My first year on campus was difficult for me on many levels, though. I was shocked to discover that I would be required to take an entrance test for admittance to the French Honours degree course. This was because the program was demanding, so the professors needed to know if we students would cope academically.
Only three of us were subsequently accepted: a French-speaking female, whom I had first met at school in 1960, when she had been unable to speak a word of English. Her family had fled the Belgian Congo amidst political turmoil. The second student to be accepted was also a white female, privately educated, bilingual in German and English, with some French, too, from a very eclectic European background. The third student to be admitted was me, from a working-class background, with no additional talents as far as I could see and certainly no family expertise in languages. No-one in our family spoke French. I was the first person to even make it to university.
I was both elated and terrified. How had I got to this point? I didn’t know, and was, once more, scared of not making the grade. Having two gifted brothers had taught me that I, who wasn’t in their league at all, to my mind, at least, had had to work hard to maintain a position in the top echelon of my high school classes. I was very successful but knew that my success was due to hours of studying often late into the night.
I could hardly believe how drastically life was changing in Salisbury. The political unrest in Rhodesia, as the country was now called, continued to escalate, and the university was soon considered a hot bed of Communism. To our Prime Minister, Ian Smith, and his extreme right-wing government heading more and more towards a system of apartheid as in South Africa, local Whites either agreed with him, or else must be outright Communists. In his view, there was nothing in between. So, the multi-racial university just had to be full of Communists, didn’t it?!
I hated living in a country where all mail was opened, where telephone calls were monitored, where people were watched and spied upon, and where the daily “Rhodesia Herald” newspaper, was published, as per usual, true, but containing endless blank pages, the rest having been censored and removed. It was surreal. I found it difficult to accept but knew that if I said or did anything likely to anger the government, I would immediately lose both my scholarship and my bursary. This meant that I would never acquire a university education, since I realised that my parents could not afford to pay for me. So, I did nothing, much as it hurt me at that time. I kept quiet. I stayed in my room, hiding from mass demonstrations by mainly African students, for instance. I hated the drumming and chanting, because it thrust me back to the times in 1960, when I had hidden under the kitchen table with my brothers when the Africans outside had been protesting in similar ways. It had traumatized me.
