Interesting passage from the book "Just Another Mzungu Passing Through" by

When a white man goes to Africa, he often arrives with big plans. He wants to make a difference, to do his bit for the developing world and its people, so that there is at least one thing he can look back on with a degree of pride. When he lies on his deathbed as an old man he can know that despite everything else he has done, he had value then.

He arrives with innocent eyes, knowing for a fact that all men are equal and should be treated the same. That a good deed will generate another in return and that a hand offered in friendship will be reciprocated. He knows what he is read is biased when it is critical of his poverty-stricken brother but truthful when it glorifies their efforts in adversity. He knows he will have an uncanny affinity with the poor because after all hasn’t a he always felt strangely out of place n his safe middle class home in the west?

For a time he manages to ignore the potholed roads and piles of putrid garbage. He smiles at the street boys and stoned beggars and gives them a little change. This is not wrong he tells himself despite the sneaking suspicion that they will spend it on glue and now the warm and wholesome food he intends. His heart is true and so it’s worth a few shillings and hassle.

He will probably get dysentery and salmonella and then spend countless hours on the toilet cursing the damn place, but he will love it more as a result. He will drink is diralite and sip his flat Coca-Cola to replenish the salts and sugars and when he recovers will go back to buying the corn from the barbecue of the corner and he will smile as the vendor turns the cob with his dirty fingers and fans it with a ratty piece of cardboard picked up from the dump behind him. This is the real African experience. An upset stomach is a passing thing and it takes time to get used to the local germs. An African would get ill too as he adjusted to life in the UK.

He will purchase food from the duka on the roadside like an African. He will visit the poorest housing areas on weekend, sharing ugali and sickly sweet tea in someone’s tiny tin home. he will smile when he is called a man of the people by his hosts and he will be delighted when he is told that they truly value him as a Rafiki (friend) and that they hardly notice the color of the skin is wearing for he understands them, and they him.

He might show how and how African he can be by sharing nyomachoma on Friday night, sipping warm Tusker beside the smoky barbecue with the village elders. He will chew miraa with the youngsters as he wanders with them in the bush wearing just a kanga around his waist...


But at some point during the game Africa will grab him by the throat and offer him a choice that will define him for the rest of his life. It will lay bare his posing and posturing and may point him out as a phony and make it all too clear that he’s just another mzungu passing through. A prince playing a pauper for kicks.

Perhaps something dramatic will happen or maybe he will simply wake up one day with a strange feeling and he will decide he’s had enough of the game and will make the call book the flight and use the return strip of this ticket and fly home at the shortest notice, leaving Africa to the Africans and to the next hopeful white man with fresh an innocent eyes, and not his now cynical ones.

And in his soul he will know that he’s let Africa down just as the west has been doing for decades.