“The Kenyan Muzungu,” or “How I Undeservingly Became a Kalenjin Tribesman”

I’ve been working on this one for a few days. It’s long. I hope it amuses you, I hope it gets you thinking, and I hope it doesn’t discourage you.

Once upon a time, I became the son of a fifty-eight year old Kalenjin tribeswoman by drinking fermented milk and eating unsanitary passion fruit. It is one of the greatest honors I have ever received, and it breaks my heart a little. But that is getting ahead of the story.

This past Tuesday, my student Peter Rono asked me after class, “Do you want to come to my house?” Heck yes I did! So, that afternoon, Peter, another student named Grace, and myself set out for a walk through Eldoret. I followed eagerly behind them as we left campus, walking several hundred yards of crowded, dusty streets before entering a quieter section of town. The roads were still all made of dirt, but overhanging trees and roadside hedges full of the flowers that grow everywhere here did much to alleviate the sense of oppressive dustiness that hangs over this late part of the dry season.

As we walked, we began to compare our lives and our worlds, and found much to discuss. Grace and Peter were particularly interested in my opinion of President Obama, and my reports of general American sentiment about our commander-in-chief. It seems he is a great curiosity in Africa: on the one hand, he is seen as a hero for giving the order to assassinate bin Laden. Yet the Kenyans don’t at all understand the general enthusiasm for his presidency that they perceive through the media, particularly the immense grassroots support that sprung up during his first election. They told me that he seems a largely lackluster figure, and laughed when I told them that I think he will be re-elected in the coming election. I was puzzled by their attitude. It isn’t that I don’t understand someone disliking the president; indeed, a huge portion of our own country usually dislikes the president in office during any given administration. So I pressed them about their attitudes, and got at least a partial explanation. “If he had to run here, in Kenya,” on of the students explained, “he would have had a much more difficult time.” When I still didn’t understand, my source laughed, “We are all black!” Finally catching on, I shared the joke with them. Then they continued, telling me that, despite their reservations about Obama or any other politician, the people of Kenya have immense respect for American government. They told me that they are enthralled by the way that our politicians listen to us, the American people, and respond to our demands. I started to respond, “Which politicians have you been watching?” But they continued, and I could see that this matters a great deal to them. Our system may be imperfect, and they may not even particularly care for any one man—including our current president—but they deeply respect our ideals and the way that our people try to uphold those ideals at least a majority of their time.

For all of this to make sense, you have to understand Kenyan government. Kenya has one of the most stable, well-respected governments on the African continent. And it’s still atrocious. The most famous Kenyan president, whose name I believe was Moi and who I think was either the last president or the one before, retired from office as one of the richest men in the world, despite the fact that he was president of an incredibly impoverished nation. I’ll give you one guess as to how he made his money. The most recent, or perhaps current, president is widely known to take a twenty percent or larger cut of every government contract for himself. Nor are these men the terrible disease of an otherwise-functional system. Such corruption is known, even expected, throughout parliament and with every government bureau, down to the bribes demanded by many local police officers. Kenyans chafe under this system, rail against it, and yet find themselves unable to do much of anything about it. So our system, warts and all, seems practically utopian to them. Kenyans long to be empowered, and to have a government by the people, for the people. But this revelation was only the beginning of our afternoon.

After telling them about America, about our government and our feelings about our politicians, and after hearing about their national problems, I asked to hear about Kenya. Peter, who had invited me on this walk in the first place, laughed and told me he doubted any American had ever heard of Kenya. Not so, I told him. There are only a handful of African countries whose names we know, and half of those are not realized to be African by half the people who know them, but most of us have heard of Kenya. I told him that my perception of Kenya, which I think is fairly representative of that of my countrymen, was that there were a few modern cities, scattered throughout a huge savannah that runs a perpetual, real-life production of The Lion King. Then I asked Peter about their flag, and I heard again about a national identity that is troubled, but which longs for and believes in its own ability to be great. The flag is red, Peter says, for the blood of Kenyans who died to free themselves from colonists, and green for the fertility and richness of their land. It is black, he chuckles, and points conspiratorially at his skin. Sobering, he tells me that there are white stripes for the peace they desire, and a shield for the way they must defend themselves from the trials that come to them. Finally, there are two spears, symbolic of their strength and resolve, their resourcefulness and ability to meet any challenge, as evidenced by their fearlessness in winning their liberty from the modern British army with nothing but the weapons they had used to hunt on the savannah since time immemorial. “But,” he confides to me, “you only need one spear. The other is for decoration.” Good point, Peter.

