The pursuit of culture(dness)

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Published on Tuesday, 27 September 2011 07:47

Written by Kevin Minofu

On a cold and uneventful night in Johannesburg,  during my cold and uneventful holiday, I sat down to watch an episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? During the episode in which a celebrity had to have “that awkward moment” when someone tells you that your great-grandmother died of syphilis, I decided to do my own share of family tree construction, ideally devoid of any venereal diseases. 

Mainly, this particular episode of Who Do you Think... consisted of me simply questioning my parents about a little bit of my family history.

Why do people care about their lineage? Is it simply a means for people to claim that their irritating characteristics, including rudeness, ugly toes and stubbornness, are a simple product of heritage? (No, that’s all you.) Or is it a vain exercise to find a royal line to some virile monarch or the proclamation, “I totally have white (or black, for that matter) cousins!” Well, in my case, growing up as an immigrant from Malawi in this country had led to long, lonely walks on isolated  beaches as I asked of the world: “Where are my roots?” 

Okay, that may perhaps be a bit over the top, but I have pondered what makes up the face that stares back at me in the mirror.  Growing up in a society that places so much on the persistence of culture and an identification with an obese archetypal chieftain in a mystical village made me wonder exactly how much I owe to this peculiarly African idiosyncrasy — and what is this supposed “culture” that my  monolingual, Western-influenced self  should embrace?

After about an hour of interrogating my parents, I discovered that the Malawian-ness that I have felt perhaps closest to is not as much a product of that beautiful lacustrine country as I thought. It was surprising to find out that my lineage was attributable to successive immigrants form modern-day Mozambique, Tanzania and, perhaps most interestingly, a great-great-great grandfather who left Zululand to get away from the benevolence and gentle-natured character of the ever-cheerful King Shaka. 

The irony then hit me. My forefathers were also wanderers searching for better lives; immigrants who established their culture not as a clinging hope to a past life, but as a fluid exercise in self-identity.

So where does that leave me? Where does that leave all of us who ponder our culture and heritage? And perhaps more importantly, where does that leave  the people who believe that their culture and their specific customs are the only things that provide any sense of identity to their lives, as a metaphorical leash that they can’t break through? 

Well, what I have learnt and what all the sordid details about my family that I have yet to learn has left me with, is a new, fresher sense of identity. Also, the identity I still search for is made up of my life experiences — and that, after all, didn’t involve the beating of any drums or any quasi-spiritual excursions up mountains.