![]() ![]() I returned to Zimbabwe in the winter and enrolled at the University of Zimbabwe. ![]() Nor was anyone aware of, or interested in, the historical upheaval that had ruined lives and families in Rhodesia. Returning to Cambridge under strain, I decided there was no point in enduring the pressure of finding cheap digs I could afford for the holidays, of being the only black girl in my college, reading for a degree I was no longer interested in. The bleakness of the Zimbabwean students’ lives, their self-medication with various drugs and episodes of mental collapse related to reliving a war from which they’d fled indicated to me how the mind needed as much treatment as the body. I was in London, where I’d spent all my summers since arriving in England, during the peace talks. But the nationalist liberation struggle escalated while I was at college, and in the summer of 1979 a peace treaty resulted in a road map to independence. ![]() The idea was to proceed to a teaching hospital after I graduated, such as the hospital at the mission in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe where I’d spent several years of my childhood. After school I returned to England to study for a BSc in medicine at the University of Cambridge. Early memories were of a foster home in Dover, then of returning to a Rhodesia that had just removed itself from the British empire. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |