Out
Of America Or
How I Became A Marxist
By Betty Wamalwa
Muragori
17 July, 2007
Chicken
Bones
I
went to study in the USA in the 1980s in the time of what was to me
the inexplicable presidency of Ronald Reagan. It was an enigmatic presidency
for me for two reasons. First, at my university and amongst the mostly
left leaning circle that I was to hang out with it, I never found anybody
who had voted for him. The second reason was that for me Reagan was
clearly challenged on the intellectual front. I could not believe that
a nation with all that maedeleo or development, we in Africa so covet,
would tolerate some folksy guy who could have come from a darker and
more ignorant century. Certainly the cool left leaning students at C
University had no time for Reagan.
In my two years in the US
the only person I found who would publicly admit to voting for Reagan
was a 65 year old black man, in Albany, Georgia, the father-in-law of
my cousin. Pops, as he was called by his children, in that quintessential
African American manner, would routinely proclaim his love for President
Reagan, loudly to people, in the presence of his children. He showed
me his Republican Party membership card, much to the mortification of
all his children, who murmured about how the old man was finally going
senile. When he whipped out the letter from Reagan his children teased
him saying that he only received a letter because he was special, for
being the only black Republican on the planet.
Pops broke two rules I had
come to accept about voting patterns in America, first that black people
were not members of the Republican Party and second that they always
voted for the Democratic Party. To this day I am still left with the
question, “So how did President Ronald Reagan win with such landslide
victories twice, if only one black man in the South voted for him?”
America’s Presidents
and War
Eight months into America,
I had imbibed the paranoid conspiracy theories of my Marxist circle
and lost my African ease. Late one night I turned on the television
to find the President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan
ranting and raving in the most alarming manner about the “evil
empire”. He was referring to the former Soviet Union, America’s
then mortal enemy country of Cold War days. And you thought “Axis
of Evil” was original? Do you see a pattern here? This is clearly
the language of America’s dumb dumb presidents.
There is a moment in the
deep night when reality becomes suspended and we become susceptible
to our original lurking primeval selves. In this night moment, assorted
distorted demons and night creatures with names like Linani, banshees,
ghosts, and ghouls rule as reality twists and turns changing shape and
resonance. The howl of a dog becomes a were-wolf. On the Kenyan coast,
that night moment brings with it all manner of djins and mermaids, prowling
in their woman shape to steal the souls of victim men. Mating cats evoke
the screams of damned souls burning in a Christian hell. It is easy
to believe the bizarre. (I am setting up my excuse for what happened
next.)
It was at such a moment in
the night that I found Reagan’s ranting so aggressive that as
I listened I became convinced that I had only missed the first part
of his speech, in which he had finally gone over the edge and declared
war on the Soviet Union. I went to bed that night terrified, in the
grip of my imaginary world war. Before I fell into erratic sleep I obsessed
about how I would not be able to get out of the US before the actual
war started and that I would die alone in a foreign land. The next morning
I was relieved and abashed to find that all was normal and there was
no sign of impending war.
Twenty years later as I watched
the elections that brought another dumb, dumb unfathomable US president
into power, George Bush Jr., I realized that my vantage point with its
emphasis on linear “development” or maedeleo had warped
my thinking. Until that instant, I had thought development also brings
highly enlightened people who would not lie about the presence of weapons
of mass destruction to bring pain and destruction to innocent women
and children many miles away in another country. For what, for oil,
(I can’t believe that), to get revenge for daddy, (that’s
too weird) to get their way (what way, the American way in Baghdad?)
To be right about a perspective? (Probably the only right answer outrageous
as it may seem.)
For us in this part of the
world, things like technological advancement, elimination of hunger,
industrial development, foreign vacations, microwaves, one doctor per
100 people, four lane highways, per capita income of US$ 30,000, a new
car every two years, pensions, social security, (pick your top ten)
all of which come with development also lead to progress, to maendeleo.
And ultimately to enlightenment, the cherry on top of the development
cake. We think, surely in America or Europe there must be such enlightenment
that people, ordinary people everywhere must have become immune from
the dictates of the baser human urgings like fear, malice, jealousy,
racism, intolerance, corruption, violence, the need to declare war for
dubious reasons, religious fanaticism, (again pick your top ten).
It is easy to believe that
if we were to invent a machine that would test our level of enlightenment
we would find that those with more development have more enlightenment.
