by PAUL THEROUX
North American real estate salesmen undergoing mock initiation ceremony, Manaus, Brazil, 1993 PHOTO/Alex Webb/Magnum
Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger’s language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means “the Original People,” or simply “the People.” “Inuit” means “the People,” and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean “the People”: For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, “the Original People,” and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning “Real People,” and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, “Original People.”
As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), “They are like people you see in a dream.” But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders, who were uncooperative. The Lakota, Indians of the North American plains, who called white men washichus, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in The Last Stand, “believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning ‘water all over.’” In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, “To West Africans, the white men were murdele, men from the sea.”
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I heard the word faranji, for foreigner, in Ethiopia and remembered farang in Thailand, jerangi in Iran, and firringhi in India and Malaysia (though orang-puteh, for white person, is more common in Malaysia). What’s the connection?
When Richard Burton took his first trip to Abyssinia—recounted in First Footsteps in East Africa—he wrote, “I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term ‘Faranj.’” Burton went on to say that the Bedouin in Arabia “apply this term to all but themselves.” In his time, even Indian traders in Africa were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar), since trouser-wearing was associated with outsiders. In his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), he wrote, “The convert [in Arabia] is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a ‘new Moslem,’ especially a Frank.”
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via 3QD