A Lesson in Humility

During my last visit I noticed that other volunteers and I were being discriminated against because of the color of our skin. It didn't matter if we were walking through the city or the foothills to our volunteer placements, we would get stares, jeers, and insults in a language we didn't understand from random bystanders. After a while I started picking up some words and one I heard frequently was ‘pesa’ which means ‘money’. I don’t know if it was meant as a question or an automatic reaction to my skin color. Probably both. I remember getting increasingly frustrated when I was gawked at on a route that I had been taking to the school consistently for weeks. You see me every single day. I hear you laughing! Yes, you are very observant. I am white. What an astute observation! Why can’t you just accept that I’m here and I’m trying to do something good? I’m a human being just like you and your friends!

I got a dose of reality in a class called “Multicultural Education” this spring. What I realized is that in my white, middle-class, American upbringing I was told that discrimination is a thing of the past and “all people are equal now”. This idea is completely ridiculous (in general but especially) when you consider the historical basis for the prejudice modern day Africans have.  I’ll try to keep the history lesson short, but the area that is modern day Tanzania was once home to some of the oldest civilizations in recorded history. The Bantu-speaking people freely inhabited the land for a thousand years before it was colonized by Germany in 1884. For the next 78 years that the natives were under European rule, they were exploited, forcibly converted to Christianity, and dragged into various military conflicts. It wasn't until 1961 that the native Africans regained their independence.

Tanzania has only been a country for 53 years, and to think that there aren't any lingering Anti-European sentiments is naïve. European rule is something that is still fresh in their minds and I can’t expect the color of my skin not to be salient. I have to accept this fact humbly and tune out the harassment. I’m here to volunteer, not to start a debate. It’s going to be difficult though because I’m getting pretty good at Swahili and I don’t know if I want to understand the things some people say behind my back.