It is only at this sunset age of 68 that I reach this conclusion.
Did I needed to see my two granddaughters to come to this conclusion!
I'm not proud because I am mulato,
I'm not proud because of being black,
I would be even less proud of being white,
I am proud, first and fundamentally, of being human and then, subsidiary to being human, of belonging to a nation, Ngoni, to a country, Mozambique, to a continent, Africa, to a people, African. A continent made by the way up of blacks, mulattoes, Arabs and a whole panoply of skin colours. Mine is black and I am at peace in it, but that skin should define our humanity is an aberration brought by the colonizers.
However, I shall endeavour to take the reader through the process that brought me to this late epiphany, how I found myself on the road to Damascus, as it were.
Independently of me because I have no say in this, this begins with two events of my mother, Filomena Akazianyenga. She was the granddaughter of a slave lady. It is about the Zulu nation conquering various ethnicities along the way of its migration from South Africa to the North of the Continent, passing through all these southern countries, ESwatini, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania. My father told me that in one of the battles against local tribes in the Tete area now known as Angónia, a Zulu war chief would have captured three women from a defeated local tribe. As was the custom, the chief handed over the three women to the General of the force who, in turn, gave back one of the slaves to the leader of the victorious detachment to marry. It was my mother's grandmother.
Right there, Mixed race.
The second event was about the untimely death of my mother at my age two. In the despair, my father entrusted me to the nuns at the orphanage at the catholic Missão da Fonte Boa, who in turn left me in the care of the girls in the hostel: one Ana Samuel, and the other Margarida Ferrão (Vovó Guida), until I reached the age of 13. I am therefore a son of several mothers, which led me to the conclusion that being a father or mother is much more than giving birth. That would be too easy. Being a mother or father is about giving yourself totally to another being that needs love and selfless care, human warmth and unqualified belonging to a family.
A Mixed being.
I evolved with the certainty of being an individual, then I was made aware of being black, Ngoni, Mozambican, African, citizen of the world. Until my eyes opened wider to realize, through reading, that the Ngoni of the North of Mozambique (Tete, Niassa) and the Changana of the South (Maputo, Gaza) are the same people that migrated from South Africa. It so happened that a Zulu general called Ngungunyana decided to settle in Southern Mozambique, while the others advanced, also leaving more sub-groups along the way - Ndebele in Zimbabwe, Lozi and Ngoni in Zambia, Changana, Ngoni, Yao in Mozambique, Chewa in Malawi, Ngoni and Matengo in Tanzania. And certainly many more. They are all from the same blood and I, a product of all that. Various ethnicities, one people.
A Mixed being, if any doubt there was.
By historical accident I worked mostly outside my country, I fell in love with a Tanzanian lady, we got married and had two children. And during the second pregnancy in Abidjan, my wife needed blood transfusion. A member of parliament from Cote d’Ivoire happened to be a consultant in our organization; she volunteered and offered us her blood.
I am telling you I am mixed blood, mestizo.
My first son is today a grown up man living in Canada. Taking from me, he married outside his country of origin and went outside my comfort zone: married a white Canadian and has two very beautiful mulatto graces. Every time I look at those photographs, I see that black blood is strong and it conveys living beauty.
Am I not telling you? I am a mulatto.
Surreptitiously, my blood had been mixing and I had a damascene revelation: this black blood mixed with so much other blood finally makes my blood today a product of contributions. I am mixed black and therefore mulatto. The simple explanation is that this is hidden by my beautiful skin.
Mixed race all over.
My conclusion is that I am a mulatto and an agent of genetic mixing, a philosophical sophistication. It makes it unavoidable that I tease out the following considerations and offer them to you the reader, so that you can also interrogate your preconceived ideas and induced prejudices in a profound manner. Because your personal truth shall set you free (sound familiar?).
The deep racial discrimination characteristic of some ethnicities, European, Asian and perhaps other tribes, is an attitude that is not aware or wants to refuse the fact that in a few decades, a pure race will no longer exist. Racism ignores that historically the entire human race comes from the human migratory radiation from Africa. After all, who biologically is superior: the son or the mother? Current discrimination against black people, in South America, North America, in the United States in particular, in Europe and Asia, are therefore not just shamefully primitive manifestations, they are rooted in fear and cowardice. The global black population is much larger than white ethnicities, and inexorably growing.
Remaining as it is hijacked by blatant racism, the human imagination is prevented from inventing more positive ways of addressing the issue of interracial harmony. Don’t we all say out loud in our churches, relics of a colonialism that claimed to be superior, that we are all children of (one) god, made in the image and likeness of God? Does racist practice actually contradict that which we say is our belief? Isn’t there, after all is said and done, an inferior god?
Black people are forced to spend their entire lives and their intelligence fighting off degrading treatment that perpetuates human discrimination. The system’s architecture wants us to believe that white people are superior, that angels are white (maybe God is also white, now that I remember the statues in church!), baptism clothes are white. The entire media discourse turns in this sense, forcing us into a sterile state of being, unable of imagining better forms of human coexistence. Including the contemporary characterization of migration as evil. And the fostering of technical assistance and finance programs, to arm-twist African countries into adopting intra-African migration management methods similar to the European, schizophrenic and anti-historical management. Resulting in pathological racism of the African against the other African in South Africa. Expect much more human tragedy in South Africa, while the white migrants go about recreating their own apartheid enclaves.
As for me, I'm mulatto, as for me, I am mixed race.
Jose
Tete, September 2024
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