Kampala
In the more than ten years that I have now lived in Uganda, I have tried to adapt as best I can to the local circumstances, but of course there is little I can change about one thing: my skin color. In the eyes of the people around me I am and remain a muzungu, or a ‘white’ one.
I’ve been reminded of this for a decade, literally every day, because in Uganda it’s the most natural thing in the world to greet someone like me with an enthusiastic, ‘Hello, white one!’ Sometimes it’s about moped drivers, street vendors or market vendors who want my attention, sometimes about children who think it’s funny that they see such a strange figure passing by. Or take the soldier of the Ugandan intervention force in Somalia whom I met years ago: after I arrived at the base in the capital Mogadishu, together with a few Dutch colleagues, the soldier picked up his walkie-talkie to inform his superior that ‘the whites ‘ have arrived.
It may seem crazy when people talk about you as if you are an object, but experience shows that Ugandans don’t mean it badly when they say ‘white’. Some can even make fun of the strange ducks in the bite, for example I have come across Ugandans a few times who wore a T-shirt with the imprint muzungu, as a nod to the white tourists who after their first acquaintance with Uganda sometimes also in such funny shirts.
Outright wonder is occasionally seen in children, for whom I may be one of the very first white people to see them. I remember standing in a shop in my gym shorts and a toddler started rubbing his little hand over my calf to see if I might be coloring. Another toddler once kept staring at me over his shoulder for so long that he hit his head hard against a wall (apart from a lot of tears, he was fine). And then there was the little girl who had clearly been paying attention in her Bible lesson: When, after a long haircut, I came jogging along her front yard, she held out her finger and exclaimed in astonishment: “Look, Jesus!”
This last example may help to understand why I also regularly experience the necessary discomfort. As a muzungu in Uganda you are often placed on a pedestal, and this fact cannot be seen separately from the arrival of the very first white missionaries and the subsequent decades of colonization, which firmly stamped the idea of white superiority in the population. The phenomenon is persistent: Ugandan children are still thrown to death at school with Adam, Eve, the Queen of England and the Briton who once came here to ‘discover’ the source of the Nile.
Anyway, on to the order of the day: while I’m typing this, a garbage truck drives past my house. That happens often. A garbage man sits on top of the mountain of garbage bags, his head protrudes above my fence. ‘Hello white!’.