A traveler is often conspicuous, and consequently is vulnerable. But in my traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. This was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.
Among the Batelela in the Sankuru region of central Congo the word for stranger is ongendagenda. It is also one of the most common names for a male child. The reasoning is that when a child is born—and males matter most among the Batelela—he appears from nowhere and is unknown, so he is usually called Stranger, and this name stays with him throughout his life—Stranger is the "John" of the Sankuru region.
Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, quotes an Old English proverb: "The stranger, if he be not a trader, is an enemy." In The Valleys of the Assassins, Freya Stark wrote of the nomads in Luristan: "The laws of hospitality are based on the axiom that a stranger is an enemy until he has entered the sanctuary of someone's tent."
Some words for stranger have the meaning of a spirit, as in the case of the New Guinea Highlanders, who could not conceive of the white Australians as anything but spectral ancestors. In Swahili, the word mu-zungu (plural, wazungu) has its root in the word for ghost or spirit, and cognates of the word— mzungu in Chichewa and murungu in Shona and other Bantu languages—have the meaning of a powerful spirit, even a god. Foreigners had once seemed godlike when they first appeared in some places.
The word for foreigner in Easter Island, in Rapa Nui speech, is popaa —so I was told there. But this is a neologism. In an earlier time the Rapa Nui word for foreigner (according to William Churchill's Easter Island, 1915) was etua, which also means god or spirit. It is related to the Hawaiian word atua, though the Hawaiian word for stranger is haole, meaning "of another breath."
Here is a list of countries and languages and their words for stranger.
Maori—pakeha, white man, foreigner.
Fiji—kai valagi (pronounced valangi), white person, foreigner, "person from the sky," as opposed to kai India for Indians and kai China for Chinese.
Tonga—papalangi, a cognate of Samoanpalangi, meaning "sky burster," a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature.
Samoa—palangi, "from the sky," related to the Fijian kai valangi.
Trobriand Islands—dim-dim, for foreigner or white-skinned person; koyakoya for dark-skinned non-Trobriander. Koya is the word for mountain. But there are no mountains in the Trobriand Islands. So a koyakoya is a mountain person—that is, from mainland New Guinea, or simply an off-islander.
HongKong—gweilo, "ghost man," a prettier way of saying "foreign devil," since a ghost is menacing, something to fear.
Japan—gaijin. The word is composed of two characters, gai, meaning outside, and jin, person. This appears to be a contraction for gai-kokujin, "outside-country person," thus an outsider in the most literal sense—racially, ethnically, geographically.
China—wei-guo ren is the neutral term, a person from a foreign country. But yanguize, "foreign devil," is also common, and there are words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose."
Arabic—ajnabi, "people to avoid"; also ajami, meaning foreigner, barbarian, bad Arabic speaker, Persian; also gharib, stranger, "from the west."
Kiribati—I-matang. Traveling by kayak within the huge atoll of Christmas Island (Kiritimati), I heard this word often. I-matang is generally used to mean foreigner (there were four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it is "the person from Matang," said to be the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people. The word implies kinship. By the way, it is an actual place—Madang, on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, thought by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people.
Mexico—gringo. The word seems to have come from griego, a Spanish term for a Greek. The Diccionario Castellano (1787) defines gringo as a word used in Málaga for "anyone who spoke Spanish badly," and in Madrid for "the Irish." It implies gibberish. The many popular theories (among them, that it may be derived from hearing the disenchanted Irish soldiers who'd joined the Mexicans singing "Green Grow the Rushes Oh!" during the Mexican-American War in the mid-1840s) are fanciful and unconvincing. The earliest recorded use of gringo in print is in the Western Journal (1849–1850) of John Woodhouse Audubon (son of John James, and also an artist), who traveled by horseback through northern Mexico on his way from New York to witness the Gold Rush in California. In Cerro Gordo ("a miserable den of vagabonds") Audubon and his fellow travelers were abused: "We were hooted and shouted as we passed through, and called 'Grin-goes' etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water."
Being Frank
I HEARD THE word faranji, for foreigner, in Ethiopia when I was on my Dark Star Safari trip, and remembered farang in Thailand, ferangi 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."
In The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), Freya Stark says, "The aim of the Persian government is to have [the people of Luristan] dressed á la Ferangi in a year's time." Later on, in a valley "stood the castle of Nevisar Shah to which no Frank, so they told me, had ever climbed."
These words, all related to farang, are cognates of "Frank," though the people who use the word don't know beans about Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which "French" is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century, when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as East Africa and Southeast Asia, a Frank was any Westerner.