February 21, 2013

A Lesson from Africa

Thursday, August 2nd 2012 is one of my beautiful moments in my life. One of my instructors gave us papers to read and a video named TED to watch. It was about a beautiful professor named Chimamanda Adichie from Nigeria.

The title of her video presentation was the "DANGER OF SINGLE STORY". She described learning about the idea of the STEREOTYPE. She realized that what she read and heard didn't represent the whole story about something.

A stereotype is something which is not representative of a person’s whole life. She explained that “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

She went on to say “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of the person."

The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly": "Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. 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”.

Thank you for my lecturer Louise, you showed us one of the best and important things for me in my life not to live my life in a stereotype world. Being able to see millions of possibilities of other characters of country, people, or culture is an extraordinary mindset that we could achieve not only through education but also people to people contact or what I learn as People Diplomacy, to widen the firmament by simply start asking: "How are you doing and where are you coming from? Tell me about your life there."

This great life's lesson is to welcome the unknown with a positive smile that all is good in its essence.