As we passed down a number of beautiful dirt streets bordered by walls covered in flowers and vines, I commented that no one lives this way where I’m from. “I’ve never seen a city with so many compounds,” I told them. “It seems so normal here.” Peter laughs at Grace, and tells me that her neighborhood, which we’re nearing, is upscale, and that he will take me to the real Eldoret. Grace denies Peter’s joking critique, and begins to tell me about the walls I see. The muzungu, the white people, all live behind these walls, as well as the government officials and other Kenyans with money. They close themselves off from the rest of the country, and from the people around them. Now, from what I understand, this is not altogether unreasonable, since people with money do often tend to lose it here if they don’t protect it somehow. But Grace and Peter assured me that the muzungu are far more afraid of Africans than they have any right to be. I don’t know, guys. I saw The Four Feathers. We conversed about this, and they told me that there is a deep divide in Kenya between the few people who have some money, including the muzungu like myself who come and live for a time, and all of the other people. They are amazed that I am even willing to walk out on the streets with them, and tell me that I am more Kenyan already than the muzungu who have lived here for years. I deflected the compliment, joking that in America, we keep our lions in cages and our white people roam free, whereas here the lions are free and the whites are caged. They found this immensely funny, and I was very pleased with myself.

Peter and I left Grace, and turned to head to his home. As we went, the houses did indeed become smaller, more spread out, and less neatly laid out. Homes are everywhere, and interspersed with vacant buildings of various sizes, not laid out neatly in proper neighborhoods. Peter continued to tell me of his wish for a Kenya run by honest, responsible Kenyans. “We believe that we could be like America, a great country, if our people were given the opportunity.”

Finally, we reached Peter’s home. It was a truly modest house, half the size of my small apartment in Chattanooga. Around one side was a thriving shamba, full of the local greens and the vegetables that supplement ugali, the local maize-meal that is the staple of Kenyan cuisine. Outside, we met Peter’s family, who proceeded to pour hospitality on me. His mother and I exchanged what I only know as the French custom faire les bisous, and I was ushered into his living room. His house is tiny, but it is crammed with comfortable furniture and happy family. They treated me like royalty, which put me in mind of a friend of mine who once described to me the feeling of embarrassed gratitude he had felt upon receiving similar treatment in the Philippines. I would call it a humbling experience, and it is, but that makes the whole thing almost too pious. It’s humbling, yes, to see how well these people treat their guests and to compare it to how rarely you welcome strangers into your home at all, but more than that, it’s antiquated and beautiful and outdated and barbaric to receive this kind of treatment. It’s a product of an older, politer world, but the modern man can’t help but think, “These people are my equals, not my servants. This can’t be right.” But if being in the homes of foreign people has taught me anything, it is that one should accept every gesture and comment in the spirit it is given. So, it was with as much charm and grace as I could muster that I watched Peter’s younger sister Pamela bring me fermented milk purified by charcoal.

