Reflections From A Lone White Guy in East Africa

Jeffrey Kass
13 min readAug 11, 2021

Beauty, Lessons, Challenges and Repair

In rural Rwanda with children/Jeffrey Kass

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I landed in the Rwandan capital city of Kigali. I was visiting East Africa as part of Africa Development Promise’s program to support women-owned farming cooperatives.

I had done my fair share of reading about various parts of Africa over the years and certainly didn’t have a monolithic view of the continent. But you can’t grow up in a western country without having at least some unconscious bias about the continent being “backwards.” It’s not like I thought of countries as “shitholes” or anything, but I still approached my trip with a combination of excitement and apprehension.

A forty-something-year-old man sitting next to me on the last leg of my plane ride back to the U.S. asked where I had traveled to.

“Africa. Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia,” I responded.

“Oh! You were in the jungle,” he followed up without blinking an eye. He wasn’t joking.

These kinds of questions are a bit irritating to me, but I get it, those are the main images we’ve been fed about Africa since our early childhood.

“Why, have you been?” I couldn’t resist some slight sarcasm, still with a smile, knowing he had not.

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Jeffrey Kass

A Medium Top Writer on Racism, Diversity, Education, History and Parenting | Speaker | Award-Winning Author | Latest Book: Black Batwoman V. White Jesus | Dad