As a woman, I am dismissed. As a person of color, I am not acknowledged. To say this is a change for me would be an understatement. I exist in this life as the daughter of a wildly in love interracial couple, 
from Unlearning Racism trainings at the YWCA at the ripe old age of 14 and as the loud and proud president of the Young Women’s Resource Center (much to the dismay of the South High administrators who had to deal with my wrath when trying to deny me public forums on STD’s, birth control and self defense clinics). Feminist is a title I love. Talking about race is not something I shy away from. I have a voice, and as most of you know, I tend to use it, often and without hesitation.
I mentioned in an earlier post that they call me mzungu. At first, I found this mildly entertaining and accepted it as part of my new day-to-day happenings here in Uganda. It’s been a month now and this has not changed, though my perspective has. Through a series of minor hiccups, which for lack of a better word, we’ll call #africaproblems, I’ve learned quite a bit more about how I am perceived here by the locals. These hiccups probably wouldn’t rate as issues back home but here they come to be a bigger deal. For instance, when all your meals are out of your control, both in times served and variety, it matters that eight full grown women are staring at you like a piece of meat, their blood sugar dropping, dying a little as each additional minute passes. On Monday dinner was served at 5:30pm when no one was hungry, and on this day it’s 8:15pm and the table’s not even set. At this particular moment, I paused to remind myself that this was Africa and we were on Africa time (whether we liked it or not). But even on Africa time, it’s important to have just the tiniest bit of consistency—mainly so that we don’t go insane. People need to know that dinner is going to be within the same ballpark time each day so that they can count on that and plan accordingly. Especially when they’re only being fed breakfast & dinner and walking 2+ miles a day. So needless to say, dinner times that jump 2-3 hrs each night are problematic.
I also mentioned before that I’m trying to work on my waiting game. Patience IS a virtue and on this particular night we had all practiced quite a bit of it. I had had numerous conversations with our hosts leading up to this night about trying to have dinner between the hours of 6:30 and 7:30 each night. In the effort of not micromanaging I waited until fifteen past seven to ask about the status of dinner. I was informed by our male host that he would check on it. Ten minutes later he confirmed that dinner would be ready in 20 minutes. 30 minutes later brought us to the scene described above. At this point I was at my wit’s end. It was clear that no one was listening to me, despite the fact that I had been the point of contact for menu planning, meal times and all other food related activities for the month we’d been here. So, we decided to try a different tactic and deployed Jack to lay down the law. Side note- I can lay down the law too, just apparently not in Africa.
Jack disappeared down the stairs and confronted our male host about the status of our dinner. Our host apologized to Jack profusely and gave him the real story about how they had been planning on doing dinner later because another group would be joining us, and that dinner would be ready in another 20-30 minutes. Jack let the host know that this was unacceptable. The host swore it would never happen again and that all further issues would be communicated if they arose. It was at this point that I realized that the problem was not the checking in, or being too firm (or not firm enough) with our hosts about dinner. The problem was that I was a woman, and because of that I had zero credibility or influence. That sucked then and it sucks now.
I’ve dealt with this un-fun truth several ways. My first response was to throw a mini whisper fit to Jack in the not so privacy of our room. Jack REALLY enjoyed this. After that I protested dealing with anything in general because I’m a woman duh. Why should I negotiate with the boda driver when I had Jack there to do it for me? Why should I bother to order food when Jack was there to speak for me? If Uganda wanted me to shut up then I figured they didn’t deserve to hear from me. So that lasted about a day… Shocker right?! It seems I can’t shut up for any extended period of time, even when trying to prove a point. The awareness of all this still irritates the hell out of me and I argue with our boda drivers and order my own food and still try to manage our dinner situation and I make it all work because I know it’s not going to be like this forever. This issue aside, our hosts have become a wonderful family to us and I in no way mean to denigrate the lovely experience we’ve had with them by sharing this story.
I was dealing pretty well with this unsavory truth until I started telling the locals that I was only half mzungu and that papa Warren was a…wait for it… BLACK man! Pause for gasp. Nobody believed me, at all. They said “noooooo, no way.” First I was floored. Do y’all not see these curls?! I didn’t just get this tan in the past month, I had a genetic head start! None of this mattered, they wanted proof. “Bring a picture,” they said. I was mentioning this casually to another wise mzungu and they told me to tell them I was like Obama.
Needless to say, this pleased me greatly. I thought that a pretty smart comparison since all Ugandans (and probably all of Africa) know who Obombs is as (well as his heritage). I felt re-energized with this in my pocket and was confident I’d get my point across.
In the end, in spite of the President’s own proximity to me (he’s currently just next door in Tanzania), this still didn’t help. What did help was Kaliya’s arrival. Though she’s just a few shades darker (think mocha instead of cinnamon) with deeper brown hair and eyes, she got instant credibility. “You African! Just like us.” Enter me yelling to the high heavens that she’s was my sister!!! We share the same genetic makeup!! Every Ugandan polled said that we resemble each other but that I took after the mzungu and Kaliya, the African. It’s a hard truth to have two parts of your identity, central to your identity, dismissed and ignored. I don’t like it one bit. I actually hate it. But I remind myself that it’s temporary and in spite of how obnoxious I find it all, that it is a bit mind blowing. In the U.S. I can’t escape the fact that I’m a minority, but apparently Uganda doesn’t know about the one-drop rule. I don’t accept these attitudes that I receive but they’re impossible not to think about and do lend themselves to some interesting and entertaining conversations. Africa may not accept the me I see, but they still accept the me they see and that’s okay.
"It's all happening." 