Getting drunk in foreign countries always seems to put me in a contemplative mood. Last night I had the pleasure of sharing the 19th anniversary of Namibia’s independence with a group of jovial Namibians in Katutura, the poor township whose name, roughly translated, means “We Will Not Move Anymore.” Savoring glass after glass of Windhoek Lager (still the best beer I’ve ever had anywhere in the world), I found myself often staring up at the brilliantly clear night sky, trying to remember the names of constellations normally obscured back home in the United States.
For some reason, my thoughts drifted to a couple of old high school photos I had seen on Facebook earlier in the week. One of the delights of Facebook is that logging onto the site often brings the unexpected surprise of a classmate not seen in over a decade or some other piece of detritus that seemingly randomly washes up from the past. In this case, it was a pair of photos from my Prom Night, circa May 1995. What immediately struck me about the photo was how young I looked; indeed, how young everyone looked. In my memory I had placed myself and others as being on the verge of adulthood, but on seeing the photo I realized that we were just boys and girls.
More significantly, for myself, the photos brought back the social awkwardness I carried with me at the time. I remembered being something of an interloper that night, suspended in some liminal state between belonging and not-belonging. Most of the people in the photos were sort of, vaguely, kind of, my friends, but they had, in most cases, known each other for many years. The photo reminded me how out of place I was in high school, how the four years I spent there (as well as the eight elementary years before that) had produced in me an understanding of my own fundamental difference, which seemed to be almost a natural function of my own being. It was not a case of ostracization; if anything, I thought of most of my high school classmates as being generally friendly people. But I am certain that it was around my senior year in high school that I began to understand the meaning of this difference, and had started to cultivate a personality that sought to accentuate my separateness through a dry, sometimes biting, sense of humor. It was a trait that served me well through my college years, and which I still carry with me.
But last night, while drinking with my newfound friends in Katutura, I realized that the fourteen years since that photo was taken can, in many ways, be understood as a gradual coming to terms with the idea that I was an “outsider.” And it was this trip, surely, which led me to study Africa. Because make no mistake about it, every Westerner who studies Africa carries within him or herself some impulse towards separating from the crowd and making a break with expectations, and further, wants to broadcast their difference in particularly stark ways that are easy to discern.
All these swirling thoughts carried me right up to the present moment of last night, when I sat outside under a clear night sky making toasts to the independence of a country I did not know anything about a few years ago. In the shebeens of Katutura, I realized, I am the ultimate outsider. In our long night of drinking, I was the only Oshilumbu (the word for white person here) that I saw. Every place we went to in the township, people stopped and they stared at me. They joked about me, commented on my dancing, spoke in hushed tones about me, and sometimes followed me around. Several people commented that with my pale skin, long straight dark hair, and beard, I looked like Jesus. What struck me about all this was not the rather natural cultural and racial curiosity directed towards me, but rather my own comfort with it. Indeed, I found that I felt almost indescribably happy being seemingly the only Oshilumbu out in Katutura celebrating Namibia’s independence from colonial rule. Here my status as an outsider, which I think I have always carried with me throughout my life, seemed to be almost naturalized, transformed into something of an asset.
Last night I fell asleep in a large empty bed in Katutura. In the morning I was woken repeatedly by the sound of a rooster announcing the rising sun. As I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my thoughts drifted back to my wife, now four months pregnant with our second child. She will learn the gender of our baby next week, and I will not be there. I thought about my five-year-old daughter, entering the final months of her kindergarten year. On Monday she undergoes a very minor yet nonetheless frightening medical procedure, and once again, I will not be there. There is a toll we pay for cultivating lives as outsiders. It was not forced upon us; it was a choice that we made.
Dear Sir/Madame, my name is Archana in Year 10 from Tiffin Girls School, and I am writing for permission to use your image “namib-desert” as part of a project in ICT.
I will need your permission in order to use this photo “legally”, so could you please reply so I could show my teacher that I have permission?
Thankyou greatly for your time as it is much appreciated, Archana.