| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Shari Eppel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Shari, welcome to Berkeley.
Thanks very much, Harry.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Zimbabwe, which is in Southern Africa. It's the country that used to be known as Rhodesia. That's where I was born, and where I've lived my entire life.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your character?
That's an interesting question. My parents were professionals, are still professionals. My father is a veterinary surgeon and my mother was a physiotherapist. I think my father always hoped I would follow in his footsteps and be the scientific one in the family, in our family of three. I used to go with him over weekends and work in the laboratory with him. He was a government vet, so he was a big animal vet. I also used to help him with postmortems of cattle that used to come in dead and things like that. Looking back, I can see that I've had a fascination with the forensic aspects of death for a long time.
What about your mother?
My mother, of course, was a healer of people, as a physiotherapist, and she worked in a school for handicapped children. So I guess that also influenced my choices.
Did you talk much about politics and government affairs growing up, around the dinner table?
I suppose I would characterize my parents, if I had to, as wishy-washy liberals, which isn't unkindly meant. But what I mean is that we were raised to have a good attitude, in terms of the fact that we were growing up in a very violent country and in a very racist country, growing up in the sixties and seventies under the Rhodesian Front fighting to maintain white supremacy. Our parents always encouraged us not to support racism as an institution, and to teach all people on their own merits. But they weren't political activists, they weren't great human rights activists. They avoided politics as much as possible, I should think.
Were there any incidents that you remember from your youth that taught you about discrimination and made you feel what racism meant?
Well, yes. I was a teenager during the 1970s, which was when the war was very bad, and all my male counterparts, white counterparts, were being forced to go into the army to fight. As a woman, as a girl, I was excluded from that, but I was very aware of double standards as a schoolgirl. I can remember a particular instance when I was really horrified, which was in 1976. The Rhodesians carried out an air raid on a camp in Mozambique, and slaughtered thousands of people. I can remember hearing about this at school, and some of my friends were jubilant and were saying, "Oh, we massacred all those ... we killed a thousand people last night." I remember having this ghastly feeling, and thinking, "Well, that's as if this entire school got wiped out, as if we were just all dead, that's the equivalent," and feeling quite shocked that people could talk about massacres like that. That's something which stands out for me.
Did you have any black friends during those growing-up years?
It was very difficult in those days for the races to mix. The government went to a lot of efforts to make sure that that didn't happen. Schools were segregated; living areas were segregated. So, in short, I had very little exposure to black children my own age growing up.
What about books you read as a young person that influenced you?
I don't know about ones which influenced me into human rights; I remember enjoying C.S. Lewis. But I suppose I had this strange, schizophrenic upbringing that many white children had in Africa, where I grew up reading about Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland, and reading Dickens and Shakespeare. I remember visiting England for the first time as an adult, and it was like going to fairyland or something. It hadn't seemed like a real place at all growing up, because it was so at odds with the bush and the wild animals, and the war, the violent context, the very unfriendly, in many ways, greater environment that I grew up in.
I know now you consider yourself a citizen of Zimbabwe. What was in your mind back then as a young person? Do have any recollection about your sense of national identity?
Yes. I think many white families in Africa raised their children with the idea that this is a good life, but it's not going to last, and you should think of growing up and leaving. And, in fact, when I look at my classmates, there's not one actually left in Zimbabwe. In fact, the white population of Zimbabwe is between 40,000 and 60,000 in a population of 14 million. So it's a very small minority group. As a child, I was raised like that -- "Well, you must think about the world being your home in the future." I did study outside of Zimbabwe, I did my university education outside of Zimbabwe and traveled for a few years. It's as an adult that I've made a conscious choice, that I'm Zimbabwean and I'm African, and it's the country where I hope to live always.
Before we talk about your education, let me ask you, did you have any mentors other than your parents who were quite influential?
Yes, there are some human rights activists in Zimbabwe whom I greatly admire. I could mention a few.
But this is later in your life?
That's later, yes.
Yes. But go ahead and mention them, let's talk about that.
One of the great current mentors is a Catholic archbishop, Archbishop Pious Singubet, who is himself a torture survivor. He is an outstanding individual from our region. And also Michael Ritt, who was the Catholic Commissioner for Justice and Peace when I was growing up. He was one of the few whites who stood up against Ian Smith, and actually had to go into exile in order to stay alive during the seventies. And then he stood up to the Mugabe regime in the eighties; he was one of the few people who spoke out about the massacres of this government at the time they were happening. Now, actually, he's a member of Parliament. He's in his sixties now, and he's gone into politics.
Both in your work and I'm sure in the individuals you've described, there is courage. When one looks at their careers or your own career, are there common roots to this courage, or do people come to it by different routes, or does it just emerge in the course of the work and the importance of the cause?
When I think of those particular individuals and myself -- and I never sit and think of myself as a courageous person or whatever -- I think that what I have in common with them is the pursuit of truth, that I don't like being lied to. In forty years in Zimbabwe, I've known two governments: the first was the Rhodesian Front and the second has been Zapu founder Robert Mugabe, and both have lied to everybody in the county. I don't like being lied to; I like to know what's going on. So I see part of being involved in human rights as a way of keeping my finger on the truth, to know what's really happening in the country. That for me is a strong motivation, it's anger at having been lied to and the feeling that I won't be lied to again by any government.
Let's talk a little about your education. How did that change the course of your life and affect you in this trajectory that your life took?
Well, I have a small formal education, by Berkeley standards anyway, where I did study psychology and clinical psychology at the university, and then did my Masters, basically, by internship, by practical application.
And this was where?
My academic training was in South Africa, and my internship has been Zimbabwe. I operate kind of in an intellectual vacuum, in terms of colleagues, clinical psychologists. In the entire Matebeland, which has a population of four million people, there are two clinical psychologists apart from myself, and two psychiatrists. That's the entire mental health service for four million people. So there's a certain space in that, as well, to be creative. There's no such thing as breaking out of the mainstream, because there's no stream at all.
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