White doctor, black music
Mhlaba, Sondlo Leonard
WHITE DOCTOR, BLACK MUSIC WHAT GOLDBERG'S MBIRA TAUGHT ME SONDLO LEONARD MHLABA I lived in Boston's South End then. Going to Newton for a Sunday afternoon party felt like heading for the...
...In 1893, Cecil John Rhodes had brokered a truce at the Matopo hills which the Europeans had declared a victory...
...Few of them knew that I had been there...
...is less human than we are...
...In a fight I imagined I would actually sink my fist into what appeared to be their malleable faces...
...I have a wife and young children...
...I personally felt that I had already learned my lesson on that score...
...eeyea...
...My parents had relatively enlightened views of race and ethnicity, but my grandparents' views were more compelling to us as children...
...was quite evident and what he said was surprising to me...
...now seven...
...For a while they had me believing that white women, whose hair set loosely on their heads and over much of their necks, had no ears...
...I don't mean to suggest that I thought they were dumb...
...Soon, supper time would be over and we would surround the kitchen fire and listen to my grandfather repeat stories of Zulu military exploits...
...Goldberg continued to talk about the mbira and its place in the Shona community...
...The white people of my early days had not thought of us as human, certainly not human enough to learn from...
...How could I tell the rest of the audience...
...I had not known a white person until I was a teen-ager...
...Eventually, the sun would descend too far down for us to see it, even at this height, and we would lazily make our way down, wishing we could fly up and up and see where the sun goes at night...
...The more intently I looked at it, the more it seemed to wobble and dance in concentric circles of varying colors...
...The author would like to thank the Jones's and Dr...
...perhaps from a thousand years ago, in a manner of speaking...
...His sincerity SONDLO LEONARD MHLABA,, a naturalized citizen of the United States, was born and raised in Zimbabwe...
...Might it also make us less likely to brutalize one another...
...My mother was one of only two children of a radical feminist nicknamed Valela and a famous chieftain named Mlisana...
...eeyea...
...He had fought against them in the 1890s...
...The party at Dr...
...How could I explain my tears...
...Now I know, the connections are always there for the picking...
...I wept...
...I was a PF member and district officer...
...I...Well, you have to understand...
...Now one ray juts out between the branches...
...I had personally seen it turn red and then back to white in minutes...
...And, as we bent to catch sight of it below the trees, it quickly sank behind Mount Mfazomithiyo, safe from our curious eyes...
...Why is this African weeping...
...Is that too much to ask of each other...
...Of particular interest was its responsiveness to a simple touch or to temperature changes...
...I had also been told that Newton had many influential people: "You never know who's in the audience," I thought...
...The setting sun was equally beautiful...
...Now I knew that, for all my protestations to the contrary, I really had not believed that a white person could be in my shoes...
...But Valela (which means "shut him out") had no problem keeping her own schedule...
...As President Bill Clinton has talked about "growing the economy," I wonder if all of us Americans might not benefit from a concerted effort to "grow" our capacity for empathy and our ability to acknowledge it in others...
...feels less pain than we would...
...Then he began to play a tune...
...As it went down it spread gorgeous streaks of gold, orange, and red along the horizon, playing games with my friends and me behind the tall mopani tree that lay in our line of view...
...Goldberg spoke passionately about how he had tried to get the university in Zimbabwe to grant his village mentor a college degree...
...There was something wrong with this picture: a white man playing a mbira without the slightest sign of self-consciousness...
...We all want many of the same things...
...then he strummed harder, looking at the ceiling and jerking his head rhythmically...
...he white mbira player was tossing me back and forth between that distant past and the present, and the experience was disorienting...
...at times, labyrinths of blue veins could be seen on white faces or arms...
...I wasn't quite sure why...
...How would I get there...
...Going to Newton for a Sunday afternoon party felt like heading for the ends of the world...
...I was to learn my other lesson in high school from Joram who was black like me but belonged to what I had been told was an inferior group...
...Goldberg for the experiences described in this article...
...that I was sorry...
...Music is not required...
...There were several other guests, most of them white...
...Born in 1868, she was way ahead of her time...
...But arriving in the United States in the mid-1960s, I found my new attitude to be at variance with both the emerging Black Power movement and with widespread white bigotry...
...But educated...
...Another day gone, we would hurry home to help lock up the cattle, goats, sheep, and chickens...
...eeyea...
...My commitment to building bridges of understanding among peoples had been tested and I felt had been vindicated...
...I didn't have a car...
...I drank several cups of tea and ate more than my share of pastries to ease the initial awkwardness...
...A couple of the children had grown up in Zimbabwe and could speak Shona—which made me feel comfortable rather quickly...
...White skin generated a great deal of discussion among us...
...Pressure was mounting on us to prepare for a nonracial government, to demonstrate that we really believed in the equality of all people...
...Umuntu" our word for "human being," referred only to a member of our group by birth or assimilation...
...As a growing boy, I would watch the sun rise like a barrel of burning coal above the distant trees...
...My father, an imposing man with a Zulu warrior demeanor, had a softer side, probably inherited from his Bamangwato mother...
...Doctor Jones (not his real name) and his family were wonderful hosts...
...But my grandfather had seen this as simply a temporary setback...
...I jumped onto him like a tiger, but soon got into trouble and thanked my gods when we were separated and I went home to tend to my wounds and consider my lesson...
