MARGINALIA

PRIVILEGED WHITE GIRLS IN AFRICA

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

In a field
I am the absence / of field.
This is / always the case.
Wherever I am / I am what is missing.
—Mark Strand, from "Keeping Things Whole"

My parents own an old, dog-eared edition of Tenzi Za Rohoni, the hymnal of the Tanzania Mennonite Church. Inside its ripped green cover, the pages are slathered with the large swirls and zigzags of my one-year-old hand. My markings cover the texts of North American hymns, translated into the straightforward vowels and forceful consonant blends of Swahili: Mungu Ni Pendo, Baba Mwana Roho. Later, back in the Mennonite churches of Pennsylvania, I will learn them as For God So Loved Us and Holy, Holy, Holy.

I imagine myself in those Shirati days, perched on my mother’s lap during hot services inside the white adobe church, scribbling intently on top of those songs while listening to Luo voices sing them. It seems that I am determined to make a mark on each page of the book—even if only a dot or short line—as if to say, I have been here, and here, and here, too.

It is as if I am adding my voice to the chorus of other wazungu [white people], who have brought medicines and motorcycles and coverings and hymnals to this Dark Continent: We have been here, and here, and here, too.

In Africa, I am the absence of Africa.

Several countries to the south, during those same troubled years of the 1970s, another white girl was leaving her race’s mark. Alexandra Fuller’s recent memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, recounts her bitter childhood as the daughter of colonial farmers with motives far more complex—and far less admirable—than my parents’.

Fuller’s British family moved from ranch to ranch in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. They lived at least the façade of colonial dominance, complete with uniformed "houseboys," swimming pools, and all-white boarding schools. Although their colonial lives crumble in the face of her mother’s alcoholism, the death of three of her siblings, and African nation-building, Fuller’s parents persist.

A conversation early in the book tells much about her parents’ blinded loyalties to their race, their refusal to acknowledge any Other.

While entertaining a visitor from England and discussing politics, Mum pours herself more wine, finishing the bottle, then she says fiercely to our guest, "Thirteen thousand Kenyans and a hundred white settlers died in the struggle for Kenya’s independence."

I can tell the visitor doesn’t know if he should look impressed or distressed. He settles for a look of vague surprise. "I had no idea."

"Of course you bloody people had no idea," says Mum. "A hundred . . . of us."

I am reticent to lay these stories beside each other. The characters in them—my parents and their missionary colleagues, Fuller’s parents and their colonial cronies—could hardly be more different. The first were motivated by concern for the souls and bodies of others, the second by a strong brew of racism and profit and adventure. And even though many early missionaries are learning how culture-bound and racist their message often was, I remain confident that most carried generous motives and compassionate hearts.

Yet I am disturbed by the strange sonority of these scenes, the strings of Whiteness, resources, and power that connect them. As Tanzanian Mennonite bishop Zedekiah Kisare, now deceased, put it in his memoir (Kisare: A Mennonite of Kiseru, 1984), missionaries (and certainly colonialists, even struggling ranchers like the Fullers) have a "long tether rope": "Their rope is so long that they can hardly carry it," he writes. "These resources give the people from the West the ability to come here in the first place. Their resources make it possible for them to do their work and for them to enjoy Africa."

With these words, Kisare implicates some of my favorite memories: Land Rover trips past the acacia trees and elephant tribes of the Serengeti, afternoon teas in the bougainvillea-lined guesthouse of Nairobi, hippo-watching at lush Lake Naivasha. My missionary-kid life certainly wasn’t all game-park vacation, but my life looked more like Fuller’s than like the malaria-ridden and water-carrying existences of my African peers.

I would love to return to Africa. I would love to show my husband and children the frangipani trees I climbed, to taste the ugali and mandazis that I learned to love, to meet the people who were so hospitable to my family.

But how do I salvage these happy memories when Whiteness and the privilege of a long-tether rope made them possible? How do I appreciate another culture without consuming it? How do I observe or interact with the Other, whether person, culture, or landscape, without altering—or at least negatively altering—It?

On the other hand, how do I, as a person of relative privilege and power, not feel guilty for my very existence? Alexandra Fuller and I take little stabs at apology and reparation: She takes some of her few clothes to one of her family’s African laborers; I choose to live in a diverse neighborhood with at least a few less things than my culture tells me I deserve.

But how do we not simply act ashamed of our privilege, which is a convenient liberal façade, while continuing to benefit from it?

As Albert Memmi writes in his over-40-year-old but timeless book, The Colonizer and the Colonized, any attempt by a colonizer to disengage from colonial ideology is ultimately futile and mostly a mental exercise: "It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships."

We can be, in Memmi’s terminology, "colonizers who accept" the structures of inequality or "colonizers who refuse," who agitate against the system. We can be hard-driving ranchers or compassionate missionaries. Eeither way, in Africa, we are the absence of Africa.

It would be disingenuous to assume that my privilege is visible only there, of course. I benefit from my race and class privilege every day, here at home, most of the time without even being aware of it. But that’s a topic for another, much longer, much more confessional column.

So I won’t travel to Tanzania right now, or any time soon. Instead I’ll read Swahili counting books to my sons and enjoy the ugali that my father and sister whip up on occasion. I’ll remember with fondness the hyena’s cackle and the bitterness of wood-smoke, but I’ll try to keep my tether rope coiled, at least a little. It’s not about a guilt trip for a privileged life, as Barbara Kingsolver puts it in an essay about simple living, but just "an adventure in bearable lightness."

And fortunately, when we human beings with power use it wrongly, nature—and culture—can sometimes bounce back to their original forms. Fortunately, Luo Mennonites now sing Luo songs in church, not only Swiss-German melodies, and North American missionaries are leaving their requirements for coverings and "modesty" at home. Fortunately, God can take all the absences we create and turn them into signposts of the true Presence.

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the mother of two young sons as well as assistant editor and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.