“Muzungu: An African Lost Soul’s Reality Check” invites readers to abandon every assumption they’ve ever held about Africa. In this gripping firsthand account, author Pamela Sisman Bitterman offers an unflinching look at a world far more complex—and far more devastating—than the Western imagination often allows. Published by eBookit.com and now available for download, this e-book chronicles a journey that forever altered her understanding of truth, culture, and survival.
Bitterman arrived in Kenya with an idea of what she expected to find, only to have those expectations turned completely inside out.
“One cannot truly know African reality without going there and experiencing it firsthand,” she reflects. “Sometimes, not even then.”
The word Muzungu—Swahili for “white person”—literally translates to “confused one who wanders,” a title that fits Bitterman all too well as she courageously navigated the country’s most shadowed corners. Her months in Kenya exposed her to the raw and often shocking underbelly of a nation in turmoil. Along the way, her husband was unjustly imprisoned, and a close friend and guide lost his life to suicide. These losses punctuate a narrative already filled with moral ambiguity, political corruption, and human tragedy.
Within these pages, readers will witness religious elders morph into villains, government leaders revealed as criminals, and tribal chiefs conducting forbidden rituals rarely described to outsiders. Bitterman shines light on foreign missionaries pushed to their breaking point and a country spiraling into violent revolution. This is not a journey for the faint of heart.
Ironically, Bitterman’s white skin and her identity as a writer became her unexpected passport into spaces typically closed to outsiders. Her experiences unfold like a living newsreel: encounters with doctors and activists from President Bush’s AIDS Relief Project; stark visits to hospital wards, orphan clinics, schools, huts, and government offices; and a chilling confrontation with the true face of AIDS in Africa. In Kenya, she discovers, almost nothing is as it appears—and the phrase “lost in translation” barely scratches the surface.
Volunteer workers trapped during a national political uprising provide frontline testimony of chaos and courage. Ancient tribal customs are revealed in vivid detail. Western religious influence is questioned. History is stripped back. Kenya, in all its beauty and brutality, is deconstructed before the reader’s eyes.
With unapologetic honesty and gripping storytelling, Muzungu challenges readers to take a raw, unfiltered look at Africa—one that is both eye-opening and unforgettable.
During a query to receive content from writers around the world (via PitchRate), several great authors shared their stories and excerpts from their book. This one has been submitted by Pamela Bitterman Enjoy!
My checklist is getting checked off. I have the basic necessities covered. There are other details I could obsess over, more material I could learn, extra gear I could bring. But I imagine that I’ll be able to make do with what I have or grab what I need on the fly. I feel pretty good to go! Even my faculties are sharpening into adventure mode. The daily exploration of unknown territory and the deciphering of mysteriously encoded exchanges with my mental-acuity-challenged morning companion is helping to inure me to the intellectual demands I’ll face while living as a stranger in a strange land. And my old gumption that has been busting a gut to get loose for a quarter century is now ever present, even at three a.m. when I lurch wide awake from my warm bed in a cold sweat and blurt out, “What the hell am I thinking?” It’s not that I’m having serious personal reservations. It is simply that moms tend to worry that their families will implode without them. As it happens, I find that I am not in the least fearful for myself. In fact, I discover that I’m as game as ever to take this next leap of faith.
The “yee-hah!” exhilaration of climbing out to life’s edge has never entirely died out in me. It’s merely been lying dormant beneath a meticulously constructed, implied housewife persona, a twenty-five year stint of nurturing-mother prioritizing for which I have absolutely no regrets. Everything has turned with the seasons, as they should. And a bygone time has finally come back around, although to what purpose under heaven remains to be seen.
That being said, this go-for-it attitude of mine does pose a psychological incongruity that I do have some measure of difficulty coming to terms with. I am experiencing a powerful, altruistic desire to “go help starving children, be a blessing in the world, touch just one life,” with a hefty side of, “travel, have an adventure, get out there, prove you can still do it,” purely selfish thrill-craving. Like a cup of warm milk with a Wild Turkey chaser. I don’t want to go without my husband but I want to know that I can. I don’t need to fly halfway around the globe to be benevolent but I do need to get back out into the big world. I have no concrete conception of what I am moving toward but the lure of the unknown pulls me like an old familiar drug.
There is nothing in my life to escape from and yet the passive act of staying put evokes despairing thoughts of, “Oh, if this is all I’m going to do, then just shoot me now!” Some things never change. This is still the same me, just me a little older, me a little slower, me jetting off to Kenya . . . with Ian.
For more information visit: www.pamelasismanbitterman.com
Reprinted from August 2011
Words of Wisdom from Pam: “Thank you Heidi! You did a very nice job with this. And I am honored to be represented on this site. Women of Wisdom out there, we know who we are. We celebrate what we know. We remember (mostly) where we’ve been. We have a great deal to offer. Don’t hold back. Don’t be still.”
You can read the book here: https://www.everand.com/author/618407373/Pamela-Sisman-Bitterman
