Entry six - Mzungu

A striking difference between Dar es Salaam (the commercial capital of Tanzania) and Kampala for a Western visitor is the lack of "touts" (as the guidebooks call them) in Kampala. "Touts" (also known as papasi or ticks) are salesmen, hustlers and conmen who follow around newly arrived Westerners trying to sell everything from safaris to marijuana. Although the rapid growth of Uganda's tourism industry may change this, a tourist can wander around Kampala without much harassment. Instead, a white visitor can expect special attention mostly from children who frequently chant "Mzungu, how are you? Mzungu, how are you?" (It is more a chorus than a question.)

Mzungu is a word used throughout East Africa to refer broadly to Westerners. However, both its literal definition and popular uses illustrate its geographical, racial, cultural, historical and economic connotations. From what I have read, it is the noun form of the Kiswahili verb Kuzungua, meaning to wander aimlessly, and was originally used to refer to early European explorers. It thus contains a degree of mockery, which varies drastically depending on context.

First, mzungu is a racial classification. It refers to all people of European descent, including life-long residents of East Africa, while other foreigners, such as people from East Asia, are not included. However, it is not purely a 'racial' marker, at least as far as 'race' is understood in North America. African-Americans are included, occasionally differentiated as wazungu waafrikano, while light-skinned Africans, such as albinos, are not. The cultural aspect of the designation became clearer when a friend told me that, to use his phrase, "Westernized Africans" are often referred to, albeit disparagingly, as wazungu. The third aspect of this identity is class. When I asked a friend about what mzungu meant during my visit in 2002, he responded, "If my friend buys me an expensive meal, I can say that he is my mzungu."

As intriguing as the word's connotations appear, they have their obvious problems. Wealth and modernity are equated with 'whiteness' and 'Westernness', which are themselves conflated. As a result, "Africanness", which has been constructed historically as the inverse of Western, is equated with poverty and 'traditionalism'. Mzungu thus makes explicit the static differentiation between African and European identities, which is itself a familiar assumption in North America.

This does not reflect the reality of people's lived experiences, as illustrated by a couple of examples. First, most wazungu I have met in East Africa like African music, particularly what is labeled "traditional music". Though often performed at certain events, this type of music does not have nearly the amount of popularity among East Africans as does "Western" dance music, whether made by Africans, Europeans, Americans or Indians. Second, in areas such Kololo in Kampala or Msasani in Dar es Salaam, one can see the grandious wealth of many East Africans, far exceeding that of myself or almost anyone I know.

This illustrates two further points. One is that what many of us think of as "Western culture" is not confined to any geographical area known as "the West", or any people known as "Westerners". Likewise, what we often identify as "African culture" may be more familiar to someone in Canada than to someone in Uganda. This does not mean that people have "lost" their "true" culture or identity; rather it means that our understanding of their culture is hopelessly out of step with how they live it. An accurate representation of Western culture should include African drumming, while a similar assessment of African culture(s) should recognize that hip-hop and hamburgers are as legimately African as kora music or kola nuts (both West African, by the way).

The second point is that the view of Africa as a symbol of poverty out of place in "our" modern world is based not on reality, but on a preconceived idea of 'Africa' as 'our' opposite. Labels such as Africa, Asia or the Mid-East are so broad that they do not refer to anything real. Instead, as generalizations, they help us map out the world according to a series of predetermined ideas and images, which grossly distort our understanding of what any specific place is actually like. In order to conjure up the most foreign, incomprehensible image possible, everyone from Joseph Conrad to the The Economist usually picks Africa. However, Africa has always been and continues to be as much a part of the international economy and global culture as anywhere else. (The Congo River was an international religious and economic hub for four hundred years before Conrad wrote about it in Heart of Darkness, and The Economist's "Lost Continent" is as much a part of the world economy as East Asia or other apparently more economically successful areas.) Not to mention that not everyone in Africa is poor. As a Nigerian doctor living in my new residence wondered yesterday, "How can some guy who's sitting in a rat-infested trailer park in Texas or a crumbling project in New York City think that he is lucky not to be living in Kololo [an elite section of Kampala]?" The logic of the mzungu label (fusing being White, Western, modern and wealthy into one category), both mocks and reinforces this image, which is not always an accurate one in practice.