IDENTITY CRISIS and an indigenous trait

If anyone has suffered from any form of crisis, be it financial, personal, professional, interpersonal as in relationship or health, please note that you are not alone. I believe that living is a crisis; take the ‘automatic nervous system’ for a start; this is the part of the nervous system responsible for the control of bodily functions that are not consciously directed. I mean functions that keep us alive, from heart beat to opening our bowels are all controlled by something that we are not in control of, they are automatic activities. Imagine if one day your automatic nervous system went into crisis, what happens then? Apologies for those who think I am a health freak, but I just love the human body and I have read intensively on the human anatomy and physiology as part of my numerous studies. So, any part of our body can go into crisis anytime, anyplace without us moving a finger. It is scary having had a near miss myself when I thought I was having a stroke. It turned out that I had got myself so angry and anger is a crisis for me as it always triggers a migraine. I had a similar but less intense episode in 1998 and I spent a night in hospital. My medical knowledge then was equally less, hence I just went by what the doctors told me – a diagnosis of a migraine – my head went into a crisis without me moving a finger. When it happened this time round, my medical knowledge was equally advanced and that set me in panic mode which is a crisis on its own. But thanks to medical innovation, a stroke can be completely reversed but only if the right treatment is given within the first 3 hours of the onset of symptoms, hence the panic mode saw me blue lighted to A/E and of course the blood pressure equally goes into a crisis of its own. As it was a week-end, I spent 3 days in hospital and in that period, my automatic nervous system returned to normal functioning without any medical intervention. Hence I take it that it was a very bad migraine, a self inflicted crisis.

But I have another crisis that has plagued me for more than half my life, i.e. identity crisis. I have been pondering over this crisis that befell me for over half my life and I think I have now resolved it. Up to the age of 22, I identified myself with my people in my little village. I was born and grew up in that village, knew everything and everyone in that village, and despite leaving the village to go to boarding school and later on when I exiled myself against the brutality of apartheid, I always identified myself as Florence from Mopaneni. This was the norm where I come from, men and women worked in town, bought houses in town but always maintained their identity with the village they came from, always going back as often as their job allowed them. There is a word that describes people like me, indigenous, because in our village we knew its history and how we came to live there. This is one of the definitions of indigenous: Indigenous people are any ethnic group who inhabit a geographic region with which they have the earliest known historical connection. I suspect therefore that despite having left my village over 20 years ago, this still qualifies me to classify myself as having some form of indigenous trait. If it is a trait it means that it is me, I carry it where ever I am in my mind, in my heart and in behavior. To me this explains why western civilized people who meet me for the first time find it difficult to relate to me.
I love those TV programs showing indigenous people refusing to be civilized, because I always ask myself, ‘what is it that makes them so content with their lives in the jungle?’ Now I know that it is exactly the same thing that made me content with my life in Mopaneni, the very same thing without which I develop an identity crisis. Hence I get incensed by this western portrayal of indigenous people as those who need help. From my recollection, my little village did not need any help from the western or so called civilized people. They were self-sufficient if only they were left to organise their lives the way they wanted to. No sane person rejects civilisation. When I returned from exile just before my 22nd birthday and got a job in a big insurance company, my brother and I (he was a few years older than me and also had a good job as an agricultural officer of an area a third of Zimbabwe) discussed how we were going to work together to install solar power in my parents home and dig a borehole to provide clean water for our village. But it is this other civilisation as portrayed by the western world that stopped us from improving the quality of people in our village; and this is the civilisation that I am against.

Under apartheid, we blacks were not allowed to think and hence whatever education we had was limited to those jobs that had no influence on our lives and our environment. After years of struggle by the black oppressed, we got an agreement at Lancaster House between Mugabe and those whose interest was represented by the old apartheid system, they agreed that the black government should secure the interests of those who represented the previous government. That meant anyone who objected to this continuation of apartheid was silenced. Hence what Mugabe did with the rest of the black people who did not agree with the Lancaster agreement was of no relevance to the rest of the world, hence our dream was cut short, not only by the slaughter of those in my village by Mugabe’s thugs, but by the subsequent death of my mother as a result of witnessing what these barbarians did to her village and her death was soon followed by the murder of my brother 3 years later by the very same people who destroyed my village. These were black people and most of them had not even left the comfort of their parents to fight for the liberation of the country - parasites. Had there been a leader who wanted to liberate his/her people, my little village would not only have solar power and clean water, but also a hospital, all organised and funded by those from the village. This is how I came to make this conclusion that the reason I could not move on in life was because I suffered from an identity crisis. Take this picture and spread it throughout the world where indigenous people are fighting for their rights, not against apartheid, but against their own dictators who copied the western civilisation just as Mugabe did, placing himself into the shoes of his oppressor, like a slave who leads a fight against his slave master with other slaves to topple their master, not to liberate himself and his fellow slaves from slavery, but to take over from the slave master and be equally brutal to other slaves just as their slave master was. That is what this western form of civilisation has done to this world.

