Mzungu

In less than a month, the word causes my skin to bristle.  It is usually used harmlessly enough, I need to emphasize, but I hate it anyway.  It creeps out of the cattails on the exuberant mouths of innocent children, it is announced in the alleys of the markets as I pass through, it is said under the breaths of women to one another as I pass by.

White person.

English person.

Person with money in a poor land.

Does not belong here.

I am an unabashed liberal, and I have worked hard to eliminate racism from my lexicon and prejudice from my behaviour.  Such a task is not easy for any person in the world, for we are all born with the intrinsic sense of “other”.  But working on it can be done and it has been done by many, many people.  And I have stated great pride in how Canada and Canadians have shown similar resolve in their purging of discriminatory elements.  Of course there is a long way to go, of course it isn’t perfect yet, but aren’t things so much better than they ever have been?

To which some of my friends have told me, to my great frustration, that I will never truly know what it is like until I am the only visible minority in a place.

Now, the other SWSC volunteers are home for Christmas, and so are most ex-pats from Canada, the United States, Australia and South Africa.

Here is what it’s like.

I have experienced no patent, malicious racism in Zambia, ever.  But everyone is constantly conscious of what I am.

To taxi drivers, I can afford extra fare.

To waiters in higher-end restaurants, I deserve extra attention and care.

To the staff of venues serving cheap local food like deep fried mystery fritters and Fantas, I am eyed with suspicion; as though it was only by mistake that I walked in there.

To beggars I have money to share.

To random men, I must work for the mines and make ten times what their brothers and cousins are making for the toil they bear.

One said, “Welcome to our land, you there,”

                until I told him that I taught in a Kaonde village, after which he decided that I was a friendly and harmless enough novelty, and we talked about the road graters that he drove that were like those that were made in the town where I grew up.

The women pounding rocks on the side of the road just stare;

until I put my hand to my chest and call “Moi-nay” in the traditional Kaonde greeting, and then they chatter amongst themselves about my quaintness.

I have learned how to greet and ask questions and provide answers until the folks I meet in Solwezi believe that I’m one of the good ones.  A good mzungu.  Not here to exploit the wealth under the rich soils of Zambia, but here to help its children seize their own power.

One of the good white people.

One of the good rich people in a poor land.

And of course, they’re at least partially correct.

But I am still mzungu.

And I find my lips wanting spontaneously to form those words that seem so cliché in the West: “If only people could see past the colour of each others’ skin!”

The people have been wonderful; this post is not a complaint.  It is a statement that I get it, in a way that I never did before.  Racism is everywhere, when it’s not really there.  Even when it’s systemically eliminated in all of its overt forms, it lurks in the shadows.  Visible minorities must be afforded special care if only to compensate for an undeniable and quite forgivable element of human nature, the archetypal sense of “other” that we share as brothers and sisters in humanity.

Before I wrote this post, I read that mzungu is a word in a number of Bantu languages meaning, literally, “one who wanders aimlessly”.  At least in the village, in contrast to the city, when people label me mzungu, this seems to be what they mean.  I can live with that.