Change the narrative to a dialogue | Nancy Kacungira | TEDxEuston

hello I've lived in Africa all my life I was born in Tanzania a tiny town called the DOMA what we called the traffic jam was three cars on the road at the same time and I come from Uganda originally my parents come from Uganda or should I say I'm a local in in these places so many new things to learn but I work in Kenya now and the business that I run with my sister is in Uganda Kenya and ten and Rwanda so I guess you could say I'm the east african community poster child but i did spend one year outside of Africa when I did my postgraduate here in the UK and it taught me a lot of things aside from school I realized that people ask me a lot where I'm from and initially I said Uganda but then I realized that sometimes you're met with blank stares and you know like ah but sometimes you just need to explain a little bit so I started to say I'm from Africa because they you know other people said that and it sounded really weird to me why would I say I'm from Africa that's like saying I'm from Planet Earth you know it's it's it's it's so vast but for the first time I was actually forced to think of myself as African because the whole time I lived in Uganda and and Kenya and Tanzania I maybe thought of myself as East African but I never actually sat down and said this is it I'm African what does it mean to be African so it did open the door for me to start thinking about this new facet of my identity that had been introduced to me and so as I thought about it I said okay well let's find out what this means and if I'm African what does that mean so I looked around me I saw the trappings of it as were you know sold to me kinky hair I already had that so checklist I didn't really like African jewelry I'm sorry what they you know I felt like a tracer for it but you know it was all really brightly colored and I know it's hard to tell right now but I'm into monochrome so it's it there was some bits of it that and when I thought about it this is called African jewelry but really it comes from Kenya and Tanzania and perhaps a few other countries what about North Africa what about Togo what about Cameroon what about South Africa is that the same African jewelry as we call it I've been to some African fashion shows that really had fashion from three different countries and it just made me wonder what is it that binds us together that creates this sense of identity for us as African I know what it means to be Ugandan at least to some extent I know what we have a reputation for what we're known for we're supposedly a little more gentle and soft-spoken than our Kenyan neighbors but just not as laid-back as our Tanzanian neighbors we we have our own language we have new glish which is our version of English you might have heard of it check on Wikipedia it'll be the best two minutes of your life we say things like you know you've been that girl for too long stop beeping her you know you're like yeah thank you coward icing is a word for us and I know that people think that we like you know green green bananas might okay a lot and I know that we have such a great sense of community that you know personal space is a bit of a foreign concept and I know all these things about this and I know our culture our traditions I learned how to do the maganda which is a traditional dance in high school I have an idea of what this effort this Ugandan identity means when it comes to the African identity I'm not so sure and yet I supposedly second so I asked let me try find out what this means what does what is everyone saying about this and one of the things I realized was that from reading books about leaders that I admired Sankara Mandela comment Kumar and reading about the history of Africa or at least what I could find of it it seemed that everything that United us not just as Africans but as black people was struggle whether it was colonialism slavery or racism it seemed that there was always some struggle that led us to come together and say okay we're African this is who we are Julius Nyerere a former president of Tanzania I think put it really well he said Africans all over the continent without a word spoken to one individual to either one individual or another or one country to another looked at the European looked at themselves and knew that in relation to the European they were one and maybe that's why the African identity is so hard to establish because it's always been based not on what we are but what we aren't the same for Africa this will probably be familiar to most of you Africa is often defined from the outside it is necessary when you are trying to define Africa to look at it as a whole to do it from the outside you have to step out of it and so it's possible to say well look this is the hopeless continent at some point and then change your mind along the way and say well actually hold on Africa is rising and then further down oh it's a hopeful continent this whole continent 54 countries more than 2,000 ethnic 2009 googe's 3,000 ethnic groups we can actually sum it all up in one magazine cover and this seems strange to us and lately we've we've had a lot of people saying look Africa is not a country ok and we need to speak about this more and we need to get four narratives out but if we consider where we are in the space of talking about Africa ask myself who was consulted when the Africa rising narrative came up I wasn't did you guys get a handout I don't know maybe you did I could be wrong and also what difference did it make I can tell you my grandmother did not know that magazines were writing more positively about Africa all she knew was the price of sugar is going up you know but in terms of these narratives that we talk about and want to change and I think it's fantastic that we're talking about this now and saying look we're pointing fingers that you know international media that paints us a certain way and say this is not how we should do it Africa is not a country this is how we should do it but what are we really doing in the space of a narrative we are subjects I think that it's important to think about what we say about ourselves even more than it's important to think about whether what other people are saying about us what an African saying about Africa when is the last time we declared something about our identity and about our continent and about who we are and where that comes from so one of the spokespeople at the Economic Commission for Africa Carlos Lopez he said the problem with narratives like this is that we are subjects and not protagonists and that theory agrees with something that I think I think what we need is not narratives what we need is dialogues and I'll just borrow from literature to explain this a little bit because in the basis terms a narrative is described as a representation of an event or events while the subject is basically described at words spoken out loud by a character what are the words spoken out loud by us as Africans what do we say about ourselves when I was looking around for what what does it mean when people say I'm African what did I find so when there is a running narrative you're a subject when there is a dialogue your protagonist and you have the chance to tell not just the world but tell each other and inform your own identity and I think that's something that we need to strive for so this is how big this continent is sometimes I think it's it's hard to grasp this is why sometimes people in South Africa will say oh in Africa you know or in North Africa it's easy to forget just how massive this continent is it fits all those other places inside it China Eastern Europe India it can all fit in Africa that's how big it is according to cartographers and