Top 25 East Africa Assumptions

(Originally this post was "Third World Problems for a 1st world person" but that seemed even more stupid)

I constantly find myself assuming in Africa. I know it's wrong but it really is hard not to assume. Unfortunately my assumptions are often for the worse and I have to remind myself constantly to give everyone a chance and not immediately assume.

I assume....

1. It will take longer to get there than they tell my and there will be numerous problems along the way including inexplicable one hour stops and malfunctioning equipment.
2. I can't pay with a credit card and locals will never have credit cards.
3. 90% of my eating choices will include 90% of the same starchy items present in any East African buffet. 
4. Someone will nod yes when they don't understand or otherwise provide me with wrong information. They will not admit when they don't know.
5. I will be annoyed by the music on a mutatu (bus/Dala Dala) because it is A) too loud B) religious C) bad D) same five songs over and over or E) all of the above.
6. Everyone in the streets will remind me I'm white ("muzungu" in case I forget) and children will stare. 
7. There is no schedule or way to call ahead and nothing is posted online. You have to go in-person
8. If it rains all transport and work will either slow down or stop completely and the electricity is likely to go out 
9. Someone will reach over my shoulder (because they are cold or don't like the wind to close my window on the bus despite the fact that it's usually blazing hot. 
10. The bus will have a crazy horn that it will use without rhyme or reason.
11. If I'm in a Muslim area the mosque will wake me up with exceedingly loud call-to-prayers.
12. You don't have an email address but somehow you have facebook.
13. You don't have airtime so you somehow think it's ok to "beep" me.
14. Crossing the street in Kampala will be terrifying and life threatening. 
15. The menu at the restaurant is not the "menu." Additionally, you'll be asked what you want when there is no choice. For example, I one time got ice cream and was asked if I wanted strawberry, chocolate, or vanilla and was told the first two I asked for "weren't there" and only then was offered the last one. 
16. I will get cut in a line and no one will think anything of it. 
17. The birds will be annoyingly loud (especially in Kampala).
18. My motorcycle taxi driver will smell like alcohol (and possibly be drunk or high).
19. It will often smell vaguely like fish and more often like burning trash.
20. Someone is trying to cheat me. 
21. You are exceedingly friendly because you want something. 
22. A single woman at a club wearing a tight dress is a prostitute.
23. The man standing up in the front of the bus is preaching.
24. The hotel I'm staying at will have someone sweeping the floors at 7 am and it will be surprisingly loud and annoying
25. Despite the fact it's an English colony we won't understand each other

I'm sure I'm forgetting many but this is a pretty good list. It will bring me many years of good nostalgia.

My South African Family

When people heard I was going to Johannesburg, or "Jozie" or "Joburg" as I'll refer to it from here on out, reactions were decidedly mixed. In some cases it felt like people were even mad at me, like "why would you waste your time there?" and "Joburg sucks!" Like somehow I was offending them with my travel choice. But I wasn't going to Joburg just to visit Joburg (and all transit in South Africa seems to stem through the place anyways), I was looking up long lost cousins that I'd always heard about growing up. The truth about the place is that without a car and idea of where to go, it isn't great. And if you compare it to Capetown, the place everybody kept screaming at me to go, I understand the bad rep. But Joburg, the business center of South Africa, is also not a bad place.

There are jacaranda trees everywhere and the flower pedals are everywhere. Along with the artificial hills made with the dirt from the old gold mines, the place is distinct. Johannesburg is very spread out and a lot of the city is pretty boring, just a lot of shopping malls and traffic jams really. The reputation for being dangerous also doesn't help Joburg's cause.

My second cousins, the Zars, are very wealthy and as strange as it is to stay with family you've never met, they made me feel at home. I was interested to meet them, in part, because I am curious about where I come from. I could just as easily have been South African (the majority of the Jews there come frorm Lithuania).

The father of the Zar family started a box and foam materials producing factory which employees like 70 workers, so apparently business is in my blood! Almost all groundworkers were Black and the management White and getting a tour of the place was a bit eerie. On the other hand it was admirable how the business was built from the ground up. When thinking about race and South Africa, knowing it's my own family changed my ability to judge. These people I stayed with are very generous and good people and yet I had a hard time hearing their analysis of Apartheid. It turns out, as most things do, that despite worldwide opposition to Apartheid, the issue was literally and figuratively not Black and White.

In previous times, Communism was a serious threat and my cousin told me if they gave Blacks the vote before Communism had ended they might have lost everything they owned. The Zars came from Lithuania just like my ancestors and worked hard to get businesses and earn money and start new lives. Of course they were part of a system that even as immigrant Jews you had higher status than blacks and enjoyed many advantages; However, even though they had advantages doesn't mean they didn't earn something. Of course, this all came at a great cost and the sacrifice, or oppression, in my opinion was intolerable. My cousin's main point, which I think is very legitimate (especially coming from places of deep conflict historyy like Rwanda and Israel), is if you weren't there you can't know about it. The whole thing makes me question what I would have done in my cousin's shoes faced with the same questions.

I've also grown up in a different time. I definitely recognize privilege and institutional racism in a way that this family here might not identify. Being Jewish meant integration was even harder. The Zars themselves would admit that they live in a Jewish bubble in a majority black population. I mean it's not like I have that many black friends back home but life just doesn't feel so segregated in the US. The Zars looked at me kind of like an anomoly I think. Maybe I shouldn't have told them I was really into the traditional music of Soweto and how I lived in the "bush" in East Africa. It was totally foreign for them.

