Article
Dissecting our Little Perspective of a Big Place
ID # 3760
If you were to ask me what I thought about Africa when I was in elementary school, I might have told you all about my favorite animals in the zoo. “In Africa,” I would probably say, “you see lots of giraffes, zebras, lions, and hippos.” I wanted my Barbie Jeep so that I could prepare myself for a safari like no other. Would Barbie ever been seen without her Jeep in the Sahara? I think not. If you were to ask me the same question in middle school, I might have been a little bit more “informed.” “There are many people in Africa an it’s a pretty big place. There are a lot of countries, but they’re pretty much states,” middle school me would have told you (in a matter-of-fact tone no less). In high school, before signing up to be a member of the Model United Nations team (something i was doing to meet people from other schools and travel to Korea for a week), I chose to do my audition report on something I actually had no knowledge of: the genocide in Rwanda. It’s not something I had learned about in any my history classes and I had never heard any of my friends talking about it before. Didn’t we consider ourselves culturally diverse and educated because we lived in Japan? Isn’t this important enough to teach high schoolers? I found out about the Rwandan genocide by Google searching “big political event in the last 10 years” and including the key words “controversial” and “media” to stir up something juicy. When I read about the events that had taken place in Rwanda, I was shocked. Before reading it, I hadn’t even known where/what Rwanda was. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a country full of people that seemed the same would try to kill off people within their nation. Why was there a holocaust in Africa that nobody bothered teaching me about? While I was writing this to you, the readers, I asked my mother what she thought about the issue. My mother’s global experiences as a child and young adult were limited to what she could find in the diverse state of Kansas. When she got older, she traveled during a short stint in the Navy and shared the experience of living in Japan with me when my father was stationed abroad. On the issue of so-called “Africa Education,” my mother said: “The only things I know about Africa are the things that I see on the news, the Olympics, and in movies.” I think this is typical of many people (in my personal experience.) In fact, I recently informed a friend on Facebook that the animals in Africa are not domesticated and, on the same note, you would not find domesticated animals like cats and dogs in African zoos. Jokes like this about Africa are not few or far between. I hear them on a weekly basis. It’s jokes like these that make me inclined to shake my finger at my peers, but I now stop to wonder who and what are really to blame for my generation’s ignorance.
I think the problem with my education and the education of many people I know is the same problem addressed both in the video of the speech “The Danger of a Single Story” and in the article “I Didn’t Know there were Cities in Africa.” I would recommend these to any reader of any background. The lesson to be learned is that one cannot base his or her opinion of a place or a person based on only one perspective. I would ask Americans how they would feel if a foreigner’s entire opinion of our country was based off of an episode of Jerry Springer they had happened to see. Jerry Springer presents a single story of a single type of person in a particular sentiment and situation. On the same note, we cannot teach children about Africa without presenting all of the stories. The Lion King, while an amazing film and certainly a favorite of mine (hence my early fascination with African wildlife), is not the only story of Africa. It is the way we are taught in elementary school, to think of Africa as an exotic land of excitement and adventure that hinders us from experiencing the individual cultures and from understanding the big picture or even multiple big pictures. To get the big picture, we need all of the small stories from all of the different sides. If we can manage this, it will be possible to generate excitement for African learning in an elementary class without talking about Timon and Pumba.