfriend, told me to ‘fuck off’.
“I’m not talking to you,” I retorted sharply.
One should never insult a man in front of his girlfriend. I learned the lesson too late. With surprising agility the giant policeman scooped me from the ground and dangled me in the air. With his huge arms encircling my waist he tried to squeeze the breath out of my body. I began throwing punches at his face. Staggering from the weight of my body and the blows to his face, he managed to carry me as far as the door and, breathing heavily, dropped me to the ground and ordered me to leave. Satisfied with the punishment I had inflicted, I took my nephew and drove off to Neshuro.
I spent most of my vacations with my parents in Bindura. One day, on such an occasion, I drove my Mazda 1000 pick-up truck to a white-owned farm called Geneva to buy oranges. The farm is located about six and a half kilometres from Bindura town. I did not know then that 27 years on, the farm, renamed Sangere Farm, would belong to me as one of the beneficiaries of the government’s land redistribution programme. This programme would become immensely popular amongst the majority black population, and abhorred and fiercely contested by the white minority farmers whose land was appropriated. The oranges I bought were for resale at the hospital’s vegetable and fruit market. The market place was founded by my mother around 1967 and was nothing more than a vacant piece of ground positioned immediately after entering the hospital premises. The main attraction of this location was that it was by the side of the only entrance/exit to the hospital, and there were three large trees that provided shade to the vendors seated beneath. Neither patients nor visitors could escape its beckoning presence. My mother started as the only vendor, but when it became apparent to other members of the hospital staff that she was making reasonable profit from the sale of her merchandise, about five other vendors soon joined her.
The fruits and vegetables were displayed on top of sacks or cardboard spread on the ground. Some vegetables were tied into small bundles and their stems partially submerged in water dishes to keep them fresh. The vendors would be seated on the same materials as carried their merchandise. During school holidays I usually substituted for my mother in selling the family merchandise. Youths of my age generally found it demeaning to sit on the dirty ground selling vegetables and fruits and, most of the time, rejected their parents’ demands to do so. On numerous occasions, my competing vendors were old women. Rather than being demeaned, I felt a sense of pride that I was able to be of some use to my parents. This sense of responsibility was born out of an appreciation that my father’s meagre salary was inadequate for my parents to be able to raise our large family to a decent level of education, while also maintaining a reasonable standard of living. Because of this consciousness, a result of eavesdropping on my parents, whenever I was on school holidays I spent a lot of my time vending perishables at the hospital market. My mother, gratefully excused from this responsibility, instead of taking it as an opportunity to rest would scavenge for bones and copper wire for resale. Through her efforts, the revenue she brought into the family in a month would usually surpass my father’s salary.
Even after I began working as a Council Secretary/Treasurer I would spend my vacations helping my parents. The dignity of labour my parents had taught me to appreciate from my youth had not deserted me in my adulthood. By now my parents’ responsibilities towards their family had been greatly reduced because some of their children were already married and others, like me, were gainfully employed and able to supplement their incomes.
One evening in December 1974 I went to spend some time with my father who was on night duty at Bindura hospital. He informed me that a special patient had been admitted to hospital that day, a guerrilla fighter named Cuthbert who had been captured in operations in the northeastern part of the country. Due to serious wounds to both legs, Cuthbert had one leg amputated just above the knee and was placed in a private ward. The first few days after the amputation, security around Cuthbert was lax. Those few days gave me the opportunity to surreptitiously speak to him. Despite the excruciating pain he was suffering, Cuthbert exhibited great courage. He spoke of the commitment he and other comrades had made for the cause of liberation. Even though he knew that he might be tortured or even killed, Cuthbert vowed that he would never betray the cause for freedom and was prepared to face the ultimate penalty without betraying his comrades.
During the past two years it had become evident that the war of liberation had intensified in the northeastern part of the country. Periodically there was increased movement of army trucks, military planes and helicopters going in the direction of Mt Darwin. Because of the secrecy shrouding Rhodesian operations against guerrillas, people began to speculate and even exaggerate the losses of the Rhodesian forces against vakomana (the boys), an affectionate reference to the guerrillas. But confirmation that the war was taking a toll on the regime was evidenced by the counter measures the Rhodesian government took against the rural black population, blaming them for being sympathetic and for giving material support to the guerrillas. Many communities in areas where guerrillas operated, or were suspected of operating, were moved into concentration camps called ‘protected villages.’ By the time I left to join the armed struggle, the community where my parents lived had been uprooted from their homes and placed into one of these camps.
These ‘villages’ measured about four square kilometres and could accommodate around five thousand people. The perimeter of the ‘protected villages’ enclosure had a wall of raised earth and on top of the wall were positioned observation posts, manned 24 hours a day by armed guards. A width of about fifty metres was cleared all around the perimeter on the outside to ensure nothing attempting to come in or go out would be missed. Also on top of the wall were flood lights pointing out which made the area just outside the perimeter seem like day during the night. There was only one entrance/exit that was open for the public between 8 am and 5 pm. During these hours, people could leave the village to go and cultivate their fields, attend to their livestock, or to wash their clothes. Anyone who went through the gate was thoroughly searched to ensure no one would carry food for the ‘boys’ (terrorists, according to the regime). Special identification cards were issued to the village residents to ensure that only those authorised to live there could enter.
Despite all these measures, the people were still able to feed the comrades. My mother told me how she would cook food for the ‘boys,’ cover the food and put it underneath a wash basket. On top of the wash basket she put dirty clothes for washing. She created a rapport with the guards so that they did not bother to search her thoroughly. Once outside the village she and other sympathisers knew where and how to communicate with the comrades. There were also instances when the guerrillas were able to infiltrate the ‘protected villages’.
When Cuthbert’s wounds began to heal he was placed under 24-hour guard and interrogations began. I was told that during interrogation the bandages covering the stump of his leg were unwound and the leg was beaten with a baton until blood gushed out. The torture would continue until he lost consciousness. Treatment was administered and as soon as his condition improved, the process of torture would resume. When it was concluded that Cuthbert would never cooperate, despite all the pressures, he was moved to prison and later was executed. Cuthbert died, but not the cause for which he had sacrificed his life.
In narrating some of the twists and turns in my life the intention is not to make a hero of myself or to suggest that my actions of resistance or rebellion were greater than those of others. Rather, I am seeking to show the rebel identity in me – the propelling force that led me to the decision to leave the relatively comfortable life that I led for an uncertain and unknown future in the wilderness.
* Quotation from the Holy Bible, Matthew Chapter 5 Verse 3.
* The Holy Bible, New International Version, Revised 2002, Publisher Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530, USA. ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’
† Ibid. ‘Let us not become weary in doing good for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.’
* Ïbid. St. Matthew 13 v 4–8.
* A pejorative name for black Africans, equivalent to nigger in American parlance, but deriving from Arabic in which language it means “unbeliever”.