Race, Power, and Polemic: Regardless of her respectful demeanor, Whiteness in the Anthropology of Cheney professes that her presence Africa “disrupted the regular flow of daily household life,” altering “the social dynamics” of houses and schools she visited Graham R Fox (Cheney 2007:33). Cheney’s experiences in Uganda are likely relatable for many white Introduction anthropologists in Africa and elsewhere. In In her 2007 ethnography Pillars of innumerable communities throughout the the Nation, American anthropologist Kristen Sub-Saharan Africa, the presence of a white Cheney recounts the first-hand experience of Westerner can conjure both positive and living and working in an urban housing negative sentiments. In some regions, the development in Kampala, Uganda. Con- interaction between Africans and non- spicuous amongst her black neighbors, she Africans is complicated by over a hundred describes the attention she received, years of tumultuous history. In Southern, especially in the early days of her research. Eastern and other pockets of Africa, white- skinned Europeans have not only dominated My presence in the barracks always and uprooted Africans, but exploited, elicited excited cries of “Mzungu” marginalized and in some cases, killed. (white person) from the children, most Different historical waves have sought to of whom were not yet old enough for reposition non-white Africans in positions of school. They rarely left the barracks self-determination, begin-ning in the 1960s and so rarely saw white people. Their through to the end of apartheid in South mothers would often point me out to Africa in the early 1990s. Despite these them when they saw me coming, so reconfigurations, Sub-Saharan Africa that by the time I reached them, the remains home to many whites, many of children were lined up along the rutted whom struggle to belong in places where dirt road as if for a parade (2007:26). their skin color carries significant symbolism and connotation. As Cheney’s In the course of her fieldwork in experiences in Uganda demonstrate, being Uganda, Cheney found herself in many white in Africa involves an on-going situations in which her status as Mzungu challenge of negotiating one’s identity was challenging and disruptive. Children against a complex landscape of race and gawked at the novelty of a white woman power. The purpose of this essay is to playing baseball. Classrooms were examine representations of whiteness captivated as she sat in quietly on lessons. against that landscape. With the limited exposure the local children In the first section, I will establish a had to the world outside the barracks, it is historical background in how basic conceivable that Cheney was the first white understandings of whiteness have been person they’d ever interacted with. With the forged in Africa and elsewhere in the children’s parents however, the significance colonial world. By presenting the of Cheney’s whiteness is more subtle and experiences of early European mission-aries, complex. Though “gracious and welcoming” I will discuss factors that established white (Cheney 2007:33), Ugandans altered their identity as both powerful and domineering. behavior when Cheney was present - In the second section, I will focus discussion cooperative and friendly, though with on South Africa, where the question of white evident suspicion (“stranger danger”). status in Africa has been most aggressively unequivocal center of global commerce and debated. Beginning with perspectives from Christian morality. With that history in the later years of apartheid, I will discuss mind, I aim to understand how whites and how conceptions of whiteness (by both their whiteness have come to be represented whites and non-whites) have been rigorously in the African imagination. According to challenged while simultaneously being Magubane (2004:130), early European reified. In a subsequent section on scholarship of Africa explored white Zimbabwe, I will discuss the problem of conceptions of blacks while neglecting the belonging whites now face, stemming from importance of how blacks under-stood the political power their whiteness whites. In spite of the one-sidedness of represents. The last section will focus on colonial scholarship, the lived experiences Kenya, where the topic of whiteness has yet of colonized Africans led many to develop a to receive significant ethnographic attention. keen intellectual critique. “Africans had to at In examining a 1999 article by Kajta least try to penetrate the psychology of their Uusihakala, I will demonstrate how ideas oppressors,” says Magubane (2004), part of from other ethnographies can be justly a long-standing anti-colonial ambition to applied to her perspective on white “unmask, unveil, and expose its Kenyans. My closing section will discuss pretensions… its hypocrisies” (130). As the implications of current understandings of many scholars know, the absence of written whiteness in Africa, specifically its histories in Africa prevented many of these usefulness in under-standing Africa’s place perspectives from being shared, in the world and how best to engage a topic disseminated or preserved. Recognizing of such importance and controversy. I these critical perspectives, I argue, is a acknowledge that addressing whiteness in