The Mzungu
by Richard Prins
The half-turquoise wall's screen window is cloaked by a khanga and its proverb: When you go among one-eyed people, put out your own eye. The mzungu goes drowning in gasps of Bibuka, then drowns her with white sweat. The mzungu has to piss like torment, but he's busy making bedsprings scream rust, and Bibuka whisper Jesus. The mzungu likes that everyone here calls him Jesus, though he thinks Jesus was a cracker. The mzungu can't imagine failing to come with her ass like melted rubber in his hands, eager breath fluffing his beard. But eventually he tiptoes to the outhouse and splatters; they nap and fuck 'til daybreak crows come stampeding the tin roof. Bibuka pulses her knuckle between nose and brow, gnashing aftermath rapture. The mzungu privately convulses just like this whenever he exhales the climaxes of live jazz. A saxophone's the only thing ever made him feel like a woman. The neighbor's roosters are bitching syncopated envy. Her skin glows warm, still magnetic to the touch. She requests diaper money from the mzungu after their sunrise shag.
Tomorrow night the mzungu hates to see another mzungu at the Pigamitungi Social Club, repulsive with his backpack and recent sunburn, so engrossed by the televised soccer game that he stands, arms tucked into each other, as if afraid of the Pepsi-sponsored picnic chairs. How could this execrable honky not notice him, his trail of African friends, and Bibuka, scratching her thumbnail across his palm? He picks a table within the other mzungu's field of vision, but Bibuka says the soukous music is too loud. In a spiteful corner, he buys them beer and chips. He hated ketchup at home, but here it is pink and sugary. The waitress forgets the ketchup, so the clumpy chips remain pale and useless, just like that other mzungu. He wants the good-time girls to flock ululating as he threshes disco lights with his hips. He wants to pitch his Safari Lager at that motherfucker's buzzcut skull. Anything to prove his acquired superiority.Nor does the mzungu know what to do Monday afternoon when a pretty mzungu with sandy blonde hair gets on the daladala. She comes aboard in front of the girls' dormitory, where he loved another exchange student two years ago. His eyes sharpen into a solicitous glare, sensing his territory invaded. The only remaining seat is his armrest; he folds it into the aisle for her, and a smile pines in the jungle of his mustache. Her sweaty t-shirt wrestles with the shoulder of his dashiki as the van bumps pudgily along. School girls with their boring blue skirts and boy-looking hair fidget in the aisle, wondering where to lean their elbows. He was planning to disembark at the ShopRite to purchase some Johnny Walker, but now he can't. He picks the stop with the hardest-to-pronounce name and hollers at the conductor, Lufung'ila shusha! He hopes she watches him stride into dog-fuck streets, dish out colloquialisms to loitering bajaji drivers and lose himself in surroundedness. Last night Bibuka suggested they test for HIV then make a child; he laughed preposterously, and still can't remember the name of her two-year-old. But it probably has her glittering smile, coquettish cheeks. Thrilling to know he can have one of those, if he wants it. He'll unravel the Durex the wrong way tonight, correct himself, but hope some puckish speck of pre-cum bores into her its mischief, a loosened eye on the prophylactic tip.
Richard Prins tries to divide his time between Dar es Salaam and New York City. He is beginning his MFA in poetry at NYU in the fall, and finds most of his employment in progressive politics and the Swahili hip-hop industry