When I study the world’s more “developed” nations, and how they got there, minus the colonization, the hoarding of everything valuable on earth to their benefit (The Treaty of Tordesillas), I notice something. They own their stories. They tell their stories. They share their stories. They share their experiences. They share their failures. They share their successes. They share their methods.
Permit me to say that perhaps one of the reasons our regions – the underdeveloped ones- continue to lag is because of a cultural penchant to hold everything we know close to our chests. One of the reasons we continue to be perceived as backward and unprogressive is because we have failed to share our own stories; to showcase the value in our methods. We are late adopters, because the early adopters in our midst fail to share their failures and successes with us. We know not our history, because the older ones, for the sake of shame or maintaining superiority, do not share.
In 2020, I’d like to encourage and empower more men and women from the African continent and the Caribbean region to share their stories; to share their knowledge, to share their wisdom, to share their methods, to share their successes and to share their failures.
Telling our stories is an integral part of how we shape the trajectory and speed of our development. And this is not to say that we haven’t started, but this is to say that there is room to do so much more.
I envision a decade where men and women from Africa and the Caribbean wear shirts with our local heroes – Sir Arthur, Derek Walcott, Dangote, and Nkrumah – in the stead of TuPac, Steve Jobs and Biggie. I envision a time where our men and women are more versed with the happenings which shaped their home countries than they are with the American Civil War. I envision a time where we can document our journeys to success and share them freely with the next generation.
And we’ve started.
We share distinctly African and distinctly Caribbean stories; stories of architecture, literature, music, food,
This is Wakonté!
Chadia Mathurin