recognition of the agency colonized the anthropology of Africa reifies ideas of Africans possessed. Africa as the other. Studying whites, many Aside from earlier waves of would argue, is not a study of Africa as it Portuguese slave traders, the first whites to examines Africans only in relation to make a significant appearance in Africa whites. Regardless, anthropological writing were missionaries. In keeping with both by whites on Africa and on whites in aforementioned ideas of European economic Africa demonstrates an ongoing regener- and religious superiority, missionaries ation of the other, not only through political preached the value of commerce and or historical discourse but also through face- Christianity, receptive-ness to which was not to-face encounters on Africa’s streets, in its universally positive. British missionary workplaces, and elsewhere. Thinking about David Livingstone, as a prime example, was Africa (or thinking about the West) is greeted with extreme skepticism by would- marginal to the act of seeing it and be converts and is thought to have experiencing it. The visceral nature of these successfully converted only two or three experiences is in question. Africans by the time of his death in 1873 (Pettitt 2007:124). Examining the earliest Origins of Whiteness wave of missionary activities in Southern The orientalist mentality that shaped Africa, Magubane (2004:132) argues “it was colonial European thinking was in place precisely because of the English long before whites arrived in Africa. The Missionaries willingness to dispense the image of Europe as the center of world, says gospel so freely that many Africans Steyn (2001:3), celebrated Europe as the surmised that evangelism was a cover for more crass material motives”. The melding and theologies anthropomorphizing the of commerce and Christ-ianity was also “seeing” of another’s inside, Magubane obstructive in presenting Africans with an (2004:132) says “it was not uncommon for objective image of white Europeans. The settlers, especially if they were English, to notion of faith and commerce as two declare themselves as having superior different but com-plementary enterprises, abilities to see through the innocuous she claims, served to conflate the identity of performances of Africans to the depraved whites with hypocrisy, mystery and cores lurking inside”. The consequence of skepticism (Magubane 2004:131). these claims was the development of beliefs Comparing these experiences with about the penetrability and impenetrability elsewhere in the colonial world, Bashkow’s of black and white skin, respectively, 2006 ethnography from Papua New Guinea serving the rhetoric that whites were illustrates how perceived hypocrisies in physically/biologically superior (Magubane white wealth accumulation caused 2004:132). This can be considered an early widespread bemusement among the incarnation of colonial bio-power, initiatives Orokaiva people. He claims that the physical enforcing the supremacy of whites through characteristics of whites gave the Orokaiva physiological contrast. From a functional the impression that whites were “soft”, standpoint, the idea of power in visual unblemished by the hardship of working in representation enabled whites to conceive the fields - the only form of wealth themselves as representing mystery in eyes accumulation the Orokaiva knew of. of blacks. According to Afro-American Presuming that a soft person could not feminist Bell Hooks (1992:168), white accumulate wealth, the Orokaiva were superiority is pre-dicated on the philosophy mystified by the material objects white that non-whites are unable to comprehend or visitors possessed. The ambiguous nature of outwit the mastery of the colonizer. “In white wealth accumulation, says Bashkow white supremacist society,” she says, “white (2006:21), made whites inextricably people can safely imagine that they are associated with hypocrisy and/or deviant invisible to black people since the power accumulations of wealth. These ideas also they have historically asserted accorded corroborated Orokaiva beliefs in a “white them the right to control the black gaze” world”, a far-off location operating on (Hooks 1992:168). foreign conventions of morality and political As a pillar of the white superiority economy. Similar understandings are complex, ideas of visual impenetrability illustrated in Brad Weiss’s (1996) Making eventually became tools of resistance for and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World (in colonized populations. Pan-Africanist Franz the political economy of blood-stealing) and Fanon (1967:212) addressed understandings in Rosalind Shaw’s (1997) ethnography of of white representation by emphasizing the witchcraft in Sierra Leone (pseudo-modern resistive power in how black people looked witch-cities), both demonstrating percep- upon whites. As the maintenance of the tions of Western worlds as places where colonial project required Africans to deviance, immorality and material wealth “corroborate” or “validate” their reverence intermix. with restrained and respectful eyes, gazing These early instances of interaction upon whites “became oppositional, a means give other hints as to how whiteness became of contestation and confrontation, and a represented in colonial