It is trite history, known to every child of school age that Zambia before Independence - Northern Rhodesia as it was called - operated under a social and political dispensation steeped in racial discrimination.

Black people had no political power, no vote; blacks and whites lived in different areas; different schools and hospitals were reserved for each race; jobs above a certain level were denied to blacks, whether in the army, the mines, the civil service or whatever.

Things started to improve a few years before Independence (for example with the passing of the Race Relations Act in the late 1950s) but discrimination ended completely only with Zambia becoming Zambia, under a constitution that forbade discrimination of any sort.

Now for some not-so-trite history. What very few Zambians know – even young white ones – is that the system of discrimination practiced in Northern Rhodesia did not spring from the imaginations of colonial officers or settlers. It was a modification or extension of an apparatus of discrimination that had already existed in Britain for hundreds of years, traces of which are still to be discerned by the keen-eyed.

Yes, it is true! The British discriminated against each other – white against white - in terms of votes, dwelling places, access to schools and so on.

I tend to agree with Walter Scott (he is after all my clansman), in his musings in the early chapters of his novel “Ivanhoe”, that the infamous British class system was actually born as a racial (or tribal) discrimination system.

The Normans, in cementing their colonisation of Britain that started with victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, wanted to keep their distance from the conquered people who they were in the process of dispossessing; they wanted to keep their land, their political power (and no doubt their women) away from the losers.

The Normans, for background information, were a large tribe of Frenchified Vikings who were domiciled in part of western France (still called Normandy). The British aboriginals were largely a mixture of Celts (the “Angles” or “Anglos”) and Germanic peoples (the “Saxons”). The Normans were determined to lord it (literally) over these and any other riff-raff that might have crept onto the island in years preceding the great invasion.

One problem with mzungus – especially if you confine yourself to the northern European variety - is that they do not come colour coded. They are all more-or-less pale, some more blond than others, and yet others with missing or double chins. There is no easy systematic way of visually telling the difference (and thus discriminating) between an Anglo-Saxon and a Norman.

So the Norman conquerors – the progenitors of what we still call the Upper Class English - had to take special measures to differentiate themselves from the lower orders. If you cannot create a system of apartheid from the appearance of skin or hair you have to be creative in the cultural department. The Normans accordingly developed the English language tremendously, for example, adding thousands of Latinate words to existing ones with Celtic and German roots.

Although only they could originally speak it, they thereby created what is possibly the earth’s richest language, and also the burgeoning lingua franca of the world. They altered the direction of English poetry for good (I am just showing off) leading it away from the old Anglo-Saxon predilection for anvil-heavy alliteration to the more dance-like, lyrical French schemes of rhythm and rhyme. Education was of course the most essential part of such transformation and self-creation of a new ruling class.

I do not have to imagine the “making” of a ruling class Brit, since I caught the tail end of it. Although it was perched in the Southern Rhodesian highlands the school I went to was a bona fide English public school (i.e. private school for children of the privileged following conventions and syllabi approved by the “Headmasters Conference”).

The school in those days excluded blacks and other non-whites of any gender, and girls of any race whatsoever (and people keep asking me why I am strange!). But the aim of the school had little to do with Africa – it was devoted to turning out men who would go on to Oxford or Cambridge and then go on further to making a hash of running the Bank of England.

Alternatively, in the case of the less intellectually gifted, it was happy to turn out impossibly brave officers who would lead differently accented other-ranks in suicidal charges against impregnable machine-gun nests in wars advancing the spread of British civilisation.

To assist this latter group we played arcane games – such as rugby, cricket, hockey – that supposedly honed our manly leadership qualities, although this assumption could not be tested since none of these games were played by more “ordinary” schools (which went in for soccer and boxing), so we played against ourselves (and always performed well).

Given the Oxbridge target it was regarded as important that, although my area of talent was mathematics, I should acquire a reasonable working knowledge (to O-level at least) of Latin, Greek and French. I did not then realise the relation of this requirement to the Norman conquest but I have since figured it out (with Walt’s help) and now know I was being turned into a sort of virtual Norman by dint of acquiring “deep Norman” classical culture.

The link with the British upper classes and the original Norman bloodlines must now be tenuous – with money providing all kinds of people access to “class” and nearly a thousand years of cross-breeding mixing the genes, despite any attempts at regulation. But the functional reality of the British class system survived at least into the second half of the last century.

I arrived at Cambridge, in 1962, just as the first experiments with admitting “working class” students were taking place. The stresses that arose between the la-di-dah public school boys and the “secondary modern” government school kids of easily equal intelligence were a wonder to behold. I remember one “working class” boy who stressed out for weeks before absconding, never to return to what he found an entirely alien environment. These days it has all settled down to amicable egalitarianism, I am reliably informed. I wonder if that is true.
I ask my English wife, who was one of the first generation of girls to enter both Westminster public school in London and Worcester College, Oxford, when her alma maters (just look at that Latinised English!) were founded. Second half of the 11th Century in both cases she assures me – within years of the Norman Conquest. It is so nice when flying by the seat of your pants to look down through the cloud and confirm that your dead reckoning has put you exactly where you thought you were!

What can we say after this speed-of-light detail-ignoring tour of race, class and education? I think we can say that all three are intimately tied together. Racism readily becomes class-ism; and education is a powerful perpetuator of both these evils – perhaps not necessarily but potentially. Education is dangerous; if not handled properly it can make you think of yourself as different, as superior, to the hoi polloi (that’s ancient Greek for “the masses” – gee what a classical education does for you). It can turn you into a self-regarding elitist who thinks he or she is born to rule over people who are inferior, but in fact are merely less lucky and very possibly smarter than you.

I am currently carrying out a research project, involving trawling through Hansard, the verbatim parliamentary record, with a view to demonstrating that there is a serious outbreak of education-driven class consciousness taking over Zambia at the moment. Far from being free of discriminatory thinking, Zambia is in the grip of an outbreak of “educationism”.

Black people with university degrees – totally unrelated genetically to William the Conqueror - are becoming virtual Normans, sneering down their noses at the unlettered masses of Zambia, and in the process detaching themselves from reality and becoming irrelevant to the political life of the country.

I do not want to name names at this juncture, because it would be unfair to single out one educational snob (let’s say for the sake of argument the Minister of Finance) and leave another alone. Let me finish the research – difficult as it is without an index to Hansard – and all will be revealed.

Meanwhile let us be thankful that our political system, however imperfectly, is based upon One Man One Vote and not upon One Pseudo-Norman One Vote. The original Normans would never have lost Solwezi Central.