This would render them immune from making decisions on lowly unenlightened
aspects of being a human being such as uncertainty and fear of tomorrow,
fear of the other, dictates of their religion, what the bible says,
what the Koran says, what the mullahs say, what the priest says. And
finally I understand that this is not the case just because you have
more stuff doesn’t mean you are more enlightened.
I now realize of course that
human beings may have made huge technological advances such that they
can send men to the moon or invent the internet and they will still
rely on some form of magic, juju or alchemy for managing their lives.
The advances have not created certainty. In fact they create even more
uncertainty and the threat of a backlash which can take people deeper
into the bosom of their juju side.
From Nairobi to America
Before I went to America
I was a student of the biological sciences at the University of Nairobi.
Some one had put the University of Nairobi on the then outskirts of
town. But it had not been far enough. By the 1970s, the outskirts were
already part of the central business district and students could make
their grievances felt by literally pelting the central business district
with sticks and stones. It was a rioting student’s paradise. During
my time, there were numerous riots, demonstrations and campaigns many
with echoes of Marxism or some left leaning ideology with slogans like
“Down with the Bourgeoisie the proletariat rule!!!” shouted
by students as they battled the police in the streets.
Somehow throughout these
riots I was able to remain largely innocent of any ideological infection.
Which is incredibly surprising because we were sent home on at least
four occasions over the three years for some issue with ideological
overtones. In total we spent about seven months at home, the male students
had to report to their local chief every week but the women were not
taken as a threat so we did not have to report.
The only time I was absolutely
certain about what we were striking for was the time we went on strike
over food. We were all tired of the strange cuisine. The final provocation
came when even the minced meat had weevils in it, I kid you not! For
those of you who do not know what weevils are, these creatures are a
type of beetle. And for those of you who may not know this never having
been exposed to the wonderful world of entomology here are some facts
to fascinate. Beetles the family of Coleoptera had over 300,000 species
in 1980. Weevils Curculionidae had 65,000 species in the same year.
I am sure many more have been discovered since I studied entomology.
The thing is they are all vegetarian, they will infest beans, legumes,
rice, maize, but none feeds on meat. So I could never get it, how did
the weevils get into the minced meat? Wry uncertain humour, we half
joked that they must have used them to season the minced meat.
Rioting Students
It was always those unserious
art students at main campus who started the riots. We science students
with our 36 hour-a-week schedule which was not much reduced from our
secondary school schedules, had no time for such frivolous pursuits.
Also we had no ideology to spur us to action and were so out of touch
with current issues that we had no idea that our politicians were up
to no good and that we should care. No science lecturer was ever caught
in the political crosshairs at least during my time.
The arts students had plenty
of time with their 8 hr a week lecture schedule which we sneered at,
ideologies such as Marxism, political issues that they cared about and
lecturers with a death wish to egg them on. So what would happen is
that the arts students had to use threat and force to get us to join
their strike. When a strike started we would be the first target and
rather than face the wrath of our fellow students we joined in. Soon
we were caught up in the excitement of the moment and forgot our original
reluctance. We were to be seen wearing jeans and sneakers, running around
town being chased by police, stoning unsuspecting motorists in an orgy
of anarchy that was surprisingly heady even when the threatened dire
consequences were that we would be beaten or raped by the police and
the paramilitary, (at this time they still did not use live ammunition)
and expelled wherever you had reached in your education. Were you in
your first year or were just about to graduate? I took part in the running
around town part. I didn’t want to take part in the stoning of
motorist in case one of those motorists was my mother or father or one
of their friends.
Twenty years later the reality
of becoming a nameless stoned motorist, the ones we used to talk about
so casually, the one who lost her eye, “Oh how sad”, “…the
one who died” …… uncomfortable silence, the one whose
car was burnt and had her leg broken when she tried to jump over a six
foot fence hotly pursued by angry students shouting “down with
the bourgeoisie, workers unite!” … loud laughter at the
image of the heavy set woman trying to jump a six foot fence. That scene
of long ago came to me as I faced a young man holding a stone and about
to unleash it on my windscreen. Time stood still. I had driven into
a riot of university students. Have you ever had one of those moments
of danger when your life hangs in balance under the specter of deadly
violence? I live in Africa so I have had several. For me these moments
always come with a loud metallic screeching/whistling sound. A sound
that crystallizes danger itself.
