A Myth of Racial Purity
The young American couple and their blonde children next door are leaving Ghana. “Too poor,” they say. They’ve had enough.
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The young American couple and their blonde children next door are leaving Ghana. “Too poor,” they say. “One minute, water no lights. Next minute, lights no water.” They’ve had enough.
After five years of working to improve education in the country where their children were born, they’re packing their bags and hauling their doll-like off-springs back to the good ole U-S-of-A. Colorado, I believe.
I’m relaying this story to you, second-hand from one of their hired help. I’ve never actually seen the parents in the two years I’ve lived here, but their children have fascinated me. Lovely, well-mannered kids, but they never say a word to me. They just stare. Though, I hear, they’ll point out “Rasta house” to anyone in passing.
Being born in Ghana, they speak Twi, too, apparently. But I can never see them without thinking of those ‘Children of the Damned.’ Remember that film, Village of the Damned or the sequel with those scary-looking blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids? I know, it’s wrong. But that’s what comes to mind whenever I see them.
Here they are pictured in my yard with their Ghanaian nanny. They share the same milk-white, almost luminous pale skin colour as the children in that movie, combined with the brightest fine, blonde hair, cherublike features, and piercing blue eyes. All of which really sets them apart in this sub-Saharan environment. Yet these children seem to have no problems walking around all day under a scorching sun that never seems to darken their skin but bleaches their hair even brighter.
Then, a few weeks ago, it hit me like a rock when I met their mother for the first time. Imagine a tall, powerfully built, Amazonian woman the colour of wet sand, thick, kinky auburn hair, not too unlike my own in texture, and firm, strong, long arms and legs. Got the picture?
I had been looking out for two white parents all this time, but this woman clearly was not white. Being half Ghanaian, half Norwegian, didn’t make it any easier to imagine how this ‘black woman’ could have given birth to these two ‘white children’ until you met her husband.
A slim, pale, blonde American man with a thoughtful touch around the eyes and a sense of something fragile in him had clearly passed on a visual stamp from his side of the gene pool. But it was their mother’s physical strength and vitality that had infused these kids with almost alien-like durability in this white façade that made them totally stand out. It made them “pop”, as folks like to say these days.
Picture Beyoncé painted white-face but with that same African body and spirit and energy, and you might get close to what I’m trying to convey. It’s what one of my academic friends used to refer to as “that look in people of ‘dubious’ ethnicity.” It’s what had kept me fascinated by these two kids all along without understanding why.
I could sense that there was something ‘other’ about them. Something else going on underneath the surface that was almost like a mutation. The 25 per cent African blood, although visually muted, was very much there in every other respect. Fascinating. It often happens the other way around, but society will only ever see ‘the Black.’
It just goes to prove the myth of racial purity. Am I making sense? I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