Africa. As mission- critical part of the politics of refusal” aries preached ideas about soul, possession (Magubane 2004:113). Ideas of black/white visibility are recurrent in many ethno- therefore deserves continued ethno-graphic graphies of whiteness in Africa, as attention, especially in a context where excluding and/or controlling blacks in the physical appearances are so powerfully purview of whites remains a significant juxtaposed. practice in neo-colonial projects of Moreover, ignoring the topic of belonging. How these politics of refusal are whiteness in the anthropology of Africa practiced in contemporary Africa is one of would compromise our appreciation of the many fascinating practices of post-colonial social memory, hidden histories, and life and will be explained further in hybridized cultural practices through which subsequent sections. power relations are regenerated, what Once experienced by Westerners Andrew Apter (2007:22) describes as through the writings of Conrad or “African gnosis.” Much how Africa, in the Hemingway, Africa now has the freedom to purview of the Western world, has served as represent itself. Despite the rise of Africa’s a “polemical argument” for the West’s own league of thinkers, colonial ideas about superior global position (Ferguson 2006:2), whiteness are not entirely displaced, as whiteness, I argue, is a polemical discourse demonstrated in discussions of the in which Africans may pro-actively confront “shadows” the neoliberal world continues to their historically marginal position. As cast over the dark continent (Ferguson Mbembe (2001:241) reminds us, “the 2006). Understanding Africa in its most oscillation between the real and the contemporary reality involves examining the imaginary does not take place solely in power relations that continue to situate it in writing. This interweaving also takes place the darkest corner of our imaginations. The in life.” idea of the global, says Ferguson (2006), “often evokes an image of a planetary Whiteness and Change in South Africa network of connected points, and that Nowhere in Africa has whiteness [Africa] is marginal to, and often completely been examined so critically as in South absent from, such dominant imagin- Africa. Between 1948, when the Nationalist ations”(6). Understanding whiteness is Party came to power, and the end of therefore critical in understanding local and apartheid in 1993, South Africa was the global configurations of power in post- most overtly racial society anywhere in the colonial Africa. Though a focus on world (Steyn 2001:23). The making of whiteness reifies its hegemonic symbolism, South African whiteness, says Steyn (2001), everyday experiences of race are a major has been both an “ugly and fascinating” arena in which global power relations play process (43). In this section, I demonstrate out. how conflicts between white South-Africans In his seminal work The Social Skin, served to complicate the already vast South Terrence Turner (1980:112) argues, “the African racial landscape. As the later years surface of the body seems everywhere to be of apartheid placed whites in an anxious treated, not only as the boundary of the position of uncertainty, the struggle to individual as a biological and psychological belong fed problematic discourses in which entity but as the frontier of the social self as negative represent-ations of all racial groups well.” As a primary interface of the human were reified. The product of these struggles social experience, skin and skin color are was a fragmented understanding of what significant factors in all social life. The whiteness should represent. As the post- significance of the racial experience apartheid era finds white South Africans struggling to reconstitute their identities, amongst Afrikaners to perceive their status incongruity of experience (of both whites as a marginal group as qualifying them to and non-whites) makes understanding protect the interests of other non-English whiteness a daunting and complicated South Africans. Crapanzano (1985:245) project. If the meaning of whiteness has describes some Afrikaners as allowing non- distinct, incongruous forms, how are non- whites into their churches, while describing white South Africans to differentiate bet- others as exhibiting intensely racist attitudes, ween positive and negative representations? especially towards black or Bantu South The problem with whiteness in post Africans to whom Afrikaners had less apartheid South Africa, I argue, is a lack of exposure. coherence or unity in what exactly it should In the climate of political uncertainty signify. that climaxed in the 1980s, authors describe Though mainly of Dutch origin, the intense feelings of anxiety that early generations of Afrikaans-speaking consumed white South Africans. Compared South Africans sought to reconstitute to other settler colonies like Canada or themselves as a sovereign group without Australia, the ability of Africans to maintain meaningful heritage in any European nation. cultural and linguistic tradition was a As Afrikaans-speaking South Africans were threatening expression of resistance against themselves marginalized by the English in whites. Though non-white South Africans the earlier years of colonialism, alienation were marginalized