Across sub-Saharan Africa, through many completely different languages, a white man hears the words “mizunga” or “muzungu, mlungu,muzungu, musungu, musongo” at least once on his travels. A word that sounds relatively neutral from many: “Hello, mizunga!”, it’s just a shout to attract attention. However, it is often overheard in a very stern way: “Mizunga, mizunga, give me MY money !!!” And at that moment, the denomination of a white man or an Arab, in short, an obvious foreigner and an intruder, is already very vulgar to pejorative.
And being a white blond I often felt just like such an intruder on my three-week trip to Kenya. During the coronavirus pandemic, when not even an usual small handful of tourists strayed from protected enclaves of national parks to spent time with Kenyans. Even if, as an experienced traveler, you try not to stand out and provoke unnecessarily, you are still in a kind of hard-to-beat contrast with your surroundings. It’s as if reality is breaking between you and the rest of the world, and you’re having a hard time getting there. It was as if the world was divided in two incompatible parts.
The photographs, which were taken during three weeks in February 2021, try to capture this contrast and division. The division between white and black, between right and left, between one and the other world. They try to visualize the hard-to-capture feeling of an intruder who, as a white cat, has little chance of becoming an impartial and unseen observer. In short, just because you are an unmissable “mizungu” who visits the non-coastal areas of Kenya very sporadically and whose naivety often contributes to creating a romantic image of a wild country with “noble savages”, which actually exist only in novels.