Feeling colonialist

Being a white person in Africa is definitely a strange experience. I obviously became aware of this early on, considering that as soon as I stepped off the plane people started harassing me to take their taxis (see post 2), buy things from them (see post 3), marry them and take them to Canada/America with me (potential future post), etc. A few experiences, however, have been particularly off-putting.

When I first arrived at my guesthouse, the gatekeeper carried my extremely heavy suitcase up the stairs on his back (see post 3). [As a side note, when he asked me why my bag was so heavy, I responded that my husband was inside. No one laughed, however, so I deduced that either i) the joke was lost in translation ii) Swahili culture does not get sarcasm or iii) that despite my best efforts, I am not very funny.] Anyway, considering that carrying this bag was quite the task, I gave him a 1USD tip. He seemed happy, and I was happy. A few days later I came in late and was groping my way up the staircase in the dark when he sidled up beside me out of nowhere and said, “Do you have a thousand shillings for me?” (1,000 Tsh = about 0.70 USD). I was totally scared out of my wits and said “No I don’t have any.” To which he responded “US dollars are ok too.” Got to hand it to the guy for being versatile, but being approached and straight up asked for money by someone made me feel super uncomfortable with my “status”.

Another time, I was standing on the curb waiting to cross the street when a group of girls in their school uniforms came down the sidewalk behind me. One of the bigger ones shot her hand out as she passed and touched my hair, which apparently emboldened the others as they all started touching my hair when they walked by too. That was actually pretty cute.

Soon after I arrived, a couple of South African hunters (see post 3) took me out around Arusha and to their home base in Usa River for the day. The trip to and from Usa was really beautiful as we passed rows of people walking and biking down the road past banana and coffee plantations. The women were all dressed in colourful cloth with huge burdens of everything imaginable (water, sacks of rice, bundles of clothing) on their heads and then men were often herding goats, cows, or donkeys. We saw rows of small brick shanties with corrugated metal roofs that housed everything from barber shops to restaurants to butchers to churches to family dwellings. I was really happy to get this glimpse of real Africa, despite the small regret that it was from the back of a Landrover with a local driver up front and guns in the back seat.

This twinge of regret was blown away by how I felt when we arrived at the TGT. TGT stands for Tanzania Game and hunting something or other and is basically a big old-fashioned white boys’ country club. The grounds are absolutely stunning with tennis courts, golf course, etc. and when I walked up to the bar it was exclusively white South Africans and other ex-pats watching rugby. The only black people in sight were serving drinks and our own driver, who is black, sat in the car and waited for several hours while we had drinks and watched the game (which, by the way, I found super boring, but was somehow meaningful to the South Africans watching their local team rise above adversity and beat the English).

I think the worst part is that I always feel somewhat relieved and more comfortable in a situation like that than I do trying to make my way around like a local in Arusha. In Canada I would never just waltz into a country club or luxury hotel and hang out in their lobby or garden, sit by their pool, or join their gym (well let’s be honest, I would never normally join any gym for any reason anyway, but I was super bored), but here the fact that I am white means that no one blinks an eye when I do these things, and I find myself quite often needing to do these things because I find the poverty and the sheer enormity of the difference of being in Tanzania to be overwhelming. I guess the good news is the longer I am here the less often I feel that need and the less patience I have for white people here who act like it still is a colony. Just don’t take away my satellite TV.