it was a gradual think to. I was aware of what going on from an early age but what i wasnt aware of was what it means to be colonised. i kind of started seeing the picture in terms of colonisation of the mind when i was in high school. A lot of the boys and girls I was in cla** with in primary school went to the same high school as i did. when all of them got there, which was a coloured high school, they started using their second/christian names, Andrew, Clive, Michael, Pheobe, Fiana, etc. I felt left out and grew up taking pride in having an English name so i tried but i didnt work because i had registered with my Xhosa name which the teachers had gotten used to.
so when I was 16/17 our school helped us apply for our ID documents, on the forms we filled in for the home affairs i left out my english name deliberately as I hated the idea of having an european name at the point. I never told my mother about this. but anyway, when home affairs brought us back i think it was some kind of receipt/bambhela or something like that, mine came back with my english name written in red pen. so i knew i had failed in removing it from my ID because it was already in my birth certificate.
But I think i really became black after reading I Write What I like. Though i was politically conscious and i thought i understood oppression way before i read this book, I still feel ashamed at my realisation of how colonised/self hating my mind was. I was 25 then.