From nowhere the moment was
interrupted, a student stepped out, and stopped the young man at the
last possible moment, for no reason that I can fathom, except that it
was not my day yet. “Drive away!” he shouted urgently at
me. I reversed and drove like the devil escaping my moment. To that
nameless student who saved my life and to all those nameless students
who have saved other people’s lives just because, thank you from
the bottom of my heart.
Being Cold in America
I arrived in America in the
dead of winter never having experienced winter in my life. I also went
to a Marxist university only having been vaguely aware of this ideology
or the concept of ideologies for that matter, so I was green on many
fronts. If my father had known and then been able to believe that he
was sending me to America to a Marxist university would he have so happily
walked me to the door of the airport with such pride giving me one of
his gems to take with me? I repeated it later to my new boyfriend, starry
eyed, in “behold the wisdom of my father, I want to share it with
you” moment, only to find that it was Confucius who originated
it? You can guess the one “A journey of a thousand miles begins
with one step”. I remember laughing and not being embarrassed
by the busting of my father’s “original” gem. You
must understand that I had once believed that my father could speak
Russian.
It was the cold that almost
got me first. It was February, the dead of winter. The sixth day I was
there, I looked out of the window and the sun was shining off of pristine
snow. I felt joyful at the prospect of warm sunshine on my skin. I dressed
and walked the one km to the university campus. Only, my calculations
did not make sense as I got colder and colder. Sunshine did not equal
warmth here. The light coat and sweater I had worn were no defense against
the bitter winter cold. 20 minutes later I was sitting in the reception
room of the University admission block, feeling sorry for myself, trying
not to cry as my extremities defrosted painfully, my ears, toes and
fingers. I could have gone home that second if my ticket was not one
way.
A Party in America
Eventually I settled in and
made some friends. I was soon invited to my first party. When you hear
the word “party” it should mean the same thing wherever
you are right? For me at that time it meant dressing up in something
sexy and provocative, make-up, jewelry (I still believe secretly that
it was I who introduced the whole bling concept to the USA), high heels
and looking forward to dancing and meeting gorgeous and dateable guys.
I marvel today at how many eligible men there were to choose from back
then at any party, I was always spoilt for choice.
So of course I arrive at
the party Kenyan style, dressed to the nines and fashionably late, to
make my entrance and to envelope myself with the “whose that girl”
factor. The cache in being remembered translated directly into attentions
of at least three of the hottest guys at the party. And then the routine.
Open the door of the crowded room, stop, framed by the door, hold pose
as if looking for someone. But what you were actually doing is allowing
them to look at you, and then step into the room sure of the impression
you had created.
I went into routine mode
and nearly gagged as I realized just what an overdressed spectacle I
was. One woman was still in the droopy old t-shirt that she had used
when we jogged that morning. The only difference now was that the widening
sweat marks under her armpits were not because of the jogging but because
of the heat in the room. I couldn’t believe it! The other students
were similarly dressed in old jeans, t-shirts, sweats and ill fitting
sweaters. I was now embarrassed as all eyes turned to me just as I had
intended. By now retreat would only have made me more conspicuous and
for longer. Days rather than hours. I held my head up and deciding to
brazen it, walked into the room. This was only the beginning of my introduction
to party etiquette in America.
Did I mention that I was
a geek from University of Nairobi? I soon learned a new definition of
geek because a Nairobi University geek took time out to party and one
of our rules was that you never talked about anything remotely related
to the courses we were taking during party time. The two were exclusive.
I don’t remember what we talked about but what we did at parties
was dance like mad, and tune and be tuned. And here in the university
in the US life was one continuous seminar without end.
I joined a group of friends
and my face lit up in a smile anticipating delicious banter with that
cute guy I had the hots for. At last the party was the perfect place
to advance my intentions with him. As I stood there awhile I realized
that I needed to quickly disappear the smile, it was clearly inappropriate
during a discussion about historical materialism, Hegel, Marx, Gramscii.
After 15 minutes looking for an opportunity to make my impression I
gave up. I knew the language. English. But if you held a gun to my head
and asked “Tell me what they are talking about or I shoot”
I would have had to let you shoot my brains out. I had no idea. I moved
to another group of my friends and found them similarly engaged in what
can only be referred to as deep intellectual discourse and again I could
not understand them.
My frustration was growing,
you must understand what this was like for a loud and voluble person.
This is my only point in mitigation for what happened next. The third
group at last held some promise. There was a word I found familiar,
and as I write what I said, not only do my toes still curl up in embarrassment,
twenty years on, but those of my husband as well. The word was “reactionary”.