Now, let’s talk about this milk. Peter’s traditional tribe is a Kalenjin tribe, one of the Nilotic peoples, and they have a special drink which they have been imbibing for centuries, maybe millennia. This drink is milk that has been left out to ferment, and to develop the texture that one might expect. Then charcoal is added. Peter’s uncle/brother/father-in-law (family relationships are labyrinthine here) helpfully tells me that the charcoal is used because otherwise the drink would be totally poisonous. This piece of information is not overly reassuring to me, but I rest in the knowledge that the Kalenjin have had dozens of generations to work the kinks out of the process. Peter tells me that I’ll enjoy the drink, and that it’s just like yogurt. Well, the aftertaste is certainly a relative of yogurt flavor. The foretaste, however, is more dominated by notes of buttermilk and mold, with the whole married together by a flavor that is pretty much what you might expect from fermented milk. Add in the fact that the whole thing is lukewarm and not altogether silken in texture, and your mouth is in for a truly remarkable sensation. Mercifully, Pamela brings a bunch of bananas with the drink. Then adds mango. And passion fruit. And the feeling of embarrassment at their great generosity returns. Then there was an extremely awkward moment in which she poured two gallons of warm water over my hands at a rate of a teaspoon per second, while I tried to figure out whether custom demanded that I wash my hands unceasingly for ten minutes, or if there was some cue to stop that I was supposed to give but of which I was utterly ignorant. About two and a half minutes in, I just pulled my hands out from under the water, at which point Pamela gracefully pulled the pitcher away and I congratulated myself on cracking the code. Then I promptly undid the decorum by going to wipe my hands on my pants, much to her dismay. She coughed politely as she offered me a towel form her forearm, and I attempted to re-gather my dignity while laughing nervously. Thankfully, Peter’s uncle Jacob laughed openly when he saw it, and I managed to recover something of the moment’s decency by standing and offering him the towel as he finished his own wash, which took far less time than mine. Ah well, these things do happen.

Once I had resigned myself to giving my fullest effort to the fermented milk, and munching at the proffered fruit to help it all go down, I settled in for a long discussion with Peter’s mother, Jacob, Pamela, his wife, Mary, Pamela’s son, and Peter’s own boy, Leon. Leon contentedly devours passion fruit, while Pamela’s son perches at the edge of the farthest couch, eyeing my warily and holding himself ready to flee at any moment from my muzungu tricks. I listened to them tell about their lives in Eldoret, and about the Kalenjin people. In between statements, they converse amongst themselves in Kiswahili while Leon and I have a staring contest over our fruit.

Then came the greatest moment. Peter’s mother embraced me, and told me that I was now one of her sons. Between this declaration, and the trial of my manhood which I assume must have been implicit in the fermented milk, I am now confident that I am myself a member of the Kalenjin people. In case you’re interested, Peter tells me that our tribe is a particulary large portion of native Kenya, and that we fought the Maasai. They wanted our grasslands for their cattle. But, of course, we never let them take it. Those Maasai think they’re so great…

(One of My Fellow Tribesmen, But Not One I Know Personally)

Peter and I left, with me practicing my Kiswahili farewells on his family and waving my ridiculous-but-effective cowboy hat. While we walked back to campus, Peter told me that he had been joking with his family that I was a real Kenyan, “not like the other muzungu.” He told me that my heart was big and open, and that I was the first muzungu these students had ever invited to their homes from the college. “You are like a long-lost brother!” he laughs. You might think I was flattered and gratified by this, and I was. But I was also dismayed. See, there have been multiple white directors of the college, at least one of which—the current—is a man well deserving of their respect and admiration. Aside from that, the white instructors care deeply for these students, and have given their lives to live here in Africa with them, which is decidedly not an easy life change to make. More than anything else, though, there is the glaring fact that I had been in Kenya all of five days at this point, and they had only known me for two of them. What had I done that was so significant? I’d taught two minor classes, tagged along on a field trip, and gone to chapel with them. But as Peter kept talking, I began to see that it wasn’t so much what I’d done as how I’d done it. I’d laughed with these guys, made jokes with them. I didn’t push the struggling ones in their English, and I constantly asked questions about Kiswahili. I walked the streets with them when I got the chance, and I asked about their lives. I shared their worries about their government, and the problem with raising children in modern Kenya, and the complications of muzungu with perfect intentions but raging savior complexes. In short, I hadn’t done much of anything other than treat them like equals. Which wasn’t difficult, since I’m younger than most of them and not even really a proper professor. What I want to emphasize is that I hadn’t done much at all. That’s the point. I’d just sat back and listened, like I would with any other people. Not people I was trying to save, but people I was trying to understand. And I did this mostly out of total ignorance. I was blessed by God and generally blind enough that I just happened to do the right thing by doing hardly anything at all.

