This is the point, the man who called me a mulatto has never met me. He later acknowledged that he was out of order, and I considered the matter over.

I am a Buja. That is my ethnic designation. Like any Southern African people, we are a bit of everything from the cross section of African people. I know for a fact that I have at least 0,02% Khoisan ( Bushman) blood. I like to think of myself as a person because I do belong to many intersecting groups ( Zimbabwean, Black, Rastafarian, middle-income and so on and so on)

Check out my picture on the website I am building and tell me where you would place me. My brother has messed up the colors, hopefully by the time all the pages are up, it will look different.

From my understanding of the term mulatto, it carries connotations of mesalliance, of inappropriate relations. I take that as a personal insult to all the females in my bloodline, as it suggests that they may have been less than virtuous. So, in calling him peasant I was simply reminding the person that it was not his place to cast doubt on my family line, a family line that was ancient when it occured to the Saxon hordes that they needed a king. All those people you read about, like Shabaka, these are my forefathers ( through a Princess Shenakdakhete or something like that)

Like I said, it is all water under the bridge, the brother did withdraw the remark. If I met him I would invite him to tea.

Now to your question about elders. The concept of elder in Zimbabwean society differs from the one that you seem to hold. Very different. For example, here in the UK, my elder is a girl of about 6. She is the granddaughter in the male line of my grandmother's brother. That makes her my father's mother and my grandmother. I would never address her by her first name, and treat her with all due reverence and deference. Even I am a patriarch within my clan.

Let's sort out the mulatto issue first before I elaborate on this.