yet we still have this Africa as a country narrative and I think it's a really good example in terms of talking about narratives because this is the one that has come up a lot and we've said this is a narrative that needs to end so let's just talk about the way Ebola was covered because that had real ramifications it's estimated that sub-saharan Africa not West Africa where Ebola actually was but sub-saharan Africa lost about 500 million dollars in revenue this year hotels in Tanzania had 50% less bookings because of Ebola which never actually happened in Tanzania there was a scare but the outbreak never actually went that far so this is how it was reported in international media as you can see it's an African Ebola outbreak remember all 54 countries this one I mean so there is a woman in Africa who survived Ebola she's in Africa you know that's that's all you need to know and again Africa's Ebola outbreak has not run its course so it's not hard to see why if you looked at these headlines you'd go and cancel your trip to the Serengeti because you know that this is Africa there's Ebola and I wouldn't blame you because it does look like there's Ebola everywhere in Africa so maybe this is the picture that we didn't quite paint is that actually you know this entire part of Africa did did not have Ebola and you don't need to look at me suspiciously when you sit next to me on the plane when I coffin sneeze just because I come from Africa but we've said a lot about the narratives and how Western narratives are portrayed but how about us what do we say about ourselves how are we reporting this because I think that's more important you know you can rise above what other people say about you and think about you you can never rise above what you say and think about yourself so clearly there's a problem did we do any better here's another headline so somewhere in Africa Oh Africa in general is receiving drugs so this story Africa causeway bowler a covering martial plan was actually if you read the second and third sentences about three countries calling for a recovery plan and this next one that's that's heartbreaking isn't it but guess what all three of these came from local African media houses and I find that tragic because the truth is so many of us local media houses do not have the time energy or resources to cover Africa it's easy for us to point fingers and say look at how they're doing it but we'll get their wires and their content maybe change a few words and then pass it on to inform other people about Africa in our localities so what do I know of Gabon what do I know of Togo what do I know of Cameroon which supposedly I share a shared destiny with this is where it comes from so how is our narrative going to be any different if we're not creating it for ourselves it's good that we're talking back you know and saying hashtag someone tell Fox News someone tells CNN and it's good that we're creating a new narrative but you know all we're doing is editing a story that's already been written you can get in and edit maybe change a line or two but what we need to do is write a new story we need to sit down and think who are we what do we stand for what our values where are we going what our principles what is our identity what holds us together this is a woman that I met when I went to Ghana to do a story on migration so the talk around migration obviously you know what it is so I decided well I'll do a story about people going to Africa because it's very easy to get the idea that everyone is trying to leave so this woman I make us a coffee moved from America New York where she lived for 50 years and she to Ghana on a business trip and she never went back she said you know she visited the slave dungeons at cape coast castle and said all I knew about Africa before was Tarzan that that that was actually her reference she expected to come and find people with bones through their noses these are actually her words you know running around in in leopard skin or something and yes this was many this was 25 years ago but still she's she's been in Ghana for 25 years now and one of the things she's done is she has a museum she now runs a hotel around Cape Coast and she has a museum that she says an African Museum and she has these amazing pictures of all the leaders of our history and she has a small section that deals with African inventions yes African inventions and she told me a story that made me really sad she said one time there was a group of kids from the area who came to her place and she showed them the little section for African inventions and the kids got so excited they ran back home told their parents and she says one child came to her and said actually when I told my parents about this little museum for African inventions they said you lied I said in fact I should say say it said it was ok I forgotten how they say it but I think it was yes you did tell lie something like that did I get it right yeah you did tell lie yes and basically this child was told by their parents this woman lied to you nothing was ever invented by an African and we're growing up in a world where everything is telling us who we are I never for a moment felt the feeling of being a minority until I stepped outside the borders of my country stepped off my continent and I was suddenly told that you're an African and this is your place this is who you are and because I hadn't had any concept of what actually being an African was that's what I had to deal with that's what I had to work with and so how much of what we know about our identity is really true when the migration story breaks and everyone's talking about how everybody's going everywhere where are we to say that actually a lot most migration within Africa is within Africa it's only 0.2% that come outside Africa to Europe this is the continent of 1 billion people a hundred million a year is actually not that big but we get lost in the context because we're not telling our stories and from our perspective and so I don't think it makes any sense to keep pointing fingers and say why don't you cover us fairly if we're not covering ourselves fairly we need to start a dialogue where we as Africa talk to the world and say actually this is how we do it I love a website called Africa fact-check recently the Daily Mail published a story saying it's unsafe to drink water anyway in Africa they published a story saying actually that's not true and they had statistics and research to prove it that's great but also what we need is to begin a dialogue with ourselves it doesn't make sense that we have 14 trade pacts in Africa but hardly trade with each other we'd rather trade with everyone else why do I have to go to Dubai first before I can go to another African country why why can we not harness the power and immense energy that is on our continent just by speaking to each other I would love to turn on my telly and hear about what it's like to be a fisherman in Gabon or a teenager in Togo I don't know what that is I'm from Uganda but I had hardly any idea what goes on in Africa and that's the BBC or CNN or Fox News tells me about it I think it's time to change that I think it's time that we stopped focusing so much on a story that's already written and started writing a new one about what it means to be Africa African and what identity Africa has one that's not based on a struggle but on progress one that's not there because we have to have it but because we want to have it

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 25,590

Rating: 4.9290466 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Business, Africa, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Id: QN03uiVK4eE

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2016