Aimless Wanderer

Last Sunday, I put on a long blue and white bold-printed dress with a shawl to cover my shoulders. I was pleased with my "culturally appropriate" attire. Just perfect, I thought, for meeting with my friends and their women's group in a village outside Lugazi. When I got on the matatu (a public mini-bus that usually carries between 16 and 24 passengers) my dress snagged something on the door and I heard a long rip. I quickly sat down and a man outside the matatu made a large motion around his rear to indicate that my dress was torn. I tried to feel around the fabric to figure out how big the opening was, but I was squeezed so tightly between two other passengers that I couldn’t move my shoulders. At the next stop when I had to get out to let the man next to me leave, I pulled at the back of my dress and to my horror found I had huge hole in my dress, exposing way too much!

Mortified, I got back in the matatu and soon a robust Luganda conversation began, peppered with a word I know all too well mzungu. Yep, everyone was talking about the silly girl (me) and all her bare white skin. Soon the matatu filled with half-stifled laughter. I was too overcome with humiliation to join in. But really, who wouldn’t think that was funny?

The thing about it though, is that it made me feel really isolated. I had these flashbacks to junior high, a time when awkward adolescents, like I was, feel continually shut out of a social universe they are desperate to join. Hearing the hissing of mzungu, mzungu, mzungu all day reminds me of lunch tables I got kicked off of and birthday parties I was never invited to.

Being different, a foreigner, a wierdo, an outsider, a mzungu is confusing. On one hand you feel watched, isolated, judged. Even dehumanized? But, at least in this case, people are not trying to hurt me. Many are often genuinely interested and fascinated by my difference. Others have likely met other mzungus and experience tells them certain things about me. And in the end I really believe that bias is less about people and more the systems they find themselves in. This this case, a system that is rife with inequities and hypocrisy and corruption and racism and neocolonialism and other bad isms. A system in which money is controlled from places where many people look like me and decisions are made for “less developed” places where most people don’t.

Anyway, so I have struggled with this label “muzungu” or “mzungu”. If you do some not-so-academic googling you’ll find competing etymologies of this word. Some explaining it comes from roots to describe a “white person” or “foreigner” or “European”, but my favorite are the ones that say it is most directly translated as “aimless wanderer”.

I like this best. Somehow it is more pleasant to be labeled for a peculiar action than for a peculiar physical characteristic. I think my adolescent self would have agreed. And again, it reminds me of something that happened in junior high:

I was getting restless in history class and was being so disruptive that Mr. Robinson was as tired of me as I was of him. So, he wrote me a hall pass (time: 1:15 purpose: bathroom) and told me not to come back until class was almost over. But the librarian spoiled our plan and sent me back to class saying, “your pass, young lady, does not give you permission to just wander aimlessly!” When I explained the encounter to Mr. Robinson, he gave me an exasperated I'm-about-to-retire-why-are-you-people-torturing-me look, and wrote me a new pass. Purpose: wander aimlessly.