It's not as Black and White as that

For those of you reading from the UK – or, I imagine, most of the white Western World – I’d like you to imagine that you are white and, walking down the street, you see a black person. Or perhaps a black person works for your organisation (not much of a stretch of the imagination for most of you, I wouldn’t have thought). Now imagine, walking up to that person in the street or at your workplace and saying ‘black man’ at him, or waving and shouting ‘blacky!’.

Exactly. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And, in most workplaces, it may well be a sackable offence.

So imagine my discomfort, surprise, perplexity when, on a more than daily basis, Nigerians shout ‘Baturia!’ or 'Oyibo!’ (respectively, Hausa and Igbo for ‘white person’) at me as I walk down the road. Or when people call ‘Whitey!’ or, on one occasion ‘Yellow!’ (?!) after me as they pass in their cars.

My first instinct, as my brain rapidly translates what’s going on, is an instinctive outrage. If anyone at home mentioned the colour of someone’s skin, unless it was absolutely relevant, I’d call them on it. I would expect a black person in the UK to be utterly offended if someone drove past them and shouted ‘Blacky’!

But out here, it is not an insult at all. Firstly, the fact is, that people have seen so few white people that sometimes they are genuinely shocked and a revelling in the rarity. Secondly, it’s actually – somewhat disgustingly – a mark of respect: maybe as a legacy of colonization, maybe as a result of how the developed-developing split in the world works, people here really look up to white people. And actually, when you translate ‘Baturia’, it actually means European, or something similar – it’s not a direct reference to the colour of my skin. It does make me wonder, though, how a black volunteer from the UK would be treated here; and how the VSO volunteers from Kenya or Uganda are treated by their Nigerian partner organisations.

The other day, as I was sitting in my boss’s office, one of my colleagues was explaining what another colleague of ours was doing. “She’s going to be coming in later.” Pause for effect. “With some White People.” Try as I might, I couldn’t hide the smile on my face, but I realised that what he was actually saying was that she was coming with some people who deserved our respect – they were foreign consultants and, he was assuming, more knowledgeable in their field than any of us.

Disgusting as it is to me, being called ‘white’ is a compliment here.