November 11

Ok, so to elaborate on yesterday's post....

Last week was a pretty intense week for me culturally. On Tuesday I had a lecture in African Political Thought which I absolutely loved. Usually I have no idea where the professor is going in his lectures, but that day we had a guest lecturer who was really good. The topic was "Negritude" which is a concept I studied last year in Martinique, too. It was a result of colonialism, and is basically the idea that black people should be proud of their color, their origin, their culture, and just their very being. It says they should reject foreign values and ideals because they are repressing black people. He also mentioned "Modernity" and how "modern" really means "Western."

Our professor then opened for discussion with the question "Can Africans really go back to their own culture, the culture before colonialism?" The answers ranged from "Yes, no problem, we know what our culture used to be, we are fully capable of replicating it" to "No, culture is always evolving, so how do you know which point to go back to considering the nature of culture evolution is continuous?"

At one point, a guy giving his opinion mentioned "the global culture." When he finished, the professor corrected him saying "there is no global culture. When you talk about global culture, what you really mean is American culture."

It was by far the best lecture I've had here. As I was walking out of that class thinking about all of these issues, a guy calls "Eleeza!" (That's what Tanzanians call me... Liz is just not a real name here). I turn around, and it's a guy I randomly met one day while we waited under a building overhang for the rain to stop. He asked me how I liked the lecture, and I said I loved it. He was surprised, and asked if I had been offended by anything the lecturer had said. I said no, and that I agreed with basically everything he had said.

Then he asked "Why do I always see you by yourself?" I laughed and said I don't know. He said "All of the others are always together, but not you." I figured he meant the other international students, but I asked further. "The foreigners. Everywhere they go in groups. Even at lunch, and I can't talk to them for even five minutes because it doesn't seem like they want to talk to me." I say that maybe they're just shy, and they don't like to talk to people they don't know. I also said that if he studied in the U.S. and he found another Tanzanian, he would want to hang out with that person, too.

He said "Of course yes, I would hang out with the Tanzanian, but I would want to make American friends too. I would want to talk to them a lot to learn more about their culture." At this point I was at a loss, so I said "I don't know, that's what I want to do too!" He said that it was very nice, and that I was the only foreigner he'd been able to talk to. It was so depressing. We continued talking about other things until we reached the point in our walk where we had to split ways, and that was that.

THEN, I was waiting for my Kiswahili class to start, and another American girl who's not on my program asked me what I thought of the lecture earlier that day. I told her I loved it, and she was really surprised. She said that she thought the way the professor presented the material made it seem like there was a large gap between Africa and the West. I said "well... there is." Her response was "Well, but always talking about colonialism? Is that really progressive?"

I was so mad. I said most of the following to her. The point of the lecture was not to be progressive. The point was to teach the concept of Negritude. Thus, the professor wanted everyone to understand where these political thinkers were coming from when they formulated their ideas and published their writings. We need to understand the context of these concepts in order to truly understand their impact and importance. PLUS, the class is called African Political THOUGHT. We need to know what people THINK. Basically, she was uncomfortable because the impact of the West, specifically the US, has been less than positive in many ways here, so she wanted to blame it on the professor for making it sound worse than it is.

She is also one of the foreigners who will never be seen without another white person, so that comment compounded by my earlier conversation caused me to be really frustrated. I had started to do things more on my own before this, but after this experience I was determined.