Hey white boy, what you doin' uptown?

I’ve been in Kisumu for around two weeks now, and what a fortnight it’s been. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this place: not the heart-skipping scenery I see every day traveling outside of town through the Rift Valley, nor the sight of so many people (so, so many) who make their livings hawking their wares on the street or in corrugated steel shacks adorned with hand-painted advertisements, nor the feeling of being such an extreme minority.

Even if I get used to this latter point, nobody else here will let me forget what color my skin is. Mzungu is Swahili slang for “white man”, a somewhat derogatory term, but as any Caucasian who’s been to East Africa can surely confirm, it’s interpretation is totally context-specific. Most often it comes from the mouths of the uninhibited; the sufficiently inebriated, or kids under the age of 12 - either breathlessly uttered with dropped jaw as our vehicle passes them by on the unpaved, pothole-ridden paths (euphemistically referred to as roads here), or else screamed at the top of the lungs as we pass through the front gate of a primary school, setting off a chain-reaction chorus from the littl’uns, who you’d think were flocking to see a three-eyed albino with a bad hair day rather than two fairly unimpressive university students from Canada. Teenagers might mutter it while rolling their eyes or spit it out insultingly, while older men and women just tend to give confused stares, either remembering their manners or else too startled to say anything. I’ve never been as big a deal as I am here, and, ironically, I’ve never desired more to just blend in and be able to observe, unnoticed and unbothered. But them’s the breaks, I suppose.

The city of Kisumu itself is quite small, more a town than a city really, though I still haven’t been able to get my bearings downtown due to the incessant swarm of people on the streets. You can’t ever stop to look around and orient yourself, as you’ll instantly be picked out as an outsider, a tourist, a potentially dupable customer with shillings to spare. It’s overwhelming, but moving around gets a bit easier with each trip I make into town. I’ve been living in various guest houses since I’ve arrived, though I’m making efforts to find longer-term accommodation soon; once I do, I’ll begin feeling better orientated to my surroundings. Already I can feel that I have a tentative grasp on the multitude of social, political, and cultural differences and divisions to be found here. But the process is slow, no doubt about that, and I’ve decided that sometimes its best to just sit back, soak it all in, and accept that, at least for the time being, I’m just along for the ride.