through a multitude of pressed them to differentiate from English- means, Steyn (2001:25) says “white people speaking whites while also segregating in South Africa never achieved the themselves from non-whites (Steyn 2001: comfortable assurance of their political, 24). In rural farming areas, these struggles cultural and even physical survival in the and segregations often took shape around land they colonized”. In an earlier discourses of which whites were the more ethnography of white South Africans in the desirable employers for the non-white final years of apartheid, Thornton (1990:57) workers. Vincent Crapanzano’s ethnography remarks that the result of these anxieties, (1985:245) depicts Afrikaners speaking was “the sense of the end of history, the negatively of English South Africans in the coming of bloody and final conflict.” As presence of colored workers in order to cast these anxieties grew central in the everyday them as hypocritical or immoral. Though white experience, Steyn (2001) claims that English South Africans offered workers white South African life became better wage compensation, Crapanzano “constellated around discourses of resistance claims they treated workers less humanely. against a constant threat” (25). This idea of “The English are particularly prone to treat threat or uncertainty is recurrent in most [non-whites] paternalistically,” he said. “The ethnographies of whiteness in Africa, Afrikaners are harder on them but more especially in instances where physical respectful of them as men and women” survival is at stake (Hughes 2010; Kalaora (Crapanzano 1985:245). Afrikaners encour- 2011). aged colored workers to view these different Though a peaceful political transition management styles as expressions of the was favorable for all South Africans, the English superiority complex, reifying pervasive connotation of race in South negative attributes of English South African social life led many to fear that Africans that may not have been uniformly violence was imminent. In his depiction of accurate. There is an also evident inclination urban South Africa in the 1980s, Crapanzano (1985:275) demonstrates Steyn surveys a range of life histories in concern with the “schizophrenic” discursion which white South Africans of different in how whites and non-whites interacted. In class and origin seek to reconstitute their one conversation with a colored South identities in the post-apartheid era. Similar African in Cape Town, Crapanzano is taken to Crapanzano, Steyn illustrates the most aback by the informant’s “verbal raping” of important sites of racial (de)construction as an accompanying white women, aimed at the workplaces and urban centers in which symbolically destroying the anthropologist’s whites and non-whites live and interact face- sexual privilege (Crapanzano 1985:275). to-face. In contrast to the language of sexual Meanwhile in South Africa, government- resistance exhibited by Crapanzano’s backed newspapers published frequent informant in the 1980s, Steyn’s descriptions stories about scientific findings on the are more neutral and de-racialized, imperfect biological superiority of whites. “By indications of co-existence and nation accounting for the differences in terms of building in everyday South African life. race and genetics,” says Steyn (2001:35), In spite of white and non-white “[whites] freed themselves of any citizens coming together in South Africa’s responsibility for the differences”. White workplaces, Steyn (2001:109) also superiority was to be seen as something demonstrates how whiteness remains natural and futile in confronting. Though complicated by how individual whites wish Crapanzano’s Cape Town vignette is only to be represented. Whereas whiteness in one in a massive range of everyday South Africa was once a marker of both experiences, the way in which resentment of inter and intra-racial identity, many whites whites was enacted had dangerously racial now seek to belittle whiteness as and violent connotations. As these racial insignificant in public life. This strategy, connotations reified negative representations says Steyn, is an attempt by whites to of both whites and non-whites (whites as “establish innocence” (109). Ignoring the privileged and black as sexually aggressive) realities of South Africa’s racialized history, the prospects of a peaceful transition out of she says, “scores out the effects of systemic apartheid seemed less likely. According to advantage and disadvantage” (109). Further- Steyn (2001:109), anxiety amongst white more, she argues that a discourse of white South Africans led many to demonize each insignificance invokes the same ideas of other on the grounds of racial betrayal - non-responsibility that many non-whites assisting and abiding non-whites at the peril found offensive in the Truth and of the white community. We can retrospect- Reconciliation process. Anthropologists ively say that power struggles between have criticized the “repressive tolerance” of competing white groups placed non-white the Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africans in the crossfire, forcing (TRC), creating an atmosphere that many to make difficult decisions about who “recognizes cultural difference only insofar could be trusted and who was most as the