Oporto! Oporto! Reflections on the motorcycle as methodological tool, and on having lunch with “the men”

This piece uses two vignettes from fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone. The first explains what happens when I, a white person (oporto), turns up in a village on a motorcycle instead of the 4 × 4 in which most other white people arrive. The second explores my discomfort with being invited to eat lunch with “the men”
while the women who cooked the food waited until the men have eaten. The piece engages with how the view I have of myself and the view others have of me produces expectations tied up with a complex web of power relations colored by race and gender.