The dreams of a child

The dreams of a child

As a child I wanted to marry a white man with long hair who drove a motorbike who had a million tattoos on both his arms. My dream husband as a child could fight, jump and he had the strength to catch me from any burning building. His name would have been Rambo and my name was Michelle.

As a young black woman living in South Africa today, this dream of mine has changed if not vanished completely. As a child living in a country where racial division was in the past within the norm and animosity the order of the day, I look back at my childhood and realize that my fantasies and dreams featured me looking like everything other than what I really was. I was an adult who had long silky blond hair, long legs and red nail polish, I had small perfect pink lips, but what was interesting is that in my dreams am not black. In my childhood dreams I do not have to take public transport with 20 other people instead of the legal 15 in a taxi. I don’t have to wait in long queues for a doctor to help my sick child in a government hospital. In my dreams I do not have to work hard cleaning and ironing for rich people of the opposite color to put food on the table for my family. In my dreams I have a proper well paying job: In my dreams.

As a child my dreams were an escape from the reality I knew as segregation. In these dreams of mine, my life is easy and I am free. I am rich because I am a white woman named Michelle.
As disturbing as my dreams are for a 5 year old African child, I do believe that I am not the only one who ever dreamt these dreams of mine. I am 22 now, dark in complexion and refuse to where make up, a weave or nail polish. I have clearly turned into my 5 year old nightmare, but my dreams are no longer of what I look like.
My dreams are now about how I feel.

I now dream of something more possible. I dream of walking into a room full of people who are unlike me. Who do not speak the way I do, do not look like me and yet I feel beautiful. I feel I belong and would not want to change myself for even a second in the name of trying to belong. I feel at peace with myself and those around me. I feel my dreams are no longer in my sleep, but they form a part of my reality, my world and my life. A world where Martin Luther King’s words hold truth: a place where we measure an individual by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. My dreams as a child have set the adult I am today free from seeing other people as beautiful and not my own kind. My childhood dreams give me freedom today.

Poppy "Pops" Vilakazi