cultural difference proves profitable threatening to the prospect of a democratic and, hence, amenable to popular South Africa. stereotypes” (Meskell and Weiss 2006:94). When the apartheid regime finally Amidst an ongoing struggle to define and dissolved, all South Africans faced an uphill understand post-apartheid whiteness, these battle in re-imagining ideas of race and comments suggests that non-white South representation. In her 2001 ethnography Africans are being subject to neutral Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be, representations of whiteness they aren’t eager to accept. Like in many instances of were in tremendous positions of privilege racism, Steyn (2001) demonstrates the over many black Zimbabweans staffing difference in attitudes between public and them. The structure of life on the white- private spheres. While employment or civic owned farms was characterized by highly respons-ibility may thrust whites and non- paternalistic relationships (Rutherford 2001) whites into mutual obligation, personal that, despite the marginality of whites in resent-ments make reconstituting the values politics, effectively made them a powerful of one’s racial identity more challenging. and self-determining force (Hughes 2010: The depth and scale of the TRC demon- 107). In spite of the structural racism of strated that the experience of apartheid Zimbabwe’s farming economy, white oppression differed across regions, peoples, farmers had supported the fundamental well- and periods in time. In a context where being of black workers. Hughes claims that, whiteness has different and ephemeral as the Zimbabwe African National Union- meanings, the measures through which non- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) sought to white South Africans understand whiteness humiliate and intimidate white farm owners, remain complex and elusive. some workers came to sympathize with their beleaguered bosses and accepted their Political Whiteness in Zimbabwe initiative to support the Movement for The country to experience the most Democratic Change (MDC) (Hughes 2010: recent crisis of white representation is 107). As the political climate intensified, Zimbabwe. With its own unique history of this provided deadly ammunition for colonial rule and liberation, whiteness has ZANU-PF. Seen as utilizing the structures emerged as a particularly challenging and of the commercial farming economy to ferocious issue. Though violence depicted in solidify support for the MDC, ZANU-PF Western media has slanted international argued whites were “exploiting unfair, un- favor against Robert Mugabe’s regime, deserved opportunities” (Hughes 2010:107) scholars recognize these events as products derived from years of economic gain in of a long history of power and patrimony. white-ruled Rhodesia. The economic power As David Hughes’s 2010 ethnography of white farmers and the political capacities demonstrates, problems arose when white stemming from that power effectively cast Zimbabweans attempted to re-enter politics whites as an “exclusive ethnic elite” following large-scale losses of land in the (Hughes 2010:109), the result of which, 1990s. Hughes argues that, even with the Hughes describes, was the politicization of utmost caution, whites were incapable of whiteness. In the subsequent surge of being welcomed into politics as legitimate occupations that flooded white-owned actors. Why, many ask, did white commercial farms, actions otherwise Zimbabweans pose such a tremendous threat deemed criminal became simple political to Zimbabwe’s government at a time when matters (Hughes 2010:108). Whiteness in whites were otherwise economically and Zimbabwe grew to become more than a socially disenfranchised? The problem, symbol of privilege, it grew into a symbol of according to Hughes (2010:107), lay within patrimony and inequitable political power. the nature of simply being white. Understanding the politicization of As a nation heavily dependent whiteness in Zimbabwe requires a more economically on domestic commercial detailed understanding of how the white- agriculture, white Zimbabweans owning and dominated farming economy constituted operating the country’s commercial farms power and privilege. In many studies of (neo)colonial administration, anthrop- system and consequently subject to reprisal ologists implement the Foucauldian theory and/or expulsion. that space is fundamental in exercising power. In his description of the European Kenya liberal state, Foucault (1977, in Razack The white community in Kenya, 2002:11) says that “the bourgeois citizen of though in numbers now exceeding the the state, the figure who replaced earlier domestic white population of Zimbabwe, [pre-colonial] orders, distanced himself from has yet to receive significant ethnographic the aristocracy and the lower orders of this attention. The exception is a brief earlier hierarchy by developing an identity ethnography by Katja Uusihakala (1999), premised on close control over the manner the product of fieldwork in 1992-93. The of living.” Realizing this effort, explains white Kenyan experience, she says, is Razack (2002:11) involves spatial “about a constant negotiation and struggle separation. Individuals beyond “the frontier for the making of identity and making of of