A LESSON FROM AFRICA

                       A SMILE FROM AFRICA FOR THE UNKNOWN 

Today in Louise's class on Thursday-August 2nd 2012 is one of my beautiful momentS in my life. She gave us ,her students, papers to read and video to watch about a beautiful professor from Nigeria. A beautiful woman who taught a lot of students in conference hall, I am not  really sure where was it, but I think it was in UK. her accent is a combination of British and African I guess.

she did teach about her personal life when she was in Nigeria. the title of her presentation is the "DANGER OF SINGLE STORY". by the way her name is Chimamanda Adichie. She described her life journey, when she was still a child, live in middle class family in Nigeria and drawing a lot of pictures with blue and white characters based on her old book written in foreign language. She started to found something different about life itself. What people call STEREOTYPE. She realized that what she read and heard it didn't representative the whole story about something. She went to USA to continue her education here. Her roommate was guessing that she couldn't speak english at all and her roommate was so shocked because she spoke english very well. her roommate did think she only hear tribal  music and again her roommate was shocked as she taped mariah carey's songs. (LAUGH)

shortly i got one of my important lessons about what she called about the stereotype. It  is something which is not representative whole story about human's life "And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story".  She remembered and started to said that, “I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psyco”. hehehehehe all the classmate laughing. LOL. continue her words: “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. living in our own world, is something common, but 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 like a special kind of smile showing by an African to welcome the negativity of the unknown as She stated as "Stereotype", with a positive smile that all is good in its essence.  

    Eston Zera Ronsumbre Saba,

 Nazareth College August 22, 2012