Will knowing the whole truth hurt our children, or protect our nation’s future?
November 1st, 2005
Reading the blog posted by “Dad” last week made me think about my own growing-up experiences around about the time when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. My parents did not have much money, but that’s not what I remember the most.
I remember that Wednesday was the only day that the Eskimo Hut served coffee flavoured ice cream. If each of us could find 50c for a cone we would stop, argue about who was getting out to buy, and in the end buy a coffee ice cream for each of us. Kids scrabbled under the seats, between the seats, in the cubbyhole and in every nook and cranny in the car looking for coins. If there was not enough money for us all, we all went without!
We spent hours as children by the side of rivers fishing for bream – or anything that would bite – baking in the hot sun and smelling like earthworms. We didn’t have a boat, and nor did we have fancy rods with reels but our grandmother taught us how to fish with a stick, some line and a float made out of a piece of cork. A plastic tub with worms and what more could we want?
I remember my parents moving me to a private school. They had been saving money furiously and spent ages trying to convince me it was the right thing to do – I was totally unimpre
ssed. Suddenly I was thrown into a richer environment where the other kids came to school in fancy cars. A good morning for me was when our car actually started without having to push it down the driveway! Arriving at the school usually involved me saying, “Pleeeese mum, don’t stall” because the odds were the car wouldn’t start again. My mother wasn’t the type to be embarrassed. In fact, she thought it was hilarious when her car conked out and I swear she sometimes stalled just to teach me not to be a snob. We still laugh now about how I would dash through the school gates pretending not to see ‘that’ car with the huge clouds of black smoke coming from the exhaust.
As an adult I know that the things I loved most as a child, the things I want my kids to have, are the things that cost my parents nothing. What I struggle with now as an adult are the things that I didn’t know at the time because I had to acclimatise to the full truth of my childhood at a much later age.
For example, I didn’t know the full horror of the Gukurahundi. I saw mugabe’s 5 Brigade soldiers in their red berets in army trucks going through town but I didn’t know, as I sulked through the gates of my new private school, that a family somewhere else was probably being viciously tortured and killed by them – including kids my age and younger. When we ate our ice cream cones at the Eskimo Hut, people were literally starving to death in the rural areas because of a food embargo cruelly imposed by mugabe.
I now wonder what we, as parents and children, could have done differently then to prevent the inevitability of what has happened now? If kids like me had known what mugabe was truly like and capable of, perhaps it would have been much harder for him to turn us as young adults into obedient little foot soldiers – green bombers – in his youth militia now? Who knows?
I wonder if parents in the so-called developed world ever have to negotiate questions like these? When you live in a country like ours, how do you raise your children to understand and be sensitive to the suffering all around them without making them fearful, insecure, and vulnerable? How do you expose them to the true horror that is their country if your most important job as a parent is to protect and shield them from horror? How do we stop history repeating itself – again – if we don’t tell them the truth? But will the truth scare them and scar them forever?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope that my kids won’t be faced with the same questions that my parents and I have had to deal with when they one day raise their kids. That’s one of the things I’m fighting for today.
