Age: 21 | Hometown: Moshi, Tanzania
For Naike Swai, the decision to come to Duke from Moshi, Tanzania, four years ago wasn't a difficult one. "I'm quite a flexible person," she says, "so the place where I'm in has never mattered to me so much. I've felt that I could always establish relationships-that there are good people everywhere."
And initially, Swai says her experience was overwhelmingly positive. She joined the Women's Crew Team, the Duke Sudan Coalition, Common Ground, Unite for Site, ECULAB and Students of the World, and made time to act in a play-Jean Genet's "The Blacks: A Clown Show."
Race was always in the background.
"Understanding race is a slow process," she says. "As time passed, I learned more and more about what it meant to me, and as I learned more, things became increasingly hard."
The difficulty began during an orientation meeting for black students. While she says she felt welcomed by the elders of the black community, something didn't sit right.
"I didn't feel that by virtue of my skin color that I needed to have a primary association with that community," she says. "I will always be extremely responsible to anyone of that color as my closest kin, as my experiential and categorized brothers and sisters."
Swai's aversion to being pigeonholed against her will has led her to resist being labeled by others.
"I am suspicious when I'm labeled as anything, because I don't see why the label should exist in the first place," she says. "As a result, I never had a set group of friends, or set organization that I was trying to identify as my space.... I recognized all of campus as my space."
That's not to say Swai doesn't feel she has a place; rather, she has an entirely different concept of a "Duke community."
"A sustained community has been hard for me to find on this campus. It's a space that's slightly disconnected from even the idea of a community, because nobody comes from the same place, and everyone's going to leave after four years."
Swai says she continues trying to make a difference, but that she's realized the amount of change she can affect at Duke is "limited." Even so, she doesn't consider herself a pessimist.
"This reality isn't cynical or negative, it's just the serenity prayer," she says. "Let me be able to see the things that I can influence and change, and the things that I can't, and know the difference. Certain changes work slowly, they come through little revolutions, and you've got to be patient with the process. I think I've often been impatient with the process. It's easy to look at the negative things that are frustrating and not recognize the opportunities that a place creates."
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