I was born in the kraal of the great king Lobengula when the rains had come and the earth was green and soft. But by the time that I was born in 1950, the king was dead and his kraal, Bulawayo, had become a colonial town with streets wide enough for an ox wagon to turn around. I was born in a British colony, a hybrid child of Africa, not British but not indigenous. I found my identity and my people in the Cape of Good Hope, descended from German and Dutch settlers, and a slave named Leah.

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I loved mathematics, biochemistry and computer programming in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but studied sociology and psychology throughout the 1980s. I worked as a psychologist in and around the Australian criminal justice system from 1991 to 2015 and returned to the social sciences to study cultural resilience for my PhD, beginning in 2010. I have also studied Freudian psychoanalysis and hypnosis.

 

Postcolonial theory spoke to me about my own life experience, my childhood in a racist British colony, the civil war in Rhodesia, apartheid in South Africa, a growing conscientizacao (critical consciousness) and immigration to Australia. I had been surprised to find that Australia too has a shameful colonial history, and I realised that white colonial privilege continues in previously colonised white settler countries as socioeconomic status ... in Australia and all around the world.