Out of Africa

This summer, I had the immense honor of meeting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who’s article for the Guardian is featured in my last post).  She talked a lot about her journey toward writing and becoming a writer: from writing about people with blonde hair and blue eyes playing in the snow and eating mangos to writing about about Nigerians playing in the sand and eating mangoes. All-in-all, it was a great hour+ spent.

When I first read her book, “Purple Hibiscus,” I fell in love. Here was a story about Nigeria and Nigerians that was cliche, that didn’t proliferate the horrible Western ideals of Africans. It was modern, unlike the books written by Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (both who I also admire) which are rooted more in historical Nigeria. Her other books, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” and the most recent, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” are equally as great.

In the clip below (which is from one of the TED talks), Adichie repeats a lot of the things she mentioned in the talk when I heard her speak. Her point is this: without a variety of stories, with only a single type of story, the world is deprived of the truth. The single story of Africa must be changed — it’s stuck in Africans as poor, backwards; Africa as a place of negatives. Newer African authors, like Chimamanda Adichie, are becoming more prominent in the Western world and are changing this single story.

And I’m thankful for that.

The clip is engaging, funny, and informative. But most especially, for me as an aspiring writing, it’s eye-opening.

It’s about 19 mins long, so if you don’t have time to listen to it all, here’s some “soundbites”:

“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. … Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. … Start the story with the failure of the African states and not with the colonial creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different story. … The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story the only story.  … But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it’s very important, it is justas important to talk about them. I’ve always felt that it’s impossible to engage properly with a place or person without engaging with all the stories of that place or that person. The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity… it emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar. … Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. … When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”  

– Chimamada Ngozi Adichie, quoted from a TED Talk
(filmed July 2009, posted October 2009)

This was written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Guardian recently:

South Africans and Nigerians (and indeed other African immigrant groups) have simply not had the time or the neutral space to grow an organic understanding of each other. The Nigerians arrive with their different, more distant colonial experience, with their mercantile spirit, with none of the conditioning of the South African menial wage-earning experience and – yes – with that swagger. They arrive in a vulnerable country where the legacy of institutional exclusion still thrives. They create spaces for themselves in whatever way they can and, of course, they arouse resentment.

You should read the whole article, which stems from the recent controversy over the sci-fi movie District 9, which portrays Nigerians as the ultimate bad guys. Nigerian officials have asked for Sony to offer an apology for the film and take out all references of Nigeria, saying it promotes negative stereotypes of the country and its people.

If I haven’t shared the Solving Africa blog/website, forgive me. I’ll do so now. 

One Wednesday, there will be an exhibit hosted at the NYU School of Journalism. If you’re in the area, it’s something you should definitely check out. 

The evening will start with a reading, and then attendants are free to wander around looking at photographs and videos of Junior Kanu’s trip across Africa so far.  

You can expect to:

1.watch several fun snippets of my interviews with young people around the continent.
2.see hilarious moments of cross-cultural engagement caught on tape.
3.look at and purchase some of the best photos from the trip.
4.listen to some writing that I’ve completed toward the book.
5.join me in raising the remaining $2082 needed to make it to Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria.

Here are the details:
The Solving Africa Exhibit 
Wednesday, April 8, 6PM – 8PM
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor
Dept. of Journalism, New York University

Show up at any time, as you are free to come and go as you please. The event coordinators do request that people try and RSVP on Facebook or by email to junior.kanu@gmail.com

From TRINIDADANDTOBAGONEWS.COM – The Catholic Church and the Underdevelopment of Africa.

So … the Pope tells Africa condoms are wrong.

From Africa Business Wire, the list includes:

Pamoja Media (www.pamojamedia.com) – targeting both the African Diaspora and the continent, this company is a pioneer in online marketing. Africans are a diverse group of people, but Pamoja seems to have figured out a way to target us all successfuly. 

Frontline SMS (www.frontlinesms.com) – who doesn’t like to text message? We can expect this platform of communication and information dissemination to only get bigger. Africans now have an efficient communication tool, especially when it comes to developing countries. 

Orange (www.orange.fr) – Probably one of the largest investors in Africa right now. And we can only hope that they’ll soon see a return on this investment.  We’ll have to see what they do with it. 

AfriGator (www.afrigator.com) – a social media aggregator and blog directory with a steady 25% month to month growth … why shouldn’t we be watching this South African company? 

Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com) – meaning “Testimony” in Kiswahili (Swahili), this company became an important tool during the election violence in Kenya over the last year.  It’s a free and open source platform that the entire African continent can put to use, especially in a crisis response.

Now that he’s in office, what will Obama’s Africa Policy really be like? Here’s a prediction.

According to the United Nations, millennium goals for the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are far off track—and when it comes to Africa the need is great and the prospects for moving forward are dim. None of the goals, which include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of malaria, HIV/AIDS and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development are likely to be met in Africa, a United Nations study concluded.

Should we become the United States of Africa?

And even if we should, are we ready?

Age 43 and with his own Facebook page, Rivers State Governor Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi of Nigeria believes that the youth of the country will be the ones to bring change. Especially in regards to teh conditions in the Niger Delta, where oil has brought violence instead of development.

How do you see the situation in the Niger Delta?

The criminal activities that were taking place in the Niger Delta are no longer as rampant as they used to be. Kidnappings are no longer a daily occurrence. They occurred due to the lack of an enforcement of laws. The laws are there, but the government didn’t see the need to [enforce them] and people were doing anything they wanted to do with impunity. When some of us took over they said,  “Negotiate with them.” I said that I negotiate with those who have ideological intentions. I didn’t see anybody among those who claimed to be fighting for the Niger Delta with any ideology.

The Niger Delta area requires total re-branding because what is on the ground is not what is being portrayed. Things have started changing at a very high magnitude. All the young governors are pushing things in a different manner. Almost all of us governors in the Niger Delta have started making things change.

How have you been trying to improve conditions?

We believe that one way to transfer ourselves from our own injustice is to ensure that you look at the quality of education, infrastructure, the availability and quality of teachers, the training and re-training of teachers. Education is an essential element in the progress of our people, because, at the end of the day, there is a competition in the committee of states and if you are not properly educated you cannot compete. And you the governor will have visited injustice on your people if you don’t address that.

The law says that primary education is the responsibility of the local government council. But what we’ve done because of the incapacity to develop that area, we’ve taken it over from them. We are currently building 250 primary schools. Before the conclusion of the construction of those schools we intend to train and retrain teachers and hire more teachers.

To read the complete interview on allAfrica.com, click here.

Some of the coolest things, to me, about his plan for his state: 

• providing free primary school education
• that maintenance is more important than construction
• the hopes of building a new city hub in Rivers so that Port Harcourt isn’t the only one

Thing I learned:

• Rivers State has a free pre-natal program
• They have one of the only syringe factories in Nigeria
• There’s a monorail in the old city (I’m assuming Port Harcourt)
• There’s some foreign investment going on … from South Africans, and even Ukrainians. 

The continent seems to be riddled with bad leaders. 

Check out Nigeria’s “go slow” leader. Better than a dictator?