Cultural Toxic Shock Syndrome

Cultural Toxic Shock Syndrome: A condition arising out of operating in an alien culture over a long period of time, well after cultural adaptation has taken place, where anger and frustrations at the differences in operation start to turn inwards. At this point the cultural environment has, like a bacterial infection, become toxic to the subject.


It is around 19:00 and well after sundown when I leave the office. I walk to the gate of the institute and flag down a motorbike taxi, my preferred method of transport for the past few years. A few minutes in to the journey he asks me in French, if I can speak Swahili. I tell him no and he tells me in hesitant French that he doesn’t speak the language. This moto guy is now becoming a metaphor for why I must leave Rwanda. He hasn’t even bothered to ask if I speak Kinyarwanda he has already assumed that I don’t, in the same way later he will assume I live in the area of my neighbourhood with the fancy houses and the embassy residences. He then asks me if I’m a student at the university. Again he has assumed, I am white and taking a moto and therefore I cannot be staff. A keen anger rises in me against this stranger who is giving me a ride across town my home. I want to lash out, punch something or go home and cry or just pack my bags and leave. All these feelings some at once and its been happening far too often recently.

I walk on the streets and I cannot stand feeling the judgements people are making about me as they walk past. You may wonder if this is paranoia…I wish I had the luxury of giving myself that option, but when people come and ask you for money, assume to don’t speak any of the language, start to tell you their life story in full expectation that you’ll care and want to do something about it, refer to you by the generic mzungu even though you’ve been working with them for a year, you have little recourse to telling yourself that its all in your head. With every one of these interactions my individuality is stripped away by other people’s assumptions of what I am. And I feel diminished as a person, dehumanised. Maybe I should be stronger; maybe if I was I wouldn’t be so affected by other people’s judgements. But whatever of that strength I had in me when I got here has long been drained. Now I feel somewhat like a sponge soaking up all these assumptions, these most invisible of put downs and yet at the same time raging against the insult wanting to battle out my frustrations.

What’s even more annoying is that the moto guy has not registered that when I approached him, I spoke to him in Kinyarwanda. Its so out of what he expects me to do that even though his ears have heard the words from my mouth, his brain has failed to register that I’m literally speaking his language. I’m so incensed by his assumptions that I don’t bother to tell him that I do speak Kinyarwanda. Its different, it’s so different from what he expects and so it has been blanked out. Someone once told me, or maybe I read it in a book, that one of the defining characteristics of Rwanda is the inability to deal with difference. It’s true that it permeates everything here…that cultural awareness that you must not stick out, you must not go against the grain, you must preserve the consensus. I stick out and it seems I must be told this one way or another, every single day.

I used to get angry at the frustrations here and it would be obvious that I was angry. I’d argue with people and get mad. So much song and dance just for something simple, like getting a bill paid or a wage cheque or getting someone in authority to sign a letter. So much energy for so little output. Now I don’t shout so much, but the anger is there and with nowhere to go it turns inside and makes you feel like you’re tearing at yourself.

And then there’s the men. The god-damn, stupid, mother-fucking men. From the moto guy who asks quite pointedly if I’m married, Why the fuck do you want to know asshole? You really think lack of a ring gives you a licence to try it on?, to the guy whose a friend of a friend who asks for my phone number, No I don’t want to give it to you, in fact I don’t ever want to see you again but I can’t afford to offend you yet until I find out who you’re related to, to the newspaper editor type who texts me to say I really turned him on, Oh, you thought it was cute that a woman could have an opinion eh?, to the Minister who concludes a conversation where he is giving me hassle over project delays he was instrumental in creating, by obviously flirting with me, Why don’t I come to visit you? Cause you’re a crinkly, pompous old rag and if I didn’t have to operate in this town I’d gladly stab you in the hand with my cocktail fucking fork. Honestly, it’s at points like these that I feel like the strung out junkie chick in that scene with her therapist in “Requiem for a Dream”. But like her, I’m just smiling my way through as the cold rage builds and poisons my system.

I’m going back to somewhere I don’t have to fight the gender wars and I don’t have to struggle to be treated normally. And I don't feel like being violent towards most people, most of the time. This place has become toxic and often I feel like I’m hovering on the edge. I don’t want to be this sensitive, I hate that every little thing affects me, I feel like I’m being crushed. Its time to leave. Seriously.