I am Ndebele
I am Evertone Siwela aka Bhekubukhosi, born and raised in Zimbabwe. Growing up in post-colonial Africa it seemed as if everything good was associated with the Western world throughout the entire spectrum of our lives. In retrospect, bearing the English name “Evertone” worked to my advantage in just about every instant of my life in Africa. Though we (Zimbabweans) were one of the last African nations to gain independence from Britain in 1980, one thing for sure was that the rampant effects of the "scramble for Africa" were yet to unfold. The greatest “achievement” by colonialism was colonization of the mind that was unfortunately passed on by one generation to the next. Too many of us Africans have lost our identities and the sight of our forefathers that beheld our African culture to the brim. In Africa, we call ourselves “blacks” because that what we have always been told we are, besides, the closest common colors to all of our different complexions ranges from shades of brown to black. With even more pride, I identify myself by my native tribe. I am Ndebele, also known amaTebele – a branch of the Zulu who split from King Shaka under the leadership of Mzilikazi Khumalo kaMatshobane in the 1820s to settle in what is modern day Zimbabwe. I say that with so much pride it is like I am inaugurating myself in a formal ceremony every time I say it. That pride has not always been there all my life.
I happen to be a light skinned black African who wound up in America in my early twenties. It was a shock to realize that many American blacks, not Black Americans, did not identify me as a black person at all. I thought we were all endowed with the luscious Negroid features that genealogically connected all of us, after all I was anatomically no different from the next “brother” who hailed from Atlanta, GA, Brooklyn, NY or Chicago, IL or any other “hood” for that matter. Even so, I was nothing else but African. In a bid to fit in a new world that I had probably been raised by post-colonial Mother Africa to think it was the promised land, I subconsciously suppressed my “Africaness” and under this guise of assimilation I nearly lost my identity. My last name alone usually turns heads here in the US, believe it or not even my first name, but couple that with my accent that underlies my well-spoken English and suddenly you have an alien. Literally, an alien; even credible national newspapers call me an Alien. The reason is jargonized with some legal lingo that I will not even try to decipher. Needless to say, it is just an insult in my opinion. Having an accent, which everyone does by the way, is almost a crime in this country. Many view it as an attempt to sound just “right”. Even having gone to some of the best and most westernized schools in the superb Zimbabwean education system and having been globally exposed to many cultures, my accent will never ever be American or any other western nation – a fact I accepted early on under my bidding guise. So no matter what I did, my Africaness would never be subdued by anything.
After 6 years in a western nation, I am now more African than I ever was in my life. My mother’s choice of my birth name was a native Zulu/Ndebele name “Bhekubukhosi” which means Uphold Royalty since the kinship of our family’s names’ totem is an emblem royalty in the Ndebele clan Zimbabwe to King Mzilikazi Khumalo Ka Matshobane, which of course was sidelined by well colonized minds at my birth to prefer the English name, Evertone. With my newfound pride, I recently informally adopted my native African name as a aka suffix to my given name. For the sake of simplicity and not be too much in-your-face-african, I nick it down to Bukhosi.
With thus said, I am a Zimbabwean Ndebele, I am African royalty and I was born and raised in the Promised Land – Africa.
