In the year of contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain James Cook to be the god Lono. The Aztecs, in 1517, took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, god of learning and of wind. The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, "Are you from the sun or the moon?"
Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human — at least not human in the way the People are — nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means "the Original People," or simply "the People." "Inuit" means "the People," and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean "the People." For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, "the Original People," and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning "Real People," and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, "Original People."
As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), "They are like people you see in a dream." But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative. The Lakota, who called white men washichus, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in The Last Stand, "believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning 'water all over.'" In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, "To West Africans, the white men were murdele, men from the sea."
Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness — those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away.
It is hard to be a stranger. A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "the American" or "the Foreigner," and there is no power in that.
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.