Bourgeois order” (Razack 2002:11) had difference, about an everyday construction to be morally regulated. Several anthrop- of boundaries on different levels and ologists of Africa elaborate on these scopes” (30). She observed that membership theories: Nguyen (2010) on practices of in the white Kenyan community was triage and racial sorting in Cote D’Ivoire; predicated foremost on one’s “Colonial Rutherford (2001) on domestic government Britishness” (29) - the maintenance of structures on Zimbabwe’s commercial aristocratic lifestyles and homesteads similar farms; and Hughes (2010) on white to those described by Hughes (2010). The Zimbabwean hydrological projects. case of Kenya’s whites, however, involves According to Schick (2002:117), the its own dynamics of power and privilege. In spatialization of power through the trans- a nation where political and economic formation and stewardship of landscapes are turmoil also challenge the belonging of fundamental to the European bourgeois whites, the flexible status of the community identity. During the period when white calls their commit-ment to Kenya into Zimbabwean farm owners suffered intense question. violence and aggression, whiteness was Uusihakala’s ethnography is threatening to ZANU-PF in that “whites centered on the white Kenyan project of represented power in everything they did” commitment, expressed through several (Hughes 2010:107). Their land, paternal measures, mainly historical narrative and pract-ices, and historical discourse personal remembering. The former is a amounted to a form of white-Zimbabwean connaissance of one’s family history, the sovereignty that could not co-exist with the ability to identify with figures or families sovereignty of a nationalist government. So considered to have pioneered the country in long as whites participated in politics, the the formative years of colonialism. The playing field of Zimbabwe’s future would be latter measure is a practice of “selecting uneven. Despite the corruption and memories and silencing others”(Uusihakala radicalism of ZANU-PF, their responsibility 1999:31), choosing to invoke or celebrate as guardians of Zimbabwean sovereignty mem-ories that give whites an unperturbed allowed them to cast whites as an “enemy of sense of belonging (in many cases, Zimbabwe” (Hughes 2010:109), incap-able memories of one’s childhood in Kenya). of participating in a free and fair political Though a key expression of one’s commitment to the country, Uusihakala describes both these measures as fraught Kenyan cowboys, identified by their with difficulty. By rationalizing one’s working class lifestyles, maintained belonging around ideas and experiences that relationships with blacks more characteristic have explicitly passed, white Kenyans are of Afrikaners in Crapanzano’s ethnography constantly reminded that their belonging (Kennedy 1987:189-190). An ethno-graphic was forged in dominance and privilege (35). examination of contemporary colonial/ Uusihakala’s fieldwork renders images of cowboy distinction has un-fortunately not white Kenyans re-enacting the experiences been produced, but could yield significant of colonial-ism in their everyday life, in insight into this longstanding distinction family get-togethers - celebrations of within the white Kenyan community. kinship roots dispersed and entrenched Incoherence in the understanding of throughout the Kenyan nation. These images whiteness is clearly problematic in the are fractured however, when black Africans everyday experiences of both white and non- walk through the scene. Like Crapanzano white Kenyans. As Uusihakala’s (1999) and Hughes, Uusihakala emphasizes the research demonstrates, extreme variance in effort of whites to erase blacks from their attitudes occurs even between members of picturesque colonial lifestyles. She describes the same nuclear family. While some whites the difficulty experienced by a white choose to include blacks in their narratives informant when he attempts to invite a black and rememberings, others choose to select- friend to tea at his brother’s house. The ively erase them. Though being white in brother concedes to allowing the black man Kenya is not definitively negative, whiteness to be hosted on the verandah, but refuses to presents an image that is complicated and allow him indoors. Maintaining the home as incongruous, making differentiating positive an area exclusive to whites remains a from negative representations of whites, like symbolic gesture of “Colonial Britishness” in South Africa, conflicting for Kenyans (Uusihakala 1999:29). caught up in these politics of identity. The Like the conflict between English product of these cleavages is a whiteness and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, that is fundamentally untrustworthy – cleavages also persist in Kenya over how unwilling to define itself by any concrete set whites sought to be represented. Kennedy of values. As the incoherence of whiteness is (1987:188) claims that, During British rule, re-constituted in everyday life, the ability of presenting a front of white ethnic unity was whiteness to improve itself is diminished. critical to the project of European It is also informative that dominance in East Africa. Many lower Uusihakala’s (1999) ethnography of whites income