Most of the people we met on the first half of our trip around the world. Since we have been travelling more in the Global South, we have found it noticeably more difficult to have sincere conversations with strangers. Here and there, an extremely open-minded and interested taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur surprised us with critical questions about National Socialism or Mohammed, the selfless Egyptian who found us via couchsurfing and showed us around his Cairo for 10 hours the whole day until he actually got us so tired of walking that we had to wave goodbye - he, on the other hand, seemed to have had the night ahead of him.
Instead, our dialogue partners can easily be divided into three groups: the service providers are the ones we have paid for something: Safari guides, restaurant staff, hotel people, girlfriend (kidding, Leah). They are mostly friendly, after all they are paid for it, speak good English and always say what you want to hear. Conversations are always super authentic, especially when you hear the most special German vocabulary (‘This is a Eisvogel, very farbenprächtig right?“). The indifferent are those who have to talk to us for some reason but don't care about us: Ticket inspectors, border officials, pre-paid taxi drivers (outside Egypt) e.g. via UBER. The conversation is limited to ‘Ticket!’, ‘Wrong seat’, ‘How pronounce your name? Schenke?“ and „very heavy bag!“.
And then there are the withdrawers. They see us as walking ATMs and try to withdraw one or two small or large amounts of cash. Every country has its own phrases. Here in Egypt it's a more classic one: ‘How are you? Which country? Ahhh sehrrrr gut!! Do you want this Kette/hand soap/taxi to [place minimum 4h away]? Very cheap“. In Kenia it was not quite more subtle: "Welcome to Kenya! Do you like it? Yeees, many animals. Can you give me money?“
Of course these types of people exist everywhere, even in Germany. But it was different in Kenya. Hundreds of children ran up to us, waving and stretching out their arms in a begging gesture.Once we were sitting in a rusty bus, which we preferred over a Matatu that day. I leant over to two ladies in front of us and asked where the bus was going and where they were getting off. They laughed and answered, but not to me but to other people in Swahili. Maybe they didn't know English. I asked the next one and he confirmed the location. A little later he ticked me off and told me he was hungry and asked for money. After he got off the bus an hour later, another youth sat down in his seat. He started a short conversation straight away, saying he was a comedian and would like to perform internationally, whether I had any contacts in Germany, what he could do for me and whether I could give him some money because he was hungry. When we repeatedly said no, he soon went away. These were not isolated cases. In Kenya and Tanzania in particular, you could see the dollar signs in people's eyes.
This bus journey was a low point of our segment across Africa for me. We wanted to travel like the locals, get in touch with the people, get to know what we have in common, but every conversation had the same result - we were walking cash machines.
Why? We were the poorest backpackers in the country, what did we have? Firstly, we had white skin, symbolising a life in the land of milk and honey (which is probably true compared to their lives) and secondly, we poor backpackers probably still had more cash on us than most people had in their bank accounts. That's the reality.
But if it were just the difference in account balances, there is also the little technical term ‘post-colonialism’. Although there are no more colonies today (cough, Puerto Rico, French overseas territories, Greenland), the independence movement in Africa in the 1960s was so disorganised that most countries ended up in autocratic or military dictatorships, which to this day only allow the powerful to profit from corruptive practices and keep the poor artificially poor. What also remains from the colonial era are the prejudices, racism and bitterness in both directions. The term post-colonialism examines the extent to which population groups and cultures today are still affected by the colonial times.
My God, Sönke, express yourself in a less development-studentish way! Seriously, when you grow up as a child in rural Kenya and the only white people are some Western altruistic ladies who have donated a few thousand dollars to build a school and then want to take a few photos with themselves in the middle of the many children who they have made happy. Or the countless safari cars filled with white photo tourists who occasionally hand a few dollar bills out of the window. Or the stories you've heard from the mayor's third wife's swishy brother-in-law, who now lives in a Parisian suburb and raves about how great everything is in Europe. Honestly, how can you expect this child to later, as a young adult, chat about the local history without any preconceptions or draw comparisons between rural Europe and Kenya with a vagrant and slightly smelly white backpacker? Instead I would have opened my hand too.
I do not blame anyone for my displeasure in this situation. It's the system in which Western nations demonstrate their white supremacy with development projects, know better how and who to help or just travel to their adopted baby elephants to take instagrammable snaps. Sounds too far-fetched? But surely African people don't have the education and level of development to bring their country to a similar state as us Germans, right? We just gotta come and help them out! Well, that's definitely not true, although this racist perception is often still widespread in some form. It's complex, but you can generalise and say that it's often more a lack of opportunities than a lack of education. And the opportunities are not there, partly because the country's own raw materials prefer to be mined by foreign companies at ridiculously low prices (hello, neo-colonialism, actually the same exploitation as during colonialism, just without calling it so) and development projects are often aimed at partial problems with a limited duration, without the possibility of participation and ownership by the locals. The comedian's amusingly written autobiography ‘Born a Crime’ offers a great insight and is highly recommended in this regard.
Why didn't we donate money? Wouldn't it have helped the individual? Money is certainly never a bad thing. But by donating, we would only be confirming that white tourists are easy to withdraw cash from, thereby creating dependencies and never being able to talk to anyone on an equal footing.
It's not easy to travel in Africa without thinking about the inequality between the different skin colours you encounter on every corner. Whilst the wildlife is incredible, I can't say I've experienced a culture like Kenya's enough to have formed an opinion, the distance was too great for that.
So we continue to travel between all the service providers, indifferent people and withdrawers and try to negotiate down to the local price at least occasionally. There are always a few honest people who accept the correct amount but also a sincere and receive honest thank you from us, thank you for the sign that we are all human treated equally. Because even if, as German citizens, we are blessed to be among the wealthiest five per cent of the world's population, there is no right for us to pay five times the price for the same tahini or bottle of water. Our responsibility is rather to be aware of our good situation and to be grateful for it, but also to be aware of the consequences of our own actions. Difficult enough.
