I’m nursing two stop sign sized blisters on my heels so we headed to town yesterday to buy a pair of flip-flops. We found a very eager salesman in the souk who quickly launched into a spiel, his extra-large silver crucifix prominently displayed on his chest. He cheerily quoted me 12,000 Tzs for a pair of red (probably Chinese made) flip-flops. 12,000 shillings is roughly $8, an amount not far from a local monthly earning. We saw these same slippers on plenty of feet around town, so 12,000 could hardly have been the price. Not even in the U.S. I should have worked harder but in the end I paid 6,500 Tzs, or $4. We left with the slippers but I knew we’d paid the “mzungu price.” Not far from the market we ran into Julius, the cook who took care of us while we were volunteering. He was chatting with an acqaintance and getting his shoe fixed by a sidewalk cobbler. Telling him about our morning, I pointed to the new purchase on my feet and asked, How much should these cost? He replied, Oh, 2000, maybe 1800. Doh! We told him how much we’d paid, at which point he turned to retell our market adventure to the other two. When all three burst into fits of laughter shaking their heads, I knew he’d reached the punchline. Glad to have provided the day’s entertainment. Ah, well. What’s done is done, but we did pass the sandal vendor today while shopping for fabric. He smiled broadly and inquired how we were doing. I responded by asking if he was Catholic. Puzzled by the unexpected question to his question, he said that in fact he was. I pointed to my red flip-flops and suggested he go to confession this weekend.

The mzungus head for Kilimanjaro tomorrow. Up, up and away!

Back at the kindergarten – All of us were sprawled about the floor for activity time. Some of us coloring, others writing letters and numbers. Hoards of four and five-year-olds thrust their notebooks under my nose shouting, “Mzungu! Mzungu! Me, me!”

Now what was the word for teacher? I couldn’t remember. M-something? Muhzilu, mwazimu? I couldn’t figure out what the children were saying. My Swahili vocabulary comprises maybe ten words.

And then I remembered. Mzungu. Of all the indignities. They were calling me “whitey.”

I suppose I’m not in bad company, though. We asked our two Meru guides and they assured us Oprah Winfrey is mzungu. So is Mike Tyson. There was some argument over Michael Jordan, one saying mzungu, the other saying black.

In Tanzania, Mzungu = not African, as in European, Asian, Indian or Arab. Mostly though, as our guides explained, mzungu is used for white folk, particularly Europeans and Americans. Even the black ones.

It’s all very complex. In South Africa, the Apartheid regime devised an extremely intricate system of racial categorization, which I won’t attempt here to unravel. However, in terms of mzungus and Africans, to qualify as Black in South Africa, one had to be purely indigenous African. And to count as White (mzungu), one had to be purely of European descent. None of this mixing and matching blood. There was also the category of Asian, but the largest category of all was Colored, an even more complicated section that had numerous subsets of categories. For Oprah, the Michaels and myself – we’d all have been classified as Colored, not Black and certainly never White.

Well. I suppose the simplicity of the American “one drop” rule had its advantages.

The word for teacher, by the way, is mwalimu.