settlers were pressured to conform to is centered on commitment, as an explicitly the “collective norms” of colonial contentious issue. In Zimbabwe, the whites’ aristocracy – to adopt the character of project of belonging was undertaken through Colonial Britishness illustrated in an engineering of the landscape and the Uusihakala’s vignette. The notion of a argument that whites improved the land for classless white society however, simply the economic betterment of the nation. expressed “the white community’s tenuously Commitment, in this case, was demonstrated held position of predominance in the in their investment to the land, and later, in colonial order” (Kennedy 1987:189). Self- the efforts of whites to remain and “belong identifying colonials preferred to remain awkwardly”(Hughes 2010:129) amidst a separated from blacks on their more political climate that was openly hostile. sanitized and segregated farmsteads while Though European citizenship policies did permit many whites to leave Zimbabwe dominate spaces beyond Europe that when conditions became intolerable, efforts symbolically and materially define their to cast themselves as committed to superiority (Razack 2002). Blackness, Zimbabwe were embodied in their however, “is signified through a marking livelihoods (Hughes 2010). and is always static and immobilizing” In Kenya, the degrees to which (Razack 2002:20), starkly contrasted against whites have sought assert their commitment white re-presentations of freedom and isn’t as evident. Though a significant mobility. Though the reality of leaving number of Kenya’s commerc-ial farms are Kenya has its own complex implications for owned and operated by whites, the extent to whites, it remains an opportunity most which Kenya’s economy depends on them is Kenyans can’t afford, making the notion of not as actively discussed. Unlike in whites as committed to Kenya a challenging Zimbabwe, Kenyan citizenship laws do and unrealistic idea. permit citizens to maintain other nationalities (Republic of Kenya 2010), a Conclusion flexible citizenship making the possibility of This essay has demonstrated both the their departure a significant and ever-present continuity and discursion in how whiteness factor. The white Kenyan project of is represented in the African imagination. commitment therefore echoes its own Though the scale and phenomena of fundamental problem – the freedom of experience are vast and subjective, I hope to mobility enjoyed by whites over other have encapsulated the most significant citizens who are unequivocally Kenyan. mindsets in the most significant national This privilege of mobility, to stay or go settings. In the case of South Africa, I’ve based on the success or failure of their demonstrated how a coherent and objective commitment, arguably endows whites with a understanding of whiteness is clouded by the powerful form of sovereignty, a freedom to scale and variance with which non-white excuse themselves from whatever conditions South Africans have experienced whiteness they deem unfavorable. and the competing rhetoric through which According to Bashkow (2006: 20), different white groups have sought to the Orokaiva people of Papua New Guinea differentiate themselves. In Zimbabwe, the believe whites possess a magical capacity political disenfranchising of whites has for travel and mobility. The ability to travel, failed to render them symbolically he explains, “represents a moral condition unthreatening. Though the political that in Orokaiva culture stands for a lack of landscape now finds whites in a marginal encumbrance by social obligations or position of belonging, their inextricability troubles”. Both Hughes (2010:14) and from land and power continues to mark Razack (2002:13) also understand the power them as privileged persons with counter- of mobility as part and parcel of European nationalist ethics of patrimony and wealth Cartesian ideologies. The ability to control accumulation. In Kenya, whiteness is the landscape, says Hughes (2010:14), is questioned on conditional terms of what makes whites “built for mobility”. commitment, and in the inability of local “The mapping of subjects” says Razack peoples to see whites as citizens of Africa (2002:20), “achieves [the white’s] sense of and not of elsewhere. The perceived ease self through keeping at bay and in place any with which white Kenyans could leave the who would threaten his sense of mastery”. country at any time makes their belonging For white settlers, it is the ability to problematic, a problem whites themselves experience as the everyday enacting of their global structures of power (Hartigan familial heritage is fractured by the 1997:495). Though a study of whiteness appearance of even non-threatening may reify its hegemonic symbolism, it also Africans. represents an important expression of In a broader framework, I’ve African resistance, demonstrating, as attempted to problematize whiteness as both Hartigan (1997) puts it, “that whites benefit a progressive and reifying way of thinking from a host of social arrangements and about Africa’s position in the world. Though institutional operations that seem, to whites, globalization has brought Africa closer to to have no racial basis” (495). 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