Socien's Blog

A Reddit user based in London posted in r/Zimbabwe that he was changing his name and surname to an English one— preferably, his girlfriend’s second name for the latter. Zimbabwean surnames are quite distinct from “Smith” or “Green”. One might be Tinotenda Dzambacheka (male or female), Sihle Ndlovu (female) or Peter Ndlovu (played for Coventry in the 90s and none among the football commentators got his surname right). Most popular among surnames starts with M and T, respectively.

The reason cited for the change in name by the Reddit user is not, however, because people in London are having hard pronouncing his name and Surname. He is worried that his kids will miss out on opportunities thanks to some random white dude brushing aside any resumé with foreign surnames. It’s as if he had gone through this kind of treatment and he was worried that would happen to his kids. But he pointed to an alleged incident that happened in Cape Town, South Africa. A man in that incident which surfaced online through channels like Reddit sent two emails enquiring about a rental vacancy to a stay-in white landlady one with an African surname and another with a “white” surname. The landlady responded favourably to a “white” surname. Is it even racism?

Aren’t they any chances that landlady might not have read the rest of the emails, after getting a good count of willing occupants? If you wrongly take as racism, then it becomes a problem you find yourself wasting your energy on to correct. Our Reddit friend here decided to correct the perceived problem by running away from all that he thought might be attached to the problem. He became anti-black.

I believe anyone can change his name and it’s his/her right to so. Soͼien, for example, is not even my birthname and I can reach out to international readership with it while I use my actual name for any local applications including my signature. I believe no one must be restricted on how he might want to change his/name. But changing a name for imagined (or even realised) fears of racism is to me a symptom of anti-blackness

Whilst racism is an enemy without which we can solve by deciding not to talk about it, anti-blackness is an enemy within which can only grow and ravage from the inside. Our musicians, poets, you name it, find beauty in a skin that is light (I heard a song classifying girls with a darker skin tone as tsito-bone. Tsito is a Shona term for charcoal). In recent mention, such skin tone is being referred to as “yellow-bone” women. It must be a skin very light, according to one informant, that it resembles the Fanta (drink) colour and you can somehow see veins inside with a greenish colour. But if you are to descend to any random town in the Sub-Sahara and let statistical calculations inform you of the chances that in a sample of 10, that one is “yellow-bone” you might be surprised with the results. It is a fraction of a fraction. And now there is social media how many of the pressures do we get in trying to pursue the form of beauty so rare in us whilst forgetting the one we have in abundance? It is our women who suffer the most and they don’t even see it coming.

Interestingly, we have recovered from a past that created harshly the exceptional or ‘divergent’ skin tones. Around a hundred years ago in my culture, for example, having light skin as a woman would lead to one being classified as a witch. Albinism was not spared from this purging. In a novel Takadini a man who excelled to become an excellent Mbira musician was segregated while growing up. His mother was accused for being a witch (that accusation was a normal court verdict that would easily sentence any woman to life of misery and solitary, free of marriage and love).

It seems we emerged from one extreme and went past moderate to pick up an equally toxic extreme. We just keep running from what we can be. In the past, we denied the fact that one can be born with albinism. Now we are lost again, in a different way.