Sharing a taxi with several tourists the other day reminded me how much the "them and us", white/black, superior/inferior complex still exists. Two french ladies, very much suffering from culture shock, were constantly complaining to the driver about leaving late, about speed and then tried to direct HIM to the their hotel, assuming he was an idiot, not a native Zanzibarian who's driven these roads for twenty years. Okay, so they were French, but still, I found myself pretty disgusted.

It's subtle but portrayals in the western media of Africans as mainly poor, uneducated, starving, victims or perpetrators of conflicts mean that many people still come here with a subconscious assumption about African people. It shows in the way some tourists talk down to locals, or adopt pidgin english and generally treat them as if they were children. Others are constantly suspicious and regard all interactions with Swahili people as minefields, arguing over change or storming out of shops when they think they are being overcharged, when mostly they're not.

The point is that there is so much depth and complexity to Swahili and indeed African culture that western imperialism mostly ignores, indeed the "history" of this continent as it is taught in our schools begins with colonisation, wiping out thousands of years of vast civilisations with the stroke of a pen. So many people fail to scratch beneath the surface and try to understand this culture and the lives of people here.

For example, if you've never eaten in a restaurant with waiter service, how can you know what people expect? If you're a poor taxi driver, trying to provide for a family of ten, of course you're going to try to get as many people in as possible. If you had to leave school at 10, you're going to speak pidgin English. If you don't own a watch, how can you be on time? If there's no waste collection service or any bins, of course the streets will be dirty. Complaining and shouting is not something that's done around here, largely because if you live somewhere where daily life is a struggle, what's the good of complaining?

Living out here is like a process of unlearning, gradually attempting not to see things through the lens of Western perception and trying to see why things are the way they are and why people act the way they do.