In 2020, when a Hopkins friend (an MD/MPH from Taiwan) asked me for career advice, I warned her that I was the wrong archetype. I joked that I was a tumbling tumbleweed — The Dude from The Big Lebowski drifting across the desert in that opening sequence, just with less charisma and a weaker soundtrack. But the metaphor wasn’t really a joke. It was pointing to something linguistic and structural: the intelligence of wandering, the ancient Bantu concept embedded in kuzunga, muzungu, and wazungu.
Across Swahili, Kirundi, Luganda, Kinyarwanda, and Chichewa, the shared root zung- encodes:
From this root:
Early East Africans saw Europeans not as embodiments of superiority but as strange, drifting figures whose movements lacked context — people who had left their own worlds behind. Wanderers.
What struck me years later is how closely this maps to the concept I’ve lived without naming: wandering is a form of combinatorial intelligence.
To wander is to:
This is the same geometry behind the zung- root:
motion without a predetermined path → exposure to an enormous search space.
The Swahili weren’t wrong to see wanderers as unstable or unmoored.
But they also weren’t wrong to see them as operating outside the usual cognitive grid — a kind of intelligence that is messy, high-variance, and sometimes disorienting even to itself.
When I told my friend I wasn’t the right mentor, I didn’t mean I lacked insight. I meant my insight comes from kuzunga, not from institutional linearity.
I don’t follow the staircase. I roll. I accumulate meaning through drift, collision, and open-ended exploration.
It took me years to realize that this is not failure or flakiness — it is simply the Muzungu-logic of combinatorial search, the wandering mind as method.
And if wandering is a weakness in some systems, it is the engine of discovery in others.