I came to this conclusion using the method I use professionally in my clinical judgment when someone presents with an illness; it is only through a thorough history taking that a clinician can decipher from a plethora of illness that affect a human body if he/she is to make a proper diagnosis of what that person is suffering. By the age of 25, with both my brother and mother dead, I had to rethink my next strategy, because the suffering in my village was still escalating even after apartheid was put to rest. But it was not something I could do alone especially given the barbarity that is still happening in that country. It is like a psychological castration, a brutal emotional dilemma and a physical void. It is a psychological castration because the brain that has been gearing itself and going into overdrive suddenly shuts itself down, and it is a dilemma because there is an emotional loss, the excitement, enthusiasm and the adrenalin fuelled by the forthcoming challenge gets lost in one's body leaving this rampat adrenaline in the body to circulate like poisonous radium ravaging one’s nerves. That excitement of an innovative project coming to fruition gets divorced as it is no longer feasible, and this emotional turmoil is no difference from any divorce in life what ever form or nature it takes. It becomes an illness with no cure. Every friend, both black and white that I made in the past 25 years would describe me as vivacious, friendly, comedian, full of life and a joy to be with. I am a classic example of what people would say, someone who has everything to live for because no one knows that one who has an identity crisis equivalent to mine is psychologically and emotionally void and that the only way to deal with that emptiness in life is to be just a comedian who sees life as a joke to be laughed at. I did that for 25 years, but I am sure I have found a cure.

I have been a nurse for just over 20 years, but it looks like health promotion has always been in my genes. I wanted solar power in my parent’s home because I was petrified of the dark in my youth, but it was clean water and sanitation that was of concern to me and I had that in mind when I was still at secondary school. After becoming a nurse, I wanted to go a step further and build a hospital for my village, with maybe the help of charities and NGOs. This is the kind of civilisation that I relate to. I have also participated in socialist politics here in the UK for the past 7 years looking for those with like minded beliefs and I am disappointed to say that they all failed me or I failed them. I shelved the hospital project in 2003 and moved a gear up and started looking at the world in its totality, i.e. local, national and international, but all I saw and met were those who spoke my indigenous language of a communal spirit (communism), but their actions were no different from those with the civilisation that I am fighting against. This civilisation has one poignant characteristic – GREED.

This does not mean that there are no people who don’t fall under those classified as indigenous people who share the beliefs and values shared by indigenous people and those like me with an indigenous trait. I believe that it boils down to people casting their net in networking with those of similar mindset as wide as one can possibly stretch. It looks like that this is just about to happen because I am also doing it. A group of us from different backgrounds; i.e. unions, socialists, independent are going to Bolivia (Cochabamba) in a few weeks time to participate in what has for many years been central to the struggles of indigenous people all over the world, Climate change. In cities and towns, climate change results in floods, pollution and diabolic weather. For indigenous people, it destroys their livelihood. From now on therefore, my blog will be dedicated to indigenous people, to ABANTU. This does not mean I intend to resurrect my village because from my last trip in 2003, it was no longer the village I knew in the sense that all my friends and those I grew up with are dead and the few relation still alive did not welcome me because I am their relation but for what they could get from me. It therefore looks like my village people have also given in to the greed brought on by western civilisation, and that is alien to me. But I have a trait that I carry, it is like an illness, an indigenous trait whose cure can only be through fighting for the rights of indigenous poeple and those like me who have an indigenous trait, ordinary and honest human beings who do not want to be forced into a civilisation like the one that destroyed my village.

DESTROYING OUR CLIMATE IS NOT CIVILISATION IT IS BARBARISM.