‘Ersatz Europeans and Their Minions’: Performing Whiteliness in Non-white Postcolonial African Ghettoes

Abstract

White lust and Black shame among blacks across all classes is a phenomenon that has not been fully explored and accounted for particularly as part of a residual inter-generational colonial psychosis expressed in everyday talk among black folk in postcolonial Africa. This leads to the questions: What aspects of whiteness or coloniser/colonised transactional relationships do the former colonised blacks manifest in conversations? How does whiteness refracted by class, gender, and ethnicity, remap itself onto new psycho-social relationships among blacks in former British settler colonies like Zimbabwe and South Africa? How are contemporary class differences expressed in terms of distance from or closeness to imagined whiteness in everyday ghetto language and communication? This research analyses meanings that attach to terms murungu (white person), and its plural form varungu (white persons) as used by Shona speaking black Zimbabweans in address or with reference to phenotypical non-white individuals as people engage in naturally occurring and undirected conversational talk in three different locations. In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon broached the idea of the psychotic split personality as a condition suffered by the colonised subject resulting from the colonial situation itself. The situation taught the blacks to place in a pedestal and pursue all that was white, to self-hate and to seek escape from their black skin that kept their soul prisoner. The article seeks to show cases through which everyday talk by black Zimbabweans online and in Zimbabwean based taxis reveals deeper undertones of black shame and an exaltation of whiteness. It concludes that we can still trace colour schizophrenia through everyday talk among ordinary black people of Southern Africa.