racism: africa, america, white, black, brown, whatever
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
![One of the things that surprised me the most about Africa: Racism. YEP. Guess I grew up thinking that only we white people were racist. Books, movies, whatever --- they always made Africa out to be this Euphoria of unified black souls. Um. Nope. Save the fairy tales for Disney.
Racism is alive and well here. Tribalism is the more appropriate name. Tribes often hate each other. They destroy businesses if a person from another tribe sets up shop in a tribe-dominated area. They war along tribal lines. They kill along tribal lines (hello - genocide?) They worship together based on tribal lines (the most segregated hour [Church on Sunday mornings] doesn’t just happen in America along color lines. It’s completely here based on tribal lines). They marry based on tribal lines. They disown babies (a LOT of the abandoned babies come from mixed-tribal babies whom the community (grandma, aunts, etc.) tell the mom she can’t keep.
We live in a rather progressed area, thankfully, so racism isn’t as extreme as it is in most of the parts of Kenya but tribalism is still rampant. The other day I was asking a Hindu shopowner where he suggested we hang out during election-week because already violence has broken out due to elections and I wanted to get his opinion. He told me firmly that I should stay put in Kitale.
“Kitale is a multi-cultural town,” he said. Which, just the thought of what he said made me laugh since Kitale is 99% African. How multi-cultural is that? 99% Kenyan-African. 1% is probably Indian-African and expats. But, truthfully, he referred to Kitale as a multi-cultural town AND truthfully, I believed him --- after living here for 7 years. Because it IS multi-cultural here.
Luo, Kikuyu, Turkana, Bakusu, Nandi, Pokot and Kisii live side by side.
To an outsider -- Kitale is made up of Africans.
Shows you how foolish it is to make assumptions based on color.
Kitale is really a multi-cultural hub of several tribes. So, for the most part, it is a place of relative peace and even the occasional cross-tribal marriage. A friend of mine recently married a woman from a different tribe than his own. Which may not sound like a HUGE deal to ya’ll ---- BUT, trust me, it’s a HUGE deal here. Racism isn’t a color issue. It’s a cultural issue. Humanity has divided itself among cultural lines for all of time. Like-cultures often gravitate together. I think we do ourselves a disservice in our effort to try and solve the racial question when we water it down to solely a color issue. White races warred, and still do, throughout time. That’s racism. We don’t view an Irish person the same way we do a Russian. Plllleeeease. Or an Irish person the same as a Swiss person or a German person. Or an Italian. Or a Polish person. Or even a French person. They’re all white.
There are distinct differences that
are within that person either linked
innately to DNA dispositions or to
cultural upbringing or, after having
adopted, I am more inclined to say: Both.
Africa is a continent: not a people.
Tribes here are often as opposite as a Hispanic person from an Eskimo. And that’s not hyperbole.
Around twenty ARK pastors and students (who are all from the Saboat tribe) attended Wilson’s wife’s funeral this past weekend in Kisumu (which is an area of around 90% Luo population [LUO: think OBAMA - his father was LUO].) Later as they talked about the experience (which Brian had to miss, unfortunately, because he was already away in Maasailand with Clyde Jackson on a prescheduled trip) --- they made comments such as:
“Those people are very, very different. Not very advanced.”
“Those people don’t know how to farm. They just sit around and are lazy.”
“Those people don’t know a thing about hygiene. They go to the bathroom in bushes and trees. Like animals.”
Okay, I think any sociologist might just perhaps classify “those” statements as racist statements. Racism isn’t a color thing. It’s a bad thing. But it’s not just based on color. C’mon.
The thing I love about Adopt a Legacy [the ministry to orphans/widows that we do here in Kitale] is how we have a variety of tribes represented and we have purposefully tried to keep it pretty evenly divided among tribes so that one of the lessons the children will learn and the others in the program will learn is that when we learn how to live with others and accept them across cultural and tribal and racial lines, we benefit as a whole. We gain from their strengths and they gain from our strengths. We learn to forgive their weaknesses. They learn to forgive our weaknesses.
We become stronger as a whole. Unity. While keeping our unique diversities in tact, we learn to become a new race altogether: humanity.](C9B001B2-1CA5-455E-AB0B-BD399E9DE58A_files/shapeimage_3.png)