This visit really got me thinking and wondering about roots, privilege, how we get to be who we are, and parallel universes in which your ancestors made some different decisions and you ended up in a different place as a different person. There's also the possibility that you never come in to existence in the first place.

Apartheid Museum: Take a look in the mirror

Mandela's first house (Soweto)

Soweto old coal plant, now one of the world's highest bunji locations

Daniel Zar, 2nd cousin, with Anna and her grandaughter Cocoa (Anna works at the Zar's house)

I'll order it from Zanzibars!

(Bonus if you get where the title of this post comes from)
My path of travel over the last 4 or 5 weeks looks like this. It's been a crazy fun few weeks.

I'll be heading to South Africa next. It's been a good experience and couch surfing is surprisingly awesome really. I'm now in Zanzibar enjoying the amazing beaches and interesting blend of Swahili, Indian, and Arab cultures. It's incredible but even my couch surfing host Gabriel gets lost walking in Stone town with me, the main part of the Island and where the boats from Dar bring you. It's a bit strange considering Gabriel grew up here and knows the place so well but that's how confusing Stone town is, there's so many alleyways and alternative routes that even after years you can't know them all!

Besides getting lost in Stone town I've seen beaches that you'd think you'd only find in movies and I've eaten some nice Swahili food. In fact, at Forodhani Gardens vendors set up "pop up" restaurants every night with an amazing variety of goods. The different vendors share grills and it's very unclear who actually owns any of the businesses as different workers seem to appear every few minutes behind different counters. This is on top of the fact there's at least 3 sugarcane water people, 7 Swahili Pizza makers, 7 kebab BBQ places, and many other of the same type of thing over and over (see first pic. below).

The only down moment came on day 1 when my couch surfing host Gabriel and I saw a guy getting kicked pretty hard on the ground by someone authoritative in uniform along with two guys who just looked like civilians. It's unclear exactly what happened but I later found out the guy had been trying to sell something in a spot where that wasn't allowed (hasn't that not usually stopped other Africans also)? Gabriel caught the whole thing on camera but they caught him and took his phone away. He had to fight to get it back and delete the pictures. It was scary seeing police brutality in a place like Zanzibar.

Forodhani Gardens Night Market

Beautiful beaches of Zanzibar

Dar Es Salaam, biggest city in Tanzania as seen from my ferry

Giant turtles shipped to Zanzibar from the Seychelles as a gift long ago

Couch surfing host Gabriel in Zanzibar. Zanzibar, like Dar Es Salaam are predominantly Muslim

Paying for Sex

Trying couch surfing with Bramuel (the non-white guy), out in Mombasa

Mombasa 

No I did not pay for sex but now that I have your attention I want to talk about the Kenyan coast and prostitutes. Its actually something that stands out in my mind about the place. Ok yes of course there's prostitutes in other places in East Africa, everywhere for that matter, but they were unusually aggressive in Mombasa this last week. But lets rewind a bit first to talk basics.

What is a prostitute?
Someone who gets paid to have sex right? Well yes usually but in what way? Being on the Kenya coast actually has made me rethink this seemingly simple question. Woman at clubs around East Africa have asked me to "buy them a Guinness" as they usually put it. That certainly doesn't make a woman a prostitute but it may ring an alarm here. Furthermore, woman may be dressed as business professionals, casual club type people, or in a very promiscuous outfit. As Dave Chappell's famous skit about skimpy looking woman says, you just can't tell who's who and that's especially true here. But there's a deep belief in many places here that basically any single woman at a club is a prostitute...and by some definitions they could be right. In some cases a man is expected to take care of a woman and buy her some food, drinks, maybe even some gifts. In other cases just the taxi ride home the next day suffices, except as my friend told me you might add like $20 to the normal cab fee. "Wait what?!" I said to him, "how is that different than paying for sex" to which he tells me that it difference because it's not like they demand money first before they'll have sex with you. But to me what difference does it really make to pay before or after after sex? Some restaurants in certain places you pay first and others you pay after. In general, sex is casual and people are more open seeming here about it and the same Western stigma might not apply here.

But back to the present, all of this all makes dancing with girls at clubs particularly tricky and sometimes very awkward. Many of the woman without men are beautiful. But being a white man it's more complicated. You may be approached by many girls in one night, knowing that many (most?) woman without man are prostitutes, and unless (or even if) you're Brad Pit, you should be suspicious. Why am I being approached? So even if they don't ask for anything they might be prostitutes. "Don't be fooled," my friend tells me. They might even buy you a beer sometimes!"

Making a long term investment

...is how my friend put it. When woman see a mazungu (white) man they think about the long-term so they might not ask anything of you, according to my friend. But I told him even in the Western world there's some expectation that a man takes care of his woman. Apparently it's different though when a woman expects a visa out of a relationship. But then going back to the original question, does that make her a prostitute? Well certainly not by traditional definitions. But it may come down to what these woman do normally to earn some income and do they otherwise sleep with men for money?

Tricky questions, tricky answers but in the end the experience here is, while at times awkward, good because it humanizes prostitutes and blurs the lines around traditional thinking. So do I dance with someone that I think doesn't look like the type of lady that would dance with me normally? Just because a prostitute may want money doesn't mean they might not enjoy dancing just like anyone else.