Our Race and colouroperating on different paradigms

I just returned back from my 2 monthes trip to Kenya. I went with a freind of mine a extremely beautiful Malaysian-Indian girl of Tamiil descent and everywhere we went I was instaneusly thought of as a Kenya, perhaps a 'Mzungu- Kenyan' ( Kenyan who does not speak any Kenyan langauge but is clearly of Kenyan descent) and everyone thoguht she was Ethiopian. Now it is no biggy everyone knows  that there is a relationship between South Indian Tamiils and Ethiopian but what really intrigued me was how this dark skin colour instantaneously gave her access to 'African societies' in Kenya as a sister  and a potential neighbouring ethnic group in Kenya as opposed to as a foriegner as would have been the case in the UK or  in other African countries. I am originally of Guinean-Sierra leonean descent  and I question whether this easy access and this comfortability and comradirity would have been offered to my Tamil friend  in Sierra leone or Guinea  or whether she would have been treated as a distant other- friendly and polite but still distant.

This observation caused me  to  question the static nature of which many people view Race access to race and colour. Kenyan Africans viewed my Tamiil friend as African because their near Ethiopian neighbours looked like her therefore her colour and not her race confirmed her Africanness in their African eyes. However, In Sierra leone there are no neighbouring people who look like Ethiopians and my Tamiil friend looks like Indian women they were only granted access to due to the popularisation  of Bollywood cinema from the 1960's onwards: to their African eyes shes a stranger a distant other. Now lets broaden the scope a little lets place my Tamiil friend  In Jamaica, her colour may perhaps instanetaneously associate her with the indentured labourers that came to the Carribean thus her colour does not link her to the Mother land and then back to themselves but  is linked through another channel of which her 'indianess is exemplified' as opposed to any other distant  heritage'. Ok so it is no rocket science that people from different regions view each other differently but what is interesting is the way in which ones perception of  an individual actually transforms the particular individual allowing  them access to a world they would never had  based upon no choice or decision of their own.

Just a thought.................. let me know what u think