Ignorance or Racism?

I am probably going to get a lot of hate for speaking up on this. I have stood up with a lot of claptrap before, and guess what, it’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Before I go into this upsetting issue let me say I am not in any shape or form attacking people I am going to write about in this short rant or any group of people as some might feel after my diatribe against mind-numbing racism and/or ignorance my friends and I came face to face with on our university campus today.

It’s a beautiful Wednesday afternoon, just after 5pm and outside the lecture halls we don’t see a lot of students...as we do every day. John reminds me most students leave the university campus around 3pm, but we see groups of two and three or more students scattered around the park-like area in front of R2(one of the lecture halls). As we are about to walk down the stairs three boys go past us, and one of them is waving at us. I look on my left at John, and he gives me that “I don't know them” look. On my right, David is shrugging his shoulders and in the interest of being a nice guy, I wave back with a smile. At this moment they had gone a mile in front of us but the three of them are still turning their heads back at us. Just as I wave back, they look at one another and back at us with judgmental looks, then they burst out laughing. Ouch!

You know that embarrassing moment when you pull doors that are built to be pushed and then you think no one noticed then you hear giggles behind you, and you know someone has seen you. That’s was how I felt, sheepish. We continue to walk casually as if nothing happened. "Saat kaç?" one of them shouts at us! Again I look at David and John and they are both wearing peevish frowns. There is momentary silence and David, the sturdy and muscular one among the three of us charges forward in anger shouting back at the guy who asked us the question. Now for those of you not living in Turkey, let me take you out of the fog of confusion and decode this for you. Get a couch, or anything to get comfortable, I am about to take you on a roller coaster. A few months ago, two black African students were harassed by some airheaded men on the streets of Istanbul in one of the many shameful incidences perpetuated by uneducated, uncivilized and uncouth people. Apparently, they were asked some crazy questions including the one we got asked today, "Saat kaç?" Which translates to "What is the time?" in English. You are now making faces and whispering "So, what's wrong with that? They probably wanted to know the time". Like hell they did!

Walk down a roadside in Istanbul and you are bound to bump into at least one African or black man selling watches. Of course, there are dozens of other street vendors of other races selling watches, but typical of ignorant people they assume any black person anywhere in Turkey sells watches. Please don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with people who sell watches and make a living out of it, but there is everything wrong with people presuming I am something I am not, especially when it's scornfully.

And so when I heard this question, my jaws dropped and my mind literally went numb. I stood still, watching David confront the three boys all by himself. In a split of a second I was overcome by so much anger I joined David in his heated change of words with the guy who asked us the question. I don't know about you, but if I am stuck in intense and impassioned subjects my Turkish goes AWOL. Like where does Turkish go when you need it the most? So I decide to use English instead, which was dumb because I was basically talking to my hand...none of them spoke English! But did it stop me? Hell No! I went on to give him a lecture I always regret not giving to people who sometimes make racist remarks in buses or in Çarşı (My no-go to zone in Adana), or anywhere.
The guy who asked us the question was too proud to see anything wrong with what he said, even spinning us the story of his phone being out of battery. Sure we believed him because we are naive. His friends are trying to pull him away from David who is getting closer and closer to him, to prevent what was an inevitable fight. I am getting even more annoyed as his other two friends are suppressing a giggle with difficulty. What was exasperating to us was amusing to them.
We can’t take it anymore and we are ready to duke it out, teach our bigot a lesson or two. After all, violence is the only language people like them understand. But again we looked no better than them by stooping so low and I am thinking to myself as I type this: maybe there were other better ways to deal with the issue besides fighting, but hey!

"Shut up! How dare you?" I snarl as if they can understand me! At this moment, John is pulling David away from throwing himself on this guy who won't stop uttering all the racists’ slurs, going as far as calling us "Zenci", another one of the names I resent a great deal. Call me anything but Zenci...and don't even try to defend the meaning of the word that makes every black person feel like a second class human being because you don't have to be a genius to know it has a demeaning feel to it among a huge negative baggage that it carries. His other friend tries to reason with me, and this time he is earnest, no more silly laughs. "Wait look! No stupid! No stupid... I make joke" he is trying to speak English. The causer of the whole confusion is pulled away from us by his second friend as they yell at their other friend talking to us to leave. John had mollified David and I begin to feel less emotion as we watch them walk away in another direction.


 This is my tweet in 2016 after another racist episode.



