Seeing freedom through Dr Sindiâs eyes
By Khumisho Moguerane on 26 April 2021
âHow now brown cow?â I assume is one of the phrases many British children who are now adults learnt in the early years of their schooling. Sindisiwe Mahamba-Sithole learnt it at a private school in Harare, Zimbabwe, an inheritance of the British system of education.
Sindi and I were students in the biological sciences and living in the same womenâs residence,
Huis Erika, at the University of Pretoria (UP) in the late 1990s. The phrase was a witty form of greeting between us, intended to make us laugh. Imagine a white woman teacher reciting the phrase to an audience of little black learners keen to learn? We laughed at this and other unwitting absurdities of postcolonial education that brought black and white together.