White people - selfish superhumans
Did you know that white people are superhumans? Nor did I, until we sat down under a mango tree in Dunduzu with my colleague Ken and a member of a local AIDS support group. We’re conducting a survey to gauge the effectiveness of group therapy sessions, and one of the questions concerns cross-cultural awareness. Her answer is long but I’m curious and I ask Ken to translate. He casually turns to me and goes ‘oh she’s saying she’s learnt a lot about European culture. Before meeting international volunteers, she thought all white people were superhumans who will refuse to greet them or touch them or spend time with them, but now she’s learnt that white people are normal, just like them.’
My jaw drops. In disbelief, I turn from Ken’s smiling face to the woman who is equally cool with this weird, outright awkward answer she’s just given. I’m sitting there inelegantly with my bad posture and smudgy glasses, trying to stop my chitenje from unravelling. I have no idea what she’s talking about and I need to confirm with Ken. Superhumans... seriously?
So we were about four weeks into the placement until I learnt that some Malawians consider white people ‘superhuman.’ But it was glaringly obvious I was drawing a lot of attention to myself with my pale complexion from about two hours after exiting the plane. The first time we ventured out to the streets of Lilongwe I was approached by an extremely excited old man, who resembled a stereotypical forgetful professor of sorts. ‘Excuse me miss; you are white! You are really white!’ he exclaimed joyously and gestured me to inspect my own arms. I obliged with a confused smile and concurred, yeah I am prrretty white aren’t I.
Walking past kids would often mean having to listen to them shout ‘azungu! azungu! azunguuuu!’ Azungu stands for a white/rich person, and spotting one seemed to be a big deal for local weans. Some of them would approach you and ask how you are, putting on a high-pitched chipmunk voice (apparently because all white people sound really nasal. We reinforced this stereotype by holding our noses whenever we responded for maximum nasal effect). Some children thought we were from China, an opinion often expressed with the crudest, most stereotypical imitation of Chinese you can imagine.
‘Azungu’ as a concept also neatly conflates whiteness with wealth, a familiar assumption to any white Westerner who’s travelled south or eastwards. I don’t particularly mind this presumption because it’s mostly true, and not acknowledging your privileges is very douchy (often I don’t even mind paying the azungu price for goods and services, as long as we’re not venturing out to scamming territory. I do haggle though, but in good spirit - it’s a balancing act between not being a walking cause of inflation, but also not caring about what is essentially pennies back home).
Yet I found it challenging to explain the concept of being wealthy and not having a lot of disposable income - a situation which arose a couple of times when people in the villages asked if I could take them with me to Europe (...because I’m rich). Instead of elaborating on the actual numbers of azungus who can afford to splash out on intercontinental flights on a whim and the chances of an unemployed graduate being one of them, I usually turned these conversations around with a joke. Perhaps because my food vocabulary was fairly extensive, I liked listing all the familiar foods they’d be missing out on if they decided to travel to Europe, which was always a laugh. No nsima, no mphangwe, no Sobo, no mangoes... imagine!
Besides being pale, nasal-sounding superhumans who roll in money, people also assumed that white people are selfish, unfriendly and arrogant (again I’m somewhat convinced they aren’t too far off with this one). In our case this was partly down to poor first impressions; Malawians are big on hand shakes and warm, extensive greetings no matter whether you know the person or not. We did not live up to this expectation during our initial introductions with our in-country counterparts, and a lot of them interpreted this as ‘ultimate selfishness.’ One of my Malawian team mates said he wasn’t expecting to make any friends with us UK lot at all, and was quite nervous about meeting us because he assumed we would be rude and disinterested in them.
These are not a whole lotta positive preconceptions to live with, and being stereotyped according my skin colour was unpleasant at times. It was rarely malicious though, and there were certainly no historically rooted systems of oppression in operation when I felt uncomfortable for being singled out for my whiteness. The fact that I stood out as an azungu benefited me more than once; we went to a club night in town to see a Zambian dancehall reggae artist Dalisoul, and he had one of his DVDs to give out to a member of the audience. Who does he pick? Maria the white girl, obviously. The combination of being white and female also translated into some kind of a 'get out of traditional gender roles for free' card, which I had up my sleeve every time I wanted to get drunk, wear above-knee length skirts and not get up at 4am to mop down the house (a card not available to most Malawian ladies I knew).
One evening I went for a long walk with my host mum, and after we bumped into some kids shouting azungu at me, the conversation turned to skin colour. She wasn’t one bit surprised by my superhuman story from under the mango tree. According to her it’s a common preconception which dates back to the colonial era, British commissioners being carried everywhere on sedan chairs, and to the rule of Malawi’s former President for Life Hastings Kamuzu Banda who was educated in Scotland and admired white people a great deal (worth looking this dude up, he was cray. He banned Simon and Garfunkel’s Cecilia because it reminded him of a recent breakup). This admiration coupled with a colonial past then warped into some kind of a nationwide inferiority complex, which presently manifests itself in everyday interactions like the ones described above.
What I think is interesting and important here, perhaps more so than unpacking the different stereotypes associated with whiteness, is that had I travelled to Malawi on my own, without the level of immersion in Malawian society that I had, I would not have had a clue about any of this. Sure, I’d read about Malawi’s colonial history before I left, I knew who Hastings Banda is and it was obvious to me that I stand out like a sore thumb from the fact that people walk up to me on the street to tell me I’m white, or the fact that my colleague giggled with confusion when I was diagnosed with malaria because ‘that cannot be, malaria is a disease for black people.’ But for me to infer something along the lines of ‘because A, B and C, they must think white people are superhuman’ is a ridiculous, absurd conclusion. It’s absurd, and yet it appeared to be true; a curious perplexity which makes cross-cultural encounters so fascinating.
I reckon we rarely realise how differently other people see us to the way we see ourselves; even people who know us or appear like us because of a shared language, culture or some observable characteristics. In light of what I experienced in Malawi, I have re-evaluated my understanding of how I must’ve looked like to the villagers in the Cambodian hinterlands or the Central Highlands of Vietnam when I backpacked around Southeast Asia a couple of years ago, and I suspect that whatever it is, it quite possibly falls in the ‘absurd’ category as well.
The reassuring part of all of this is that if you haven’t decided to stick it out with your prejudiced views, perceptions often change quickly. It was nice to hear that the lady under the mango tree had learnt that international volunteers were not that different from her, and I’m really glad she’s scrapped any notions of white supremacy. I for one made such an ungraceful, fumbling spectacle of myself on most days (complete with a wildly unravelling chitenje to hold on to) that there should be a very slim chance anyone in Mzimba province is left with the impression that white people are in any way superhuman.
