This pronouncement from a fellow sitting beside me at a fish lady's stand in Mopti, Mali, is perhaps a bit unusually blunt. The argument, though, is by no means an uncommon one. All through West Africa, time after time after time, a traveller is confronted by people arguing for their own inferiority. I try my best to argue the other side - that the problems in Mali, or anywhere, trace their causes to history, geography, corruption and colonialism (just for starters), not to anything inherently related to colour. I don't think I often get through to people.
It may seem a bit strange that after an amazing month seeing amazing things with an amazing woman in Mali, talking about race is the thing that I feel most compelled to revive this blog with. I think, perhaps, that does have to do with the Malian experience. Unlike the rest of West Africa, Mali is a big tourist destination for everyone from backpackers to senior citizen tour groups. With the tourists comes an attitude toward foreigners that is often disturbingly servile. I don't necessarily believe that having a Malian scurrying to bring a foreigner coffee necessarily marks a more problematic power relationship than a Sierra Leonean hustling to bring a report full of development jargon. Racism and inferiority often lurk beneath both of them, but the tourist-oriented version is just a little bit more obvious, the whiff of colonial times just a little bit stronger.
Skin colour, and the differences in it, lay down the boundaries of how a Western traveller meets West Africa. It often is a bit startling to hear how callously the terms "blacks" and "whites" are thrown around, mostly by locals whose perception of race is often far more binary than that of foreigners used to having compatriots from different backgrounds. Still, for how often skin colour enters into the conversation, or hides behind it, it can be tricky to figure out just how often you, or the local people you are talking to, are talking about race.
Skin colour, here, is shorthand for so much. To be white doesn't just signify a different background. It means a different culture. It means being impossibly rich. It means being connected to those who dominate the planet, not those who are dominated. None of this is entirely false in the Canadian context, either, but a black Canadian and white one have a great deal more common ground between them than a Canadian and a Malian might do. Not as much common ground as they should, of course. The West is nothing even close to postracial in handing out opportunities to its citizens. But when we talk about race in Canada, we can try to talk about it from the stated assumption (however weakly held it may be by individuals) that all things being equal, people are equal. That the colour of people's skin doesn't really attach to anything qualitative, either individually or as a group. That's a difficult position to maintain in Africa, where skin colour signifies membership in a group with different behavioural norms, different worldviews, different lives.
So, on the face of it, much of the shockingly brash talk about race is actually a conversation about culture. That can still be fraught, of course, but most of us are generally more comfortable accepting that people think or act differently based on cultural norms than the colour of their skin. Fair enough - and I do think that this diffuses some of the conversations that I've had. There exist plenty of explanations for why Western culture is, for example, perhaps more entreprenerial, or why government corruption in Africa is such a problem. When people say "White people are better at x," they usually mean that "x works better in Europe and North America," which is certainly quite often true. That, at least, is the charitable interpretation. I certainly realize that many Africans believe otherwise, a legacy of a dysfunctional and incredibly Eurocentric education system, and a long history of seeming dependance on the West. Perhaps it's time to make the point a whole lot louder that the so-called "donor nations" are actually net recipients of African wealth, not the other way around.
But I digress. The question remains - when, if ever, am I talking or thinking of race? As a traveller I think this is especially pertinent. Like all travellers, I enjoy the odd wild generalization about the people and places that I'm visiting. I think most of us do this. To pick a hackneyed example, backpacking around Europe one regularly finds oneself at tables full of travellers debating the characteristics of this or that nationality - nice Canadians, rude Frenchmen, et cetera. I don't think most of us have too much of a problem with these kinds of discussion, as long as the odd proviso is made that there are many exceptions to all these stereotypes.
The same lines of thought, though, are a good bit trickier in the African context. At one level, this flows from the complexity of personal identity here. When I gripe about people being perpetually late and then yelling at me to hurry (which happens all the time, by the way), am I griping about Bambara people specifically? All Malians? Africans in general? In this case, I think the gripe is fairly applicable all over West Africa - but that generalization provides a slippery slope to the sort of thinking that you catch snippets of every day: "Africans do things this way." When something goes wrong, it's always "TIA - this is Africa." Whenever I hear a group of tourists referring to "some Africans did such-and-such," I cringe, and yet I catch my own assumptions marching merrily away down generalization street all the time. I think it's unavoidable - but that doesn't make it right.
"Fair enough," you might say, "but 'Africa' is still a geographical concept, not a racial one." This is, on the face of it, quite true. There are plenty of shades of skin in any African country. The lighter ones are generally immigrants, yes, but often only in the loosest sense - the Lebanese, for example, have been here for hundreds of years. But let's be honest. When travellers or expats talk about "Africans," they don't include anyone with lighter skin.
This fuzzy euphemism-ing is a dangerous game. Too often, it is backed up by pointing out a string of examples of how people are acting in the way you're complaining about (or complimenting). These examples are usually valid enough - there are plenty of annoying or inspiring things that everyone around you seems to do. The problem comes with the slip from framing things as "In Africa (or better, "in Mali") women do the majority of the work" to "African men are lazy." I've heard both. I've said both. But I fear the second one has all too much in common with the odiously paternalistic racism that one sometimes runs into from unreformed South Africans. The kind that sighs sadly and regrets the various things - you know, promiscuity, laziness, corruption - that "Africans" cannot escape from. As always, I don't think there's a hard and fast line as to what is harmful and what isn't, and I don't believe in policing thought. The word "racist" suffers sometimes from being too strong a condemnation. I do and think and say racist things all the time, especially as a white traveller in West Africa, and I'd rather take as a jumping-off point for discussion rather than condemnation.
Returning from the realm of thought to reality for a bit, it really is simple skin colour that usually defines how I'm treated, at least until I get to know whomever I'm interacting with. Sometimes, people try and take advantage of you. I'm certainly charged the white price for goods most days, especially in touristy places where people see plenty of well off foreigners. From time to time, people befriend you on false pretenses, as is the case anywhere. Far more dominant, though, is the deference I recieve. I am continuously given special treatment - people get up and give me their chairs, boot people out of choice seats on vehicles for me, bend their heads and fetch me what I need. I don't particularly like it. Indeed, it often bothers me. I won't pretend here, though, to be a better person than I am. I regularly use my white-people-powers (as I've come to call them) to make my life a bit easier. Perhaps I take that legroom-ey seat on the long ride. Perhaps I just waltz past that security check. There are a million examples of things like this. To be fair, I would often have to argue 'till I was blue in the face to avoid being priviledged in this way. I also run into a fair share of situations where not using my white priveleges gets me booted not to an equal place on the pecking order with locals, but to the very bottom of it. Sometimes, though, I just use my position without a second thought - and it is that that every traveller needs to keep a close eye on.
Many guidebooks have sections for women travellers, with tips and advice for them in whichever country the book covers. To my utter fascination, the Bradt guides for African countries also offer tips for black travellers, whose experience is a completely different one from mine (and much more likely to involve problems with local authorities). Sadly, though, black travellers are very rare - indeed, aside from Japanese tour groups, it isn't common to see anything but lily-white skin on the African backpacking trail. I have met a few travellers of Chinese or Japanese extraction, who often tell me stories of the fairly crude racist comments levelled at them by local people. So, when I talk about race, I can only really talk about the black/white dynamic, and indeed I think I can only really even talk about the black/white male dynamic, the experiences of foreign women here being so different. It certainly gives you quite a a bit to stew on.
Peace
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