I had to seize the moment and make my intellectual mark. “Oh”
I said President Moi is a reactionary, he always reacts to everything”
I looked around at the upturned faces with pride at this insight.
And then I launched into
a story about President Moi and his reactions, by way of illustration
you understand. “One time when we were at the university President
Moi had gone to India on a State Visit. By the time he returned it was
a week before JM day which is the day a populist member of parliament
called J.M. Karuiki had been assassinated 10 years before. The students
always marked this day by demonstrating which would soon deteriorate
into riots and running battles with the police. The university was always
closed after the fracas. This year though we students had gone against
the grain and decided that we would mark the day by doing good in the
community. We had decided to establish a J.M. Karuiki Foundation and
to clean up slum areas and donate to poor people. So when we heard the
president’s declaration even before he set his feet on Kenyan
soil that the whole current three years of university would be expelled
and “the nation would feel nothing”, “if we dared
riot on this years’ JM Karuiki Day”, we were so outraged
that we were simply provoked into action. We rioted. And funnily enough
for the first time he did not react for the first week. We then decided
that we would riot until he sent us all home. So we did.”
Many years down the road
I am still grateful that they did not burst out laughing. Instead someone
politely said one word “yes, that’s an interesting perspective
to the word reactionary, you are quite right President Moi is a reactionary”
and the conversation continued seamlessly undisturbed.
Going Home a Feminist
I soon got used to this version
of a party American style so much that when I came back home I had a
hard time adjusting to the Kenyan approach. More so because I had come
back with a head full of ideologies that did not mix well with the ogle
fest that are Kenyan parties. This time I took years to get back on
track spending time at parties skulking in corners with the one or two
other like-minded people and with a drink in one had and a cigarette
in the other, both habits picked up in America and now used to camouflage
my despair at the lack of opportunity for rigorous intellectual discourse
at these Kenyan affairs.
Of all the ideologies I picked
up the most incompatible with my country was my hard core feminism.
It was not just any ordinary feminism, but one that looked for converts
with the fanaticism of a born again Christian from the American Bible-belt
out to capture souls in Africa. And I never missed a chance to advance
my mission. I was a one woman missionary determined to be martyred at
the altar of feminism.
Red bull statements that
would spur me into action were endless. “Oh you know women are
like that” or “Oh you know women are their own worst enemy”.
My country back then was still so innocent that it did not know that
it should hide its chauvinism from view, at least in public. There were
many sexist and misogynist statements said in my hearing by men and
women on a daily basis.
Just so that there would
be no room for speculation, I would declare my feminism openly on introduction.
It wasn’t quite, “Hi my name is Sitawa and I am a rabid
feminist who is vigilant and looking for opportunities to spring into
action in defense of women everywhere by lecturing you into submission
for any anti-woman statement that I may detect”. But it might
as well have been. How I actually introduced myself was “Hello
my name is Sitawa and I am a feminist” I said, looking them straight
in the eye, daring them to make a joke of my declaration.
Just in case you might be
misled into thinking that there was any irony here and maybe laugh out
loud because you found the introduction funny, the clothing and demeanor
completed the picture. I wore a uniform of black jeans, shapeless t-shirts
and sneakers, in the drab universal uniform of feminists at least in
the US. “Appreciate my mind not my behind” is what I meant
to say with my whole presentation to protect myself from another little
habit I had picked up from the US, an aversion for unsolicited male
attention.
All my friends were innocent.
After I had lectured three or four of them for half an hour each on
separate occasions I soon found myself alone. I wore my aloneness like
a badge of honour, seeing it as the inevitable the price paid by any
champion of a cause who sticks their neck out. Nelson Mandela who was
still in on Robben Island, Ghandi. Thank goodness I had seen the film
The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner I could use the image conjured
by the title to console myself when I felt like giving up.
In an act of rebellion against
my society, I smoked openly even in front of my father. This particular
statement was especially effective in establishing my rebel credentials
to no one in particular. When my friends gasped and questioned this
particular act as going too far, I had another lecture prepared for
them. “My aunts” I would say from my imaginary soap box,
“Up country, in the rural areas smoke and drink so why shouldn’t
I?” Some of my aunts do. In the western part of Kenya women can
smoke cigarettes. Some of my aunts smoke cigarettes but with the fire
in their mouths. I have never seen a man smoke like this and I don’t
know why. I have one particular aunt who is hard smoking and hard drinking,
who has always gone drinking with her husband so I just don’t
understand the sanctions levied against the so called modern African
woman, “read” a woman in the city. Ok so I concede that
now that my aunt is eighty she can’t sleep because my father says
she sees long lines of women carrying baskets on their heads marching
all the time before her eyes day and night. If it's not long lines of
women then it is long lines of insects.
