Socien's Blog

I visited a former workmate and I asked her to give me a list of things she finds harder for her to do for her boyfriend. She rather chose to start with her background and her culture. What she said (normal text and my thoughts (italicised) resulted in something like this:

I grew up in a family like mine. Dad was not going to watch some soccer, his head on momma’s lap on the sofa,  you know things us kids would see. The last time the two could be seen kissing was at their wedding which happened sometime when the first and second born were all above five. This is a kiss she has heard some parents hiring an attendee who can outbid everyone at the scene to have it bypassed.

In their verbal department words like “love/honey/sweetheart/babe,” you name it were never used. Even those that resemble them in the local language were never used by my parents.

We were colonised in the 1880s by the British. My great, great grandfather was in her twenties (likely). Armed with spears, at that time he was staging a rebellion against his grandfather. He failed to win the rebellion and migrated northwards. This is not the story I would want to tell.

Our ancestors like the one I mentioned above, wore patchy clothes covering the essentials. Unmarried girls, especially among the Zulu (which is not my tribe but I urge you to go and watch MNet’s Shaka Ilembe) would go as far as leaving their breasts naked. For this nakedness to work, a distance had to be put between males and females. In Shona (a Bantu language and consequently a sub-Bantu culture) literature we hear of a platform called Dare (men’s council) where married men would gather at sunset until late. Each would wait for his wife to bring the food. After eating he had to guess his time of likely time of departure so that he could find his wife in the bedroom huts and kids asleep in their respective huts.

There was also a hut 🛖 for boys over the age of around thirteen. This one in Shona was also known as Gota. It had to give its back to the rest of the huts, facing the other way. Older boys also developed connections with widowers to avoid staying at home or secured their uneasy tickets at Dare (men’s council). At Dare, no bad weather, as it were in most cases, except rain would displace the council. In case of rain, husbands would seek refuge in their hut bedrooms.

If you throw this background into the mix and drive with it as you come to our modernity you will find why this former workfellow of mine struggled to please her boyfriend with just a simple word “honey/babe/love, etc”. (She was, just like my girlfriend, educated. At college Western influences were rife than elsewhere).

I struggled as well with my current girlfriend. Mine could go as far as responding to an “I love you” message with “thank you” and I wrote about it. I sure should have concluded that she was up to someone else. But my understanding of the culture kept me hers before I made it to the exit door.

I think what makes intercultural relationships and marriages hard is some of the issues you will face do not require your lover to tell you about them but you to know the cultural origin of the issue.

Growing up, the bedroom remained the only place physical affection could happen, culturally. Verbal affection? I don’t know. Now, having gone to the university we got infected a little bit by the Western culture. So I was thinking, ‘Oh wait. My girlfriend went there, she must be okay at least hugging me in public or calling me using any love terms she wants.’ It didn’t happen.

When I call him “babe” it means I need something from him. Some help or something. It is just hard for me to use such terms out of nowhere. I am sure he understands that I can’t change on this one. I don’t wish to change.

It’s something in my background, I know. It will simply trickle down to my offspring in the future. Generations inherit residues of their past without knowing when it started. I am getting an insight from the “Dare” story you are telling.

Women, as suppressive as things were, were loved and the men loved the women. No other way around. It was him to dictate how things were to be. This could go to terms she would use when calling her husband or interacting with him. It was mostly a totem and it was used when thanking him.