When I became Canadian, I swore allegiance to the very Crown that colonized my people

This First Person column is the experience of Charleen Sibanda, a Zimbabwean-born lawyer who lives in Vancouver. This column is part of a Canada Day series exploring what Canada means to people across this country. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

Ten years ago, I stood in a crowded room in Calgary, surrounded by strangers who somehow already felt like kin. We were all waiting to become something new. We were every shade — brown, Black, white, olive — and every kind of story: hope-heavy and heartbreak-tested, war-scarred and wonder-filled, carrying dreams in manila envelopes and memories in the seams of borrowed jackets. 

I'd heard echoes of these stories before, while volunteering with immigrant and refugee support groups — but here, they pulsed in stereo.

The room held a hush; not silence, but anticipation — a low hum of nervous excitement. I shifted in my chair, eyes darting forward like a passenger about to board a flight to a country I was already in.

When the judge asked us to rise, we did — a patchwork of accents and histories — and pledged allegiance to the Queen of England. Then, for the first time, O Canada rose from our lips — not as visitors, but as citizens.

It was a proud moment, but the pride came laced with discomfort. I stood there, pledging loyalty to the Crown that had ruled both my old home and my new one. 

The irony cut deep. The anthem we sang wasn't the fierce, defiant song of liberation I'd grown up with in Zimbabwe — the one that honoured sacrifice and remembered the freedom won at a blood price. Instead, the Canadian anthem was a gentle hymn, almost reverent, as if unwilling to name the erasures beneath its melody.

My mother, in her late 60s, sat quietly near the back. She was visiting from Zimbabwe, probably unaware of the full weight of what was unfolding. To her, it was likely just another milestone in her daughter's life. 

But her stories of the horrors she experienced rose in me like smoke — stolen lands, forced marches to barren reserves where hope struggled to breathe. Signs that read "Whites Only" and "Blacks Only." The sting of racial slurs used by white settlers to demean, dehumanize and subordinate Black people — like a scar beneath the skin.

And beneath those memories rose the layered histories of the land I now stood on — Calgary, called Moh-kíns-tsis in the language shared by the Blackfoot people, part of Treaty 7 territory and long home to several Indigenous nations. Histories in Canada of stolen children torn from arms, graves left unmarked, cultures erased and treaties broken behind smiles that never quite met the eyes.

My voice faltered. 

I had not only left one colonial legacy behind — but I was also now bowing, however gently, into another. My body held both the joy of becoming and the ache of inheritance. It was a collision of past, present and future — a moment that seeded a lasting complexity at the heart of my Canadian identity.

After the ceremony, in a reception room filled with small talk and miniature flags, I stood beside a woman I'd spoken to earlier — newly Canadian, like me. She was from Ethiopia, a country that had famously resisted colonization.

"You speak good English," she said, smiling.

I returned the practised smile I always gave. I used to take it as a compliment. But that day, it landed differently. I was being praised — but also marked.

Her words pulled me back to the classrooms of Zimbabwe, where English reigned.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, one of the giants of African literature, once wrote that in colonial Kenya, English was more than a language. "It was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference." 

I knew that bow. 

It lingered long after the flags of independence were raised — in schoolyards where we policed and mocked each other for speaking English poorly, rooted in the colonial pressure to master the language flawlessly, and in classrooms where the sting of a ruler landed harder for poor grammar in English than poor grades in isiNdebele, my native tongue. We learned it young: brilliance spoke with a British tongue.

I spoke isiNdebele, too — but it was reserved for the informal, the unimportant. It was "vernacular," as if it were less a language than an accent you were meant to outgrow. English was for ambition. For being taken seriously. It wasn't just a language — it was a performance. The more expansive your vocabulary, the smoother your accent, the more intelligent you seemed.

When I walked out of that room with a citizenship certificate in my hand, I carried the weight of the exchange between my Ethiopian friend and me — a reckoning dressed as small talk. We had envied each other: she, my English; I, her uncolonized homeland. Two daughters of Africa, shaped by different histories, both shouldering versions of loss.

And yet, beneath that tension, I felt a flicker of uneasy gratitude — that my path, carved by a language once forced on my ancestors, had cleared the way forward for me. Even now, I catch myself rounding vowels in boardrooms, softening my own syllables to fit into rooms that reward polish over roots. And I wonder: whose voice am I using? And what did it cost to wear it so well?

It feels like standing on a cracked foundation and still finding balance. A strange privilege. A strange grief. I carry them both.

Over time, I have come to learn that reckoning with Canada's colonial past wasn't theory — it was a daily, lived practice. It required a delicate balance: honouring my own complex history while standing in genuine solidarity with Indigenous peoples in Canada, fully aware of the privileges and burdens woven into my identity.

I hoped Indigenous people would understand. And while I can't speak broadly, I've been met — in personal, quiet ways — with a grace that teaches me still. I've tried to meet that grace with action: continuously learning about Indigenous histories and cultures, attending commemorative events, listening more than I speak. In my legal work, I've had the privilege of supporting Indigenous economic empowerment through contributions to projects that centre self-determination and long-term equity.

I've come to accept this land's duality — its wonder and wounding. I've learned to cradle those truths together: the hope and the history, the pride and the pain — not as contradictions, but as parts of the same, complicated story of belonging.

And sometimes, in quiet moments when the anthem plays or a sea of flags ripples around me, I feel it again — the weight of the day I became a citizen. I catch myself twisting an invisible paper flag between my fingers, and exhale a breath heavy with both gratitude and grief.

O Canada.

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