I have long since quit all
those habits I picked up from America. I gave up picking on every body
around me because I realized that I had mistaken being constantly angry
and fighting with people who did not agree with my opinion with championing
a cause. Besides it was alienating and exhausting and no one wanted
to hang out with me because I was so intense and boring. When my friends
could talk to me again they told me that they had run away from me because
I was just plain boring.
The American South
I went to visit my cousin’s
in-laws in the American South in Albany, Georgia for a week and discovered
I could not hear so I took to endless grinning and nodding my head.
I left those people thinking I was simple in the head. But I couldn’t
understand them and I soon got tired of asking them to repeat themselves
so I withdrew into an African grin of protection and lost my reputation
in the process. They speak English in the South so it wasn’t the
language and there was still a language barrier. The long dragged words
that go on seemingly forever lost my short attention span. I found that
my mind had wondered before the end so I never heard the finish. Caaaahhhn
aaaaah speeeek to Eyyyyd Coooook is what I thought I overheard a woman
in a bank asking. It was shocking to hear, like somebody caricaturing
an American. I tried not to laugh and asked my cousin-in-law what the
woman was saying. And she translated, “Can I speak to Ed Cook?”
I visited my first flea market
on the same visit in the South. A large African like market selling
what we call mitumba in Kenya, in all forms, old clothes and shoes,
kitchenware, furniture, as well as more specialized things like vintage
clothing (read very old mitumba,) and stuff that was ordinary people’s
artistic expression of themselves. My cousin-in-law introduced me to
a little old black woman at a stall selling miscellaneous mitumba as
her cousin from Africa.
“What!” proclaimed
the little old black woman, “But you real pretty, I thought Africans
were dark black with kinky hair and big fat noses and mouths but you
real fine.” She declared in amazement.
I was equally astonished
at her casual black on black racist stereotype that she spewed, blithely
unaware that she should hide it or at least not say it straight to my
face. But she was simply the first to air such views. During my two-week
Southern sojourn I soon grew accustomed to hearing similar guileless
declarations about some African stereotype that I didn’t fit,
from black people. From questions about where I learnt to dance like
that, (I can dance!) to where I had learnt to speak so proper, to my
dress sense on and on.
Virtual Segregation in the
American South
The other big thing that
I experienced for the first time in the US was hard wired virtual segregation.
There were no signs designating white and black zones any where in Albany,
Georgia that I saw. Indeed on the surface all seemed well in race terms.
But even my Republican cousin’s father-in-law made sure he hid
his de-segregated business to keep up appearances. He was in business
with a white person because it was a good business cover that allowed
him to get white business. The trick was he had to keep his partnership
hidden so that he could get and keep that lucrative white business.
He passed himself off as a worker in the business. I know the logic
is challenging.
The two groups occupied the
same physical spaces, they ate at the same restaurants, entered all
buildings and transport from the same entrance, sat anywhere on buses.
And yet my stranger’s eyes quickly saw through this façade
and identified the fault lines of virtual segregation. The new apartheid
still did not allow the twain to commune freely even as they congregated.
As soon as I stepped into those spaces I could feel the barriers. There
was a sense of forced togetherness. If the gap between the two races
could speak it would say, “OK we have to share this same physical
space but we are not giving up our right to be separate. They can take
away our right to segregation but they can’t take segregation
out of our hearts.” It was in what was missing in the interaction
between black and white. There was no ease, peacefulness, insignificance,
silence, freedom, love.
What existed in that gap
was tension, a hateful watchfulness and worst of all an embryonic violence
that was always ready to grow into fully-fledged adulthood. You could
feel it. This violence ebbed and flowed and hung around like a dark
threat. When I was amongst black people everyone was relaxed, very laid
back as a people, but in the presence of a group of white people in
the segregated spaces there was an all round tensing a watchfulness,
an expectation of something unpleasant.
