Six days ago, I was in Kenya’s third largest city, Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria, bicycling home to my dearest cozy sleeping bag on a dark scary road, the main southward arterial to Uganda. It was about seven. It was quite dark, but close enough to dusk that there were regular clouds of gnats. It was not pleasant.

At once: I am blinded by an oncoming semi-truck. My night vision is shot; there are no street lights. Ahead I barely make the outline of bicycle loaded with raw sugar cane six feet wide. I veer right onto the road proper where a minibus is overtaking the semi-truck. Oh crap. It honks; I veer left, into a pot hole. This hurts. Back right. Through a cloud of gnats, close the eyes. Open eyes. Three shadowy slowly moving bicycles, two seconds to impact. Hmm. Left again. Big unseen bump. Ow.

Repeat times twenty minutes. People point at me, shout. Mzungu! Mzungu! White person! White person!  In the dark I really don’t welcome it. Why are you so interested in me? It’s intense but also banal. Being on the bicycle, as so, that is my day to day. Cycle, cycle, awkward encounter, cycle, eat, sleep, repeat.

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Most Africans have black skin. Mine is white. It’s a simple fact. I was taught that it was like how some have brown eyes and others blue or green, it doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t care. But here, they know better.

Muzungu! Muzungu! Bonjour Monsieur Munzungu! Kids run after us. They yell, they scream. White person! White person! Hello Mr. White Person! You hear it from cars, from passing trucks, young, old but especially the rural poor. Though they’re truly uneducated, maybe an eighth grade education, they know that the average white person has more money than the average black person. It’s a simple fact. You want to believe it doesn’t matter, but it does.

This once, I got a flat tire right outside a roadside village and everyone came out to watch, from little kids to the village drunks. These two, maybe 13 and 14, they wanted to help. And no doubt, they were better at patching inner tubes than me. Cool. He asked me where I was from. America. Ah! America, where everything is good. I didn’t know how to respond. We started inflating the patched tube but the valve blew out and the tire shriveled. Their faces dropped. They couldn’t help me and I wasn’t going to help them. One of the kids asked, in America, there are jobs? In America, you just go to school? And that, that just breaks your heart.
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Bicycling through Africa, excluding the big cities, I can easily imagine myself in a classic Western film. The land is dusty, sun omnipresent, buildings stout, industry absent, law more a suggestion and at every turn there’s the palpable sense of both opportunity and danger. The highway is littered with the hulking remains of automobiles stripped to the frame. Subsistence farmers with goat powered carts trot along as a 2011 BMW whizzes by. The highway is sparse, uninterrupted but for potholes and the few occasional cows.
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