Prudence.

Is it prudent to blog pre-coffee ruminations? You know, the slow-motion thoughts you have before your brain kicks in the morning? Well, here’s risking it:

Because the obvious irony of an issue I mentioned in the previous post – of giving in to the inhibiting ‘you shouldn’t walk here’ mantra – just dawned on me. That this is actually pretty much connected with the stuff I’m researching.

Not being able to walk that stretch is annoying: it inhibits my freedom of movement . Although I’m a woman of extraordinary economic means and can therefore call a taxi, having to organise transport or walking company every single %&dy time I need to leave my home is not as simple as just picking up the phone. Sometimes the network is down, sometimes my battery is out and there’s no power, sometimes I’ve run out of phone credit and no way to top up unless I get to a shop, which means calling a taxi, which I can’t because – you guessed it! – I have no credit. Not to mention when the taxi guy doesn’t answer because his battery is flat, or his network is down. So when any of the above happens, I feel like this ‘you’ll get mugged’ advice has me tied within a certain radius to the kitchen sink. How the heck is a single woman ever supposed to get out and DO things?!

So I’m reminded of the discussion the focus groups have had on rape. Rape is caused by women who go to places where they shouldn’t, according to all the focus groups. Not that the stretch I walk is a designated raping area (it’s more mugging) – but the effect is the same - restricted mobility. To tell the truth I’m not even that bothered about having my old freebie Allergan bag with a $3-5, a pen and a notebook stolen. It’s not the thought of that that’s scared me into taking taxis. Rather, what’s bullied me into this infuriating restriction of movement is the prospect of all these arrogant ‘I told you so’s if something should happen. There’s even a specific phrase for it in Kiswahili – ‘amekoma’ – ‘she’s learned her lesson’. A phrase I first heard on a friend’s great Bongo Flava CD; a discourse linguistics professor at UDSM told me it’s said by the more powerful to the less powerful, or as a means of asserting power.

So there it is. What fieldwork does to you. Even trivial daily life frustrations like calling a taxi, you start fitting into big academic constructs like the patriarchal dividend. And I haven’t even gone into how the idea of these roads being dangerous, of people being potential muggers, threatens the way I’ve liked to see the country, the Tanzania of childhood photos where my sisters and I stand as tanned kids with impossibly windblown hair in cotton dresses in front of acacia trees and other wilderness, drinking warm sodas (because that was the time before duka fridges and bottled water….), and how I can sort of understand now why in academic contexts, anthropologists and other whiteys who’ve done their stints in Africa, can pounce on me tooth & claw, when I say I’m studying attitudes to gender-based violence, and tie themselves into illogical knots defending ‘their tribe’: the idea of violence sort of tarnishes those rosy pictures. Yup, I won’t even go into that – clearly blogging pre-coffee can get a bit serious!