The Name I Was Born With

The Name I Was Born With

Reflections on identity, belonging and the words we inherit

"Who gets to decide who we are?"

It is an extraordinary thing to discover, in your fifties, that the name you have carried all your life has become a word other people are uncomfortable hearing.

I discovered that quite by accident.

Not during a political debate.

Not while reading a newspaper.

Not because somebody was trying to offend me.

It happened over a glass of wine with our Swedish neighbours on a warm summer evening.

My partner Dan and I had been invited next door, and as the evening unfolded, our conversation wandered through the kinds of subjects neighbours often explore together: family, travel, culture, language and the curious ways people experience the world differently.

One of our neighbours mentioned that he had recently learned that the phrase master bedroom was falling out of favour because of its historical associations. These days, many people prefer the terms primary bedroom or primary suite.

It was an interesting conversation about how language changes over time and how words can carry histories that many of us never stop to think about.

From there, our conversation naturally drifted to other words whose meanings have changed.

We talked about his understanding that the word coloured to describe a person who looked like me to be offensive. It wasn’t a word he felt comfortable using.

I smiled.

“That’s interesting,” I said.

“Because I’m a coloured woman from Zimbabwe and I describe myself as coloured.”

Being well-travelled neighbours, they completely understood my culture, my heritage and the community I came from. And even why I describe myself as a coloured woman.

As I began explaining my story, I realised I wasn’t simply explaining a word.

I was explaining an entire childhood.

An entire community.

An entire way of understanding where I came from.

That conversation stayed with me long after I went home.

It made me wonder how many other people hear the word coloured through one country’s history, without ever imagining that somewhere else in the world it tells a very different story.

This blog is not an attempt to persuade anyone to use the language that I use.

Nor is it an attempt to rewrite history.

History deserves honesty.

Colonialism deserves honesty.

The inequalities that shaped southern Africa deserve honesty.

But so do the lives of ordinary people who grew up within that history.

This is simply my story.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

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I was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, during the 1960s.

Today the city is called Harare.

The country is Zimbabwe.

The names have changed.

The memories have not.

Long before I was born, two remarkable journeys quietly crossed continents before eventually becoming one family.

On my mother’s side, my grandfather travelled from what is now Pakistan and built a life with a Zimbabwean woman.

On my father’s side, my grandfather left Britain and also fell in love with a Zimbabwean woman.

Their children—my parents—met one another, fell in love, then out of love, and my mother raised six children.

If my family tree teaches me anything, it is that identity is rarely simple.

It stretches across continents.

Across cultures.

Across languages.

Across histories.

When I was born, my birth certificate recorded my race as coloured.

My parents were recorded as coloured too.

That was the language used in the country where I was born.

It was also the language used by the community that raised me.

Growing up, I never questioned it.

It wasn’t something I analysed.

It wasn’t political.

It wasn’t controversial.

It wasn’t horrible.

It was simply who we were.

Looking back now, I realise that many people who hear the word today immediately think about segregation.

About discrimination.

About hierarchy.

About colonial governments deciding where people belonged.

I understand why.

Those histories are real.

They should never be forgotten.

But they are not the whole story.

Because when I hear that same word, my mind does not travel first to politics.

It travels home.

To the community in which I grew up.

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Home for me looked like children running barefoot between neighbouring yards.

It looked like mothers who never minded how many extra children appeared at dinner time.

It sounded like laughter drifting through open windows on warm evenings.

It smelled of food being shared between families without invitation or ceremony.

It felt safe despite the discipline we received when we needed it.

We lived in a coloured suburb.

We attended coloured schools.

Yes, Rhodesian society was organised according to race and those structures shaped people’s opportunities in profound ways. That history should never be minimised.

Yet childhood has a remarkable way of remembering something else alongside politics.

It remembers people.

I had white friends.

I had African friends.

I had Asian friends

We played together.

Visited each other’s homes.

Laughed together.

My memories are not of constantly measuring the colour of the children around me.

My memories are of bicycles.

School uniforms.

Family gatherings.

Sleepovers.

Cousins.

Birthday parties.

Neighbourhood adventures.

And adults who somehow seemed to know where every child belonged, even when none of us had told them.

Our community was close.

Exceptionally close.

Neighbours looked after neighbours.

Children belonged, in many ways, to the whole street.

If somebody became ill, support was given and meals appeared.

If somebody struggled, people quietly helped.

Nobody announced acts of kindness.

They simply happened.

Only now, living thousands of miles away, do I fully appreciate what an extraordinary gift that was.

People often ask me why I volunteer.

Why helping others feels so important to me.

The answer is remarkably simple.

Because I was raised by people who did exactly that.

Long before I understood words like “community” or “service”, I had already watched them being lived every single day.

Perhaps that is why, when someone asks me what the word coloured means to me, my answer surprises them.

It does not begin with race.

It begins with belonging.

Because that is what I inherited.

Not superiority.

Not inferiority.

Belonging.

And perhaps that is why, all these years later, I still find it difficult when people tell me that the word which connects me to my childhood, my family and my community is one I should no longer use.

To some people, it is simply an offensive word.

To me, it is the name of the world that made me.

The woman I became did not emerge despite that community.

She emerged because of it.

Its generosity.

Its resilience.

Its humour.

Its warmth.

Its ordinary kindness.

Those are the things I carry with me.

Not the labels imposed by history.

But the people who lived within it.

And they deserve to be remembered too.

Author’s Note

This blog is a personal reflection on my own life and identity as a woman born into Zimbabwe’s (formerly Rhodesia) coloured community during the 1960s.

It is not intended to speak on behalf of all coloured Zimbabweans, nor does it suggest that everyone who shares a similar heritage will feel the same way that I do. Communities are diverse and experiences of race, identity and belonging differ from person to person and across generations.

I also recognise that the word coloured carries very different historical meanings in different parts of the world. In countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, many people rightly associate the term with painful histories of racial discrimination and find it offensive. I respect that completely.

In this blog, I use the word only because it is the name by which I have understood my own heritage throughout my life, and because it remains the way I describe my upbringing within Zimbabwe’s coloured community.

My hope is not to persuade anyone to adopt my language, but simply to share my story and to invite a broader understanding of how identity can be experienced differently across cultures, countries and generations.

If this blog encourages even one person to pause before making assumptions about the word another person uses to describe their identity, and instead to respond with curiosity rather than judgement, then it will have achieved exactly what I hoped it would.