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As I was walking along Mandala Road on my way to the hospital one morning, someone stopped and said how glad he was to see a foreigner walking, that it made him hopeful for the future.
The sensitive subject of race is, here in Malawi, not that sensitive. Mzungu originally referred to the British, but now extends to anyone who is not black African. When the Egyptian soccer team won the Africa Cup recently, there was apparently some disagreement in a local bar about whether they are azungu (mzungu plural) or not. It was unquestioned that, if they were, the win was preordained - mzungu privilege is palpable, even to someone who bumbles through life without noticing much.
No security guard stops me, people tend to get out of my way sooner than I can theirs. I am offered the front seat in minibuses, next to the gangster types. In daylight hours I feel totally safe on the road and walking around. It is interesting but a bit sad, and I hate being called "boss".
At night, though, we get taxis everywhere, even a few hundred metres. But while we are apparently targets, it seems to only be because of the assumption that azungu have valuables. There is no undercurrent of racial tension that seems obvious to me. It probably helps that most of the Europeans who came here were missionaries, not soldiers or settlers, there were few resources worth exploiting, and the country was a protectorate rather than a colony. Although Rhodes (who was cunning at best and downright evil at worst) and the British South Africa Company had a hand in a few nasty parts of the history, the British administration seems to be remembered as largely a tolerable affair, out of which Malawi did get something.
The white people here are still very much a class in themselves and are rarely seen pushing a broom or serving food. There is a small Indian and Middle Eastern population here, who seem to fit in somewhere between black and white, running many of the shops and restaurants. Interestingly as an ethnic group there is much more dislike of them voiced by the black Africans, although the fact I'm in earshot might change what they say.
On the whole, Malawi seems quite happy to have azungu here, either international or locally-born. I just hope we can avoid messing the relationship up.
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