Black and white people occupied
those common public spaces differently too. White people seemed to strut
and begrudge black people’s presence. It was white people who
still seemed to be the bona-fide owners of the space. Black people were
the interlopers, but they had no choice, they had to occupy the spaces,
otherwise they risked recreating segregation by their absence. But the
sense of threat in those spaces implied that Black people occupied those
spaces under peril. Desegregation had been about pulling down the limits
placed on the existence of black people. It was not white people who
were fighting to sit in the seats reserved for black people on buses
or to use the back only entrances. Desegregation demands that white
people cede space and privileges that define their place in society.
Race in the North
My experience of race in
the American North was not one of absence rather the North was racially
clandestine, a state I much preferred. It gave me freedom to spend many
more hours in a day being just another human being. The colour of my
skin was not a constant conscious presence foisted on me by open racial
hostility. Thank you but I am not black, I really am just a person.
I am an African living in Africa so although I have many identities
being black is not my premier identity. That is the advantage of growing
up black in Africa.
When I brought this to the
attention of my Southern black relatives-in-law they made that claim
that always bemuses me. “I like the South they said, the boundaries
are clear; people here are not hypocrites like in the North. I know
where I stand here with them.”
“I know where I stand?”
What the hell is that? What I understand from that telling statement
is an admission on the part of black people that it’s OK for there
to be limits on a black person’s existence. I never heard a white
person say things like that, only black people. For a person simply
because of the hue of their skin to know where he or she could go and
what he or she could expect from their world? In other words there was
a limit of possibility which means that there was no possibility at
all. And it was fine for white people to have veto powers over the dreams,
scope of existence of black people. You can dream so much and no more.
You can aspire so far and no further, these are the limits on your movement.
And black people accepted this proscribed world and were happy that
they knew their place in this controlled world. That world was a banned
dream which they passed onto their children and this was done with the
active connivance of black people. To know my place?
I understand how dangerous
the world in which black people live in the South. I imbibed a small
part of that fear many thousands of miles away from movies and media
reports of the Ku Klux Klan. So much so that I arrived in America terrified.
For four days I refused to leave my sister’s apartment because
I was sure the Ku Klux Klan were going to gun me down. Living with that
dreadful history can skew any one and the wonder is that black people
have lived to step out of the shadow of such terrors and nightmares.
The journey has had its negative impact that sometimes their ability
to see beyond the boundaries of their terror has been compromised. This
is where Africans can lend their sight when the dreams have been extinguished.
We have the same racial reality because our existence in the world gives
us the same reference points. Yet we live in our own homes largely amongst
our own people. We are not vested in only a racial reality. Our human
reality predominates. We can fly above “black person negatives”
and separate fact from damaging fiction. A person exposed to these negatives
on a daily basis for most of their livee will lose their perspective.
Such an environment can beat down the most-thick skinned, sanguine,
optimist man and woman and create an oversensitive “defensive
human” who can no longer see the forest for the trees and perceives
racism under every bush. Such an environment can leave people severely
embattled and debilitated. Centuries of actual and virtual lynching
that black people are subjected to in the USA will do that.
Psychologically I am rather
sensitive. I found the race issue to be intrusive enough in the North
where it was not so in your face. It had me in impact. I found myself
engaged from time to time in what manifested as flash-back-filled fits
of mother-less-child weeping sessions. The kind of crying that was inconsolable,
with heaving and copious tears. The kind that is only done in hiding.
The first time it happened I did not understand what was going on. From
nowhere floods of tears came. At first they were quite frequent every
three months or so. Soon the stretches between one bout and another
grew in months and at the end they stopped. I had stopped expecting
more out of this country.
What were they, they were,
silent tears of rage and despair at the seemingly unseen-with-the-naked-eye
accumulation of incidences of racism that encountered me on a daily
basis. My mother has always told me that I am too thin-skinned, I let
things get too easily under my skin. And it’s true. I just let
the incidences seep into my subconscious. I never could speak out at
them. I had no skills to deal with them in the moment. The moment of
action would be long past before I recognised what had just happened.
And some were subtle only discernable in the pattern my subconscious
registered as I remained occupied in the hunt for that cut price designer
shoe that I desired and could afford on my student stipend. It wasn’t
until it had long happened again and again from store to store in a
single day that I recognized what was happening. The only black person
in the group of friends being singled out for kindly help again and
again.
Betty Wamalwa Muragori
is especially interested in how Africans are constructing new identities
as they redefine their place in the world. She believes in the power
of words. She has a BSc degree from the University of Nairobi and MA
in Environment from Clark University in Worcester Mass. USA. Currently
Betty works for an international conservation organization in Nairobi,
Kenya. [email protected]
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.