“We are perceived around the continent as loud and stupid – the Special Needs children who have nothing upstairs”
By David Hundeyin
I’m going to say something, and I hope it will be understood as coming from a place of love and concern.
A few weeks ago, I hosted a space with a prominent African entrepreneur. The space was curated in such a way as to give equal representation to different African nationalities so that it wouldn’t skew toward Nigeria because of me.
The unfortunate result of this was that it was painfully easy to draw connections between the speakers’ countries of origin and the quality of their submissions. All the Kenyans who spoke had useful, important, well-communicated submissions. Ditto the Zimbabweans, the South Africans and the Anglophone West Africans (Gambians, Ghanaians, a Liberian, and a Sierra Leonean).
And then there were the Nigerians.
I remember giving the mic to 8 Nigerians, and first of all, 7 of them went overtime. These 7 seemed very keen to speak and had a lot to say, but within 2 minutes of listening to them, you had this disappointing realisation – this man (they were all men) has no point. Rambling, disjointed, unfocused, random point-hopping, lacking in joined-up thinking, missing any sort of conclusion and ultimately only stopped by the “can you please round up in 15 seconds?”
I cannot fix Nigerian education. I have no power to do so. Even if I did, it would take at least a generation for the effects to become visible. That’s why in the meantime, all I can beg my countrymen (because again, it is men) to do if they are reading this, is to start making a conscious effort to talk less. Reduce your volume. Speak less. Listen more. Read more. Read for the sake of keeping the knowledge in your head, not for the sake of “performing” intelligence by spitting it out at people.
I was so embarrassed, and I wondered whether the entrepreneur who co-hosted the space noticed what I had noticed. The answer is yes. She did. In fact, she specifically mentioned to me afterwards that everyone who came up and reduced the intellectual level of the space was Nigerian. “What’s happening with education in your country?” was her exact question. I didn’t have an answer.
That’s just 1 anecdote. I have several. I have met many, many other people who have similar stories. In fact it is often the case now that before accessing certain rooms on the continent, recommendations from other Africans need to go ahead of me, because the fact of being Nigerian in and of itself makes people take me less serious if they don’t know who I am.
Nigerians have always had a reputation in Africa for being loud and overbearing, but it used to be the case that we were seen as loud and domineering, but also eminently capable and useful – which made us just about tolerable. Now, it is increasingly the case that we are perceived around the continent as loud and stupid – the Special Needs children who have nothing upstairs, but believe they must express that nothing as frequently, and in as many grandiloquent words as possible.
I cannot fix Nigerian education. I have no power to do so. Even if I did, it would take at least a generation for the effects to become visible. That’s why in the meantime, all I can beg my countrymen (because again, it is men) to do if they are reading this, is to start making a conscious effort to talk less. Reduce your volume. Speak less. Listen more. Read more. Read for the sake of keeping the knowledge in your head, not for the sake of “performing” intelligence by spitting it out at people.
The world will tolerate a loud but competent man. It will have sympathy for a quiet, incompetent man. But a loud, incompetent man?
God abeg!