I have watched unfortunate incidents of racism on television and on the internet, I read about it but not once did it cross my mind that it would happen to me one day. If you are black, in Turkey, and a stranger has never shouted "Zenci" to you as you mind your business, you are blessed! I always take these racists comments with a pinch of salt, but today it reached a boiling point.

As we walk to the bus stop to catch a bus back to the residence halls, only John is talking. I am not listening to him and I doubt David is either. "You shouldn't let them get to you guys" It’s John trying to dissolve what just happened into a minor issue. He is always like this. I wish I had John's heart. A positive young man who always sees the glass as half full. But there are only so many John's in this world. Even after walking a distance from R2 David and I are still not talking, we are listening to John go on about how we are granting "uneducated people" power over us by giving them the reaction they wanted and ... I don't let him finish, "That’s the point, I have been called horrible names in Çarşı (A very crowded market place somewhere in the city) by ignorant people and I kept my cool, but never in the university. I expect to interact with literate civil people on campus and I can't sit back and watch them make us feel bad for being black." I shoot back. David is nodding, he agrees with me, obviously still unsettled by what just happened. His residence hall is at the center of Adana whereas John and I are just a few minutes away from campus by bus. We can’t let David go alone in this state so we agree that we do something to rid our minds of the tension.


 Poor burgers! I directed all the pain on them.



Half an hour later and we are eating a lot of junk in a fast food somewhere in the city. We are in a better state and we talk, laugh about lectures and watch beautiful Turkish girls go in and out of the restaurant from the balcony where we are seated.

In a country where a lot of people don't take claims of racism seriously, where most people will try to squash the weightiness of racism with petty phrases like "We don’t have that here, because we are X and Y" or "You can only find that in country A or B.", it is about time we have a dialogue about what is a far paralyzing concept than we want to believe yet still remains a taboo talk among us. Am I getting racism and ignorance mixed up? I don’t know for sure. But what I do know is education, not just in Turkey, could be the answer to all these daftness.
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Stories Of The Murky First Year (1/3)

Approaching the main university entrance

It is the start of yet another brand new month, and I have had a hard time trying to convince myself that counting the months that I have been here for is not healthy for me. On the first day of every month, I always try unsuccessfully to stop this habit that most often sends me straight to the evil world of depression and homesickness. But hey, I am not about to sit on my bed and cry my heart out, neither am I going to drink my problems away. That I have tried before. Somehow I used to think vodka made me forget “staff”, that I would have one glass a night and then rock myself to sleep. For a while it was a harmless good enough excuse, or as I liked to call it “compulsion”, but eventually I had to give it up. So I had figured it is, in fact, writing about it that helps me fight my demons head-on and ironically, sharing my stories makes me feel sane and motivated and energized and ... all sorts of positive things you could ever think about.

Unfortunately, I feel like some of my first-year memories in Turkey are starting to fade away. I know that because I have had those “remember when...” kind of discussions way too much for my liking and what better way to memorialize them than to share them with you. But before that, here is a disclaimer! (This is just a few of my experiences here, chosen arbitrarily)

ARRIVAL, September

This was over a year ago, but yeah you guessed right, I remember it like it was yesterday. The flight I boarded the last day from Johannesburg landed in Istanbul the next morning at around 5 am (Istanbul time). Outside was considerably cold for an autumn morning and the cold breeze blew off my cap as if to say WELCOME TO TURKEY! I picked it off the ground and continued to follow a bunch of passengers from the flight into the entrance written “INTERNATIONAL ARRIVALS”. I gazed at them miserably to see from their faces if anyone of them would be willing to help me or let’s say, walk with me to the customs area. But honestly, it was not as hard as I thought it would be to get around the airport, not with all the signs hanging all over the place written both in English and some strange language I would soon learn to know as Turkish.

After some standing in a queue and a lot of frustrations to find local departures I finally found what I thought was my terminal. I asked one guy who was in a security uniform “Where do I find local departures gates?” He gave me the eye that said “get out of here man”, and now that I think of it, you can’t really blame him, Atatürk Airport is one of the busiest if not the busiest airport in Europe, the poor guy had better things to do than give strangers directions because surely I wasn't the only one.