...I was uncomfortable...
...As a young teen-ager, I had the idea that white boys were soft, literally...
...now half the sun itself...
...Would the Shona and Ndebele collaboration in the liberation war continue after independence...
...More importantly, this was a time when many of us were searching our own souls to determine how we really felt about race and ethnicity...
...The old man had also taught him how to play the mbira, a traditional instrument made of a gourd resonator and several tuned metal strips which vibrate when plucked...
...is an inconvenience to us...
...In 1976 we were closing in on the white regime in Zimbabwe...
...I had 13 grown up in a traditional village where the housing consisted of small stick-and-mud huts in which the dirt floors were polished with cow dung...
...While our oily, black faces glistened in the sun, theirs stayed dry...
...In a culture where "real" men didn't eat okra, my father ate okra and there wasn't a man, woman, or child within a hundred miles of Nkenyane who would dare to raise his or her voice at him...
...We would climb some taller tree and yell in our little minds: "Gotyu...
...Anyone not of Zulu stock simply was not our equal...
...We are talking about a simpler life here...
...He sang in country Chizezuru, a language unspoiled by foreign tongues, painting in poetry a landscape of past glories, of children lost to the cities, of hunger where none was before, of victorious freedom fighters and the dawn of a new day...
...Would there be cries for revenge against the whites after independence...
...Jones' s gave me an opportunity to talk about the PF's political views before what was, evidently, a sympathetic group...
...values life less than we do...
...Would they really appreciate that I was ashamed...
...A doctoral candidate in law, policy, and society at Northeastern University, he is the director of the Learning Center at Wentworth Institute ofTechnology in Boston...
...rior race...
...My early sense of white people had been heavily influenced by my warrior grandfather...
...With ten wives to his name, Mlisana's nuptial visits to my grandmother had a rather long cycle...
...But the Serb soldier had no empathy for this man, did not consider him a fellow human being as he cut the life out of him...
...in African musicology, but it could not imagine granting a music degree to a ragtag village elder...
...How could I tell Goldberg why I was crying...
...He recalled the plea of a middle-aged man as the soldier pulled his head back to position the throat: "Please don't kill me...
...I got a chance to prove my point when one of them called me a pickaninny...
...I grew up believing that I belonged to a supe14...
...least of all, that their own humanity had been a matter of great doubt to me for many years...
...that Goldberg had made me aware of my own residual bigotry, my belief that white people could not truly have empathy for me...
...I would have to take the D Train to Riverside and then walk up Grove Street...
...The United States of the '60s and early '70s had been a tough place in which to remain open-minded about race...
...The history of "man's inhumanity to man" is, by and large, a study in the dehumanization of each other: of believing that the other person is intrinsically different from us...
...Dumb sun...
...And I didn't have to be reincarnated...
...Our advantage was that we knew what they thought of us, but they seemed genuinely trapped in their own racial supremacist delusions, like three-year-olds who claim to be ten, or to be six feet tall...
...He beat me to "first in class" and laid to rest my grandfather's theories of Zulu supremacy...
...will be less missed than we would be...
...He had spent some time studying African musicology with an old man in a "tribal village" far from civilization...
...In time, the visions of a democratic, egalitarian society propounded by our liberation movement molded me and many of my colleagues into ardent nonracists and nonsexists...
...So unusual were white people that mothers scared naughty kids into obedience simply by invoking the threat of bringing around a white person...
...As years went by, I watched as many white people continued to think of themselves as superior to me or other blacks and to treat us as subhuman...
...15...
...And then, as it rose higher above the sky, it became sturdier and sturdier until it stood still as if waiting for any false moves that my shadow, now safely tucked under my bare feet, might dare to make...
...I listened with great interest as Goldberg spoke...
...This was 1976 and the Zimbabwe Patriotic Front (PF) was still fighting to unseat Ian Smith and establish majority rule...
...I shifted, took a gulp of the tea, and shifted again...
...Somebody, please...
...It seems to me that our lives are not as different, in essence, as we sometimes believe them to be...
...And we hadn' t thought of them as human either...
...could travel, through my music, beyond the veil of his race and connect his history, his soul to mine...
...He plucked harder, then went into the nonverbal traditional...
...He was the guest of honor...
...Even though a black African, I had never thought of our elders as educated individuals...
...The university had no problem awarding Goldberg a Ph.D...
...Now the mbira player was revealing to me the bitter truth: that I had not changed...
...White people's lips were very skinny, their noses pointy...
...He began to sing...
...The man sitting next to me and caressing a mbira was Doctor Goldberg (not his real name...
...A few months ago a young Serb soldier described, matterof-factly, how he and others had been trained to kill defenseless Muslims by use of a special knife rather than wasting scarce bullets...
...Whether we are rich or poor, whatever race or ethnic group we belong to, whatever our gender, physical abilities, or sexual preferences are, whatever religious affiliations we maintain: Most of us just want to play, to laugh, to love, to live our lives, to feed our families, to do something nice for others, and to end our days with someone left to cry for us...
...If we keep this in mind as we go about our lives, we will be less limiting in our expectations of others and our day-to-day human connections will be full of wonderful surprises...
...Their father had spent several years practicing medicine in Mount Selinola, a lovely corner of Zimbabwe...
...Might not such an effort reduce our need for the various legal defenses we have placed between each other in the name of "rights...
...Bigotry among our people was rampant...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 11
