Deciding to blog/ Coming to Africa

Let me preface this blog entirely with the following: My close friends are aware that I’ve resisted blogging for quite some time.  Working in rural China might’ve been a perfect place to begin since my experience was a series of unfortunate events that are only amusing in retrospect.

Perhaps it’s a fear of the pressure to publish something eloquent and profound on a consistent basis, because I am neither eloquent nor profound...or consistent.

Most likely, though, I don’t want to become another travel blogger answering people’s  inevitable and unoriginal “HOW’S AFRICA???” (because Africa is all one big country, right?) I’ve glanced at a few travel blogs, and I’m not amused. I don’t really care to write a blog about the “exotic” food, or whether the people are nice, or what it’s like to live without air conditioning and television or consistent electricity, or trinkets I might come across that’d be a gem at the World Market. I don’t want to post photos of half naked, malnourished Ugandan children covered in dirt and dust standing in the doorways of mud huts or emaciated HIV sufferers–though that is the reality where I live and work.
Much to people’s chagrin, I am not here to eat, pray, love nor am I on a safari of endless adventure and wonderment.

I don’t know what this blog is supposed to be about. I might write about my work in Uganda or I might write about whatever comes to mind. I might use complete sentences or decide to write in cryptic haikus. Or I might stop writing anything altogether. Having decided to at least attempt blogging anyway, I must say, I still feel like a tool.

"And if you wanna make sense
Whatcha looking at me for?
I'm no good at math"- Fiona Apple
--

In the past two weeks I’ve visited Dubai for a few days and been living in rural Uganda for the rest, and all I want to talk about is the fact that everywhere I go people gawk and shout “white woman!” at me. When I was in Nigeria a few years ago being called onyeocha, I laughed it off. But now I have the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Souls of Black Folk, The Invisible Man, and 5 years of being black at Berkeley in my bones. 

Now, muzungu irks me. 

In China people wouldn’t believe that I, like my co-workers, was American. “Americans have white skin, no?” a student asked. A blonde haired, blue-eyed co-worker cut in, “Well, most of the time.” Without dignifying my co-worker’s thoughtless response, I explained that part of my family originated from Nigeria. I left the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade out for time’s sake.

Berkeley was a formative period of racial identification and understanding white privilege, from something like an insensitive PETA demonstration comparing the black-American experience to that of animals, to my classmates’ flippant questions about my hair. Everywhere I was reminded that I was in fact “other.”

Marcus Garvey and his contemporaries once advocated for the return of African-Americans to Africa, as if Africa would be the place where we could stop being a disadvantaged minority and finally feel at home. Yet here I am, only one generation removed from my African roots, having to muster up every ounce of decorum to keep from visible cringing, and wave back to little kids shouting “white woman” at me.

Would my experience be the same if my light skin tone didn’t stick out like a sore thumb?

The question double consciousness answers for DuBois is what does it mean to be an American Negro? For my own purposes, I would like to amend that and pose the question: what does it mean to be a descendant of an enslaved people AND slave masters, while being raised only by my a Nigerian family in white suburban America, and then returning to Africa? (I can never be a writer because I pose more questions than I answer.) For all intents and purposes, I had identified as Nigerian, as an African. That was until a friend in the intellectual struggle for meaning and direction for the black cultural identity explained, between bites of an enormous burrito, “We are NOT African. That ship has sailed.” No pun intended.

“Other” haunts me as I negotiate the in betweenness of my existence and identity.

But at who or what am I mad? The Ugandans? No. The proverbial Man? Always.

However, if I am completely honest with myself, it may be fear masquerading as exasperation, fear that the “white woman” I’ve now been identified as is the same “white woman” of William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden. The last thing I want to be is just another privileged (yes, here, I am in fact privileged) American jackass coming to a resource-limited country to volunteer, doing absolutely nothing meaningful or effective, yet filled with glowing self-satisfaction at having ventured into the Dark Continent to live on the edge, surviving without many modern amenities.

As people tell me how proud they are of me, I’m filled with a growing sense of inadequacy, unable to see anything to be proud of yet. I can’t help but be suspicious of myself. When deciding between volunteering in Uganda or working in Santa Cruz do Sol, Brazil teaching English to wealthy German Brazilians, my friend Vanessa commented, “Uganda is the perfect opportunity NOT to help The Man.” But I wonder, to Ugandans, am I an embodiment of The Man?

Walking on the street late one evening to get a rolex (a type of food, google it) after work, a little boy followed my co-worker and I saying with a child-like sing-song cadence, “You are the ones who brought us disease, you are the ones…”

So I am paranoid.  But the non-profit I’m with is what Easterly would categorize as a “Seeker.” And at the end of the day, I believe that they will make me useful, even when I feel useless.


"...I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me." Timothy Levitch