So I asked another one, who was a woman, secretly hoping to get a better and pleasant response. And I did, however, she couldn’t speak English. She pointed me in a direction where I continued to read the signs all the way to Izmir boarding Gate. And I was supposed to go to Adana instead. I stood there for a while, looked at the time, looked up at the flight information display system and back at my boarding pass. I still cannot get to wrap my head around how the heck I went blank about where I was going when I had it in a completely obvious and unsubtle way on my boarding pass. Half an hour later and something told me to check my acceptance letter, (to be sure everything was in its place) and it said in the address, ADANA with bold capital letters. I looked up again at the display system and my flight was in an hour to Adana and not Izmir. I took my bag and hurried to the right gate which was way easier to find. Talk about walking sleeping!

My first “friends”

As I was waiting for my flight, I saw two black guys my age, with large carry-bags and a confused look on their faces, or at least one of them. (I know I am not going to hear the end of it once they see this). I was relieved after I had last seen a black person on the flight from Johannesburg. I wanted to go up to them, but I didn’t know what I was going to do or say “Hey my name is James!” That would be awkward.

They disappeared for a while and resurfaced once we started boarding. I reckon they were taking pictures of each other the whole time because that's the only thing I saw them doing until one of them came up to me as we walked to the plane. “Hi! Are you also going to Adana?” he asked as if the flight was not going directly to Adana. And just like that, we started talking and I found out that one was from Liberia and the other from Ghana. We sat separately and only met again when we landed in Adana. Turkey in September has some rainfall, temperatures usually fall rapidly and generally, it is cooler, except Adana. Adana is like a superhot, so much that locals say you can fry an egg on the stone. I could feel the loose shirt start to cling to my back in places, and the heat rained down on us like the breath of hell. Nothing and no one moved in that penetrating heat unless they were desperate, and we were.

As I waited for my bag at the conveyor belt, I heard a voice behind me “Do you have anyone who is picking you up?” It was the same guys I met before boarding... again. Now with an African girl, a confident but quiet South Sudanese girl! Together we met a Turkish university representative who drove us off to our respective dormitories.

Settling right in

My first weeks in Turkey were by far the most chaotic time of my life. Imagine this: You go to bed at night only to wake up in a completely different place, not even one familiar face, far away from your familiar surroundings. Then, of course, add the monster that is the Turkish language! As someone who comes from a place that's beaming with Asians, I remember how my friends and I used to mock their languages and here I was thinking it can't get any harder, then boom, Turkish happened. Honestly, I had been warned that most of the Turkish people don't speak any English but when I got here, no one could speak any English, at least not anyone I met. With the help of the African students I met, I was able to call home, do registration and other necessary activities. What immediately stood out for me was the number of students on campus (There are about 40 000 students), so many buses, red ones and green ones and white ones...buses everywhere, relatively big ones. A lot of these buses are driven by women! I have seen women drive a minibus (sometimes called taxi) but I have never seen a woman driving a bus. The transport system is also quite different. Firstly, Turkey just like the rest of Europe drives on the right (Lesotho and South Africa drive on the left). I have been very impressed by the local transportation available to us, but I am definitely still getting the hang of it. I found myself lost quite a bit in my first couple of days, but I am now starting to figure out how the buses and metro work.

Another thing you are going to notice first thing here is the obsession young people have with pictures. If I had a dollar for every time someone walked to me and asked if I would like to be in a picture with them, I would be filthy rich. On my very first days, I lost count of how many pictures I took with the locals...especially girls, wait and boys too. It strangely made me feel important, seeing all these people excited to see us. But do you know when it gets annoying? Once you start understanding Turkish and so can tell good people from bad ones. One day I was in a grocery store when a boy (about 12 years old) approached me and asked if I were a footballer? And my answer was a resounding "No". He was evidently disappointed but still asked me to be in a picture with him. "Why?" was my question eager to know why he would want me to be in his picture when I am just a "regular student” Apparently he was going to tell his friends at school that I play for some soccer team here in Turkey! Another picture incident happened at the mall, well it started on the bus to the mall. This one was off-putting! My friend and I were sitting in one of these buses that have seats facing one another. Just in front of us sat a lanky girl holding her smartphone taking pictures of us secretly! When my friend confronted her she denied it. The same day we caught another group of girls taking pictures of us while eating in one of the restaurants. I still get this a lot, others come and without saying hi proceed to stretch their hands to take a selfie with us. Others will ask politely, which is very refreshing and so mature.

For anyone wanting a taste of that celebrity life, maybe you should head to Turkey! But Turks are certainly some of the most welcoming, friendly and overall good people. Thanks to my language teachers and my new friends I soon felt "at home" at last, or so I thought.

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