Alone and Unobserved

I was reading a post on my friend David’s blog about the the current legal controversy in Greece over the use of the word “Lesbian” in the name of gay rights group Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece (OLKE). After discussing the implications of the injunction the Lesbians are seeking against the lesbians, David ends with this delightful quote from the Guardian article:

“Thank God Sappho was born on Lesbos, not Rhodes,” says Sandra, on holiday from Leeds with a group of friends to celebrate her 60th birthday. “Or we would be stuck being known as Rhodesians.”

This led me quite naturally to thoughts of my mother.

While she is neither lesbian, a Lesbian or a Rhodesian, she did live in Malawi, a former British colony greatly affected by Cecil Rhodes and his imperialistic ambitions. Her friend Cheryl moved there with her family for a few years so Cheryl’s father could help set up a system of standardized tests to replace the old, culturally biased exams imported from Britain. Afraid of being “the only white girl in Malawi,” Cheryl asked my mother to keep her company, which my mom was only too happy to do.

I grew up hearing stories about the expatriate high school they attended, the friends they made, the servants they had and the food they ate. She took the British O-Levels and failed most of them (as she had had only a few months to prepare), but she was the only female to pass the physics and chemistry O-Levels in Malawi that year, and she achieved the highest score in the country on the maths. She went on to complete a year of college at the University of Malawi.

My mom, circa 1973

We were talking about her experiences in Malawi just last week, when my parents and sister came up for my graduation, and for the first time I realized that she had lived twice in a military police state: first in Malawi under the reign of “His Excellency the Life President Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda” and then on her Mormon mission to Uruguay in 1973, during Juan María Bordaberry’s military dictatorship. In Banda’s repressive régime, women were required to wear skirts (no pants!) that covered their knees, an experience that probably prepared her her time at BYU during the reigns of Ernest L. Wilkinson (motto: “To the knees, please! And purge the gays!”) and Dallin H. Oaks (motto: “Love the gays! But also purge them.”).