True Colors

A few days ago my friend and I walked into a tuck shop in his village to get a Fanta. Pineapple is my favorite flavor and we are lucky that the shops in our area have electricity so we can get a cold soda which provides a little respite from the heat. The shop is filled with knickknacks, ujeni, and food staples like sugar, eggs, and rice.

We realized quickly that at least at that time this shop had no cold sodas. So we silently made a signal to go to another shop across the road but the owner had already begun chatting with us. He wanted to know what we liked about Malawi. The food? The people? What is different here? We began explaining a few of the obvious differences before the shop owner cut in and said, “In America, there are people from all different races.” Jake said, “Yes, we call that the melting pot.” The owner went on, “At first, there were only whites in America and then there was the slave trade from Africa and now everyone lives happily together in America.”
 ~~~
Lately, I have been struggling to put together my thoughts about race. Since I came to site one month ago, I have been drawn in by authors like Alice Walker, Octavia Butler and now I am reading Barack Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father. Meridian is one of my favorite books about the civil rights movement. I am continually enamored with Walker’s writing. Kindred, by Octavia Butler is a book about a black woman’s accidental time travel to the antebellum south. It is a clever comparison of life as we know it today and the life of slavery. And, as only it could be, Obama’s autobiography is also a story of race. (It is even more interesting because Obama is everywhere here including on t-shirts, chitenje’s, razor blades, etc. Our President is loved in Malawi!)

As I read these stories, I can’t help thinking about my placement in Malawi and I honestly can’t figure out how to feel about race in the American/Malawian context. I constantly ask myself if I am like the Baroness in Out of Africa who after years of living in Africa, realizes that putting white gloves on the African boy who serves her food is just plain stupid. I don’t doubt that I am making some similar mistakes.

Daily, I struggle with the privilege afforded to me simply because of the color of my skin. I hear young boys say that they prefer to marry a white woman when there are so many beautiful black women surrounding them and all would make better wives than me or my friends ever would. When I go to draw water, my bucket is taken first even though there is a long line of buckets waiting to be filled. Even my puppy gets treated like an azungu pup. The little girls carry him around and come to play with him rather than scare him away like they do with the other village dogs. Here, I will always stick out because of my whiteness and sometimes I may even take advantage of the fact that I don’t have to wait an hour to collect my water.

The shopkeeper I described is a smart man. I’m sure he knows there was more to slavery than what he told us. Sometime I just have to wonder what is lost in translation and what people really think. But mostly, I keep wondering what it will take for me to learn to remove the white gloves?