I know for a fact that at least most of the white missionaries, pastors, and faculty here share all of these concerns, and doubtless feel them much more deeply than I do. I’m just not wired to be all that compassionate. But I wonder if any of the others have been able to tell the Kenyans of their concern on the Kenyan’s own terms? More importantly, I wonder if the Kenyans have ever been able to believe it before. It seems the racial tensions here, and, just as much, the constant power struggles and abuses among the Africans themselves, have built a huge weight of misunderstanding even between the modern individuals who respect each other and understand each other on an academic and religious level. That Peter so freely accepts me as an anomaly, a real Kenyan muzungu, is not so much a testament to my own ability to break through barriers—which was doubtless done more through my blind, headlong ignorance than any latent insightfulness—as a marker of the depth to which preconceptions and tensions run around here. And more, the ease with which even the best-intentioned slip into them.

Let me illustrate this last point. When some missionaries I know came to Kenya, they moved into an old colonial compound where there was a hut for their gardener and an on-site maid. Now, I like to think of myself as utterly old-fashioned and unenlightened, but even I saw this and though, “Really, guys? Servants?” This came up in conversation later, and they told me that they had had the same reaction, and felt bad about the conditions in which their gardener lived as well as the idea of treating people as base laborers to do their dirty work. But they hadn’t fired them, because they didn’t want to just turn them out on the street. You want to know Peter’s response? He told me, in much more gracious terms, that Westerners come and move into nice houses and then stupidly fire all the staff, eliminating jobs and spitting in the face of the established custom. Even in our most noble efforts to liberate the African downtrodden, it seems we stray wildly from the course.

When we, the muzungu do-gooders come to Africa, I think we have to learn to aim not at correcting them as well-informed leaders, but instead at coming from behind and beneath them to aid them however we can. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t teach: in fact, my students are eager to learn from me. But we have to do so with the understanding that as we teach, we must learn, because we are so far from our world here that we cannot hope to simply make assumptions about the way things are and assume that we are right. If we do, we’ll end up drinking a ton of metaphorical fermented milk. And not in a good way. We have to empower, not save, the Kenyans, and help them finally make their country their own. And yes, I do think this is as much the business of missionaries as foreign-aid programs. Maybe more.

Now, I don’t at all wish to cast wholesale criticism against the efforts of Western missionaries in Africa. There’s more than enough of that going on, and it’s much too easy to do. There are a lot of Christians in the first world who have seen the problem second- or third-hand, and cast aspersions that are, quite frankly, ignorant and unhelpful on genuine efforts here. I have been on the frontlines myself, I’ve talked with the Kenyans who know the situation intimately, and I am still aware that I won’t fully understand the situation even a month from now. I’m totally new to all of this, and it would be a grand show of arrogance to assume that I’ve found the solution to all the myriad problems of the relationships between normal Kenyans, those in power, and the muzungu who want to help. The people at Discipleship College are keenly aware of the problem, and they work much harder to remedy it than I think anyone across the Atlantic would guess. I sat in on a class and listened to an old-guard missionary here lead a discussion highlighting the dangers of non-Kenyans leading community-building efforts here. Literally hundreds of muzungu missionaries in this country know the problem, and are working to solve it. It just isn’t that easy. There’s no simple answer to the question of how one stands back and doesn’t interfere when children are being discarded and faux-Christian government officials are growing fat on the blood, sweat, and tears of their own people.

I guess I’m just trying to think this through, to offer you some kind of explanation, and explain to you why it is bittersweet to me that I can finally get those minority scholarships that have so long been denied to my Kalenjin countrymen.

Neema na Amani. Grace and Peace, everyone. I leave you with some thoughts from some of my close personal friends (bonus points if you can identify the band):

“Catch the rain, empty hands

Save the children from their lands

Wash the darkness from their skin

Heroes from the West

We don’t know you,

But we know best.

But this is not a test”