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A letter to my children

Dearest Little ones,

I write this to prepare you for the future. I realise that you are too young to appreciate or understand the contents of my letter to you, nevertheless, I shall write, for it is my duty to prepare and protect you from that you do not anticipate.

It was a story James' mother (your friend in the day-care) told me that made me want to alert you on the unavoidable. It is a difficult task for me as I do not know how I can explain to you that in this world, "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others" (this is from the Animal Farm, a book I know you would enjoy reading one day, by George Orwell).

The story broke my heart, but I shall tell you all the same. James had come home yesterday from the day-care (he is in the 3-4s group like you, my son) and blurted out this question to his mother, "Why am I black? I want to be white, I hate my colour". As her mother struggled to grapple with this sudden reality of a 4-year old trying to find words to explain, the tearful boy ran into his room.

Following his footsteps and with a prayer in her mouth, to find the right words, she sat him down and explained to him the origin of our skin colour, that "it was the Lord's doing and it is marvellous to our sight" in her words as a Christian woman. She talk to him about God's fun activities of playing with different colours, that some he painted white, some he painted red, some he painted brown and gave twinkles for eyes, and to us he painted deep brown, sometimes bordering on black. She went on to explain that all were the same and made beautiful to suit a playful Creator.

At this point, she said to him, "look at me, am I not beautiful? And little James said "No". All these the mummy recounted to me with tears in her eyes, and I thought to my self, "Ah, what shall he be at 30, if he finds the world so bitter at 4?" (borrow some words from Alli Bhutto former prime minister). We speculated on what it might be that caused the state of affairs. Perhaps he witnessed favouritism on the part of the care-giver based on the type of skin tone and hair texture.

I shall hasten to tell you that there is nothing new about his feeling of hatred for himself or, at least, the colour of his skin. Kenneth Clark's 1940's Doll Experiment that was instrumental in the Brown v. Board of Education case indicated that black kids chose dolls with light skin over black-skinned dolls. This experiment was also recently conducted by Kiri Davis in her 8-minute

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