Today Miss Pyle asked us two questions in class. One of them was: "How many of you think you could have an intelligent, thorough conversation about the situation in Sudan right now?" My hand flopped around at my shoulder, indicating that I want to look like I have a somewhat decent understanding of Sudanese politics while in all honesty I'm really am rather clueless at this point. The second question she asked was: "How many of you think you could have an intelligent, thorough conversation about at least three African countries?" In response to this question, a million facts and memories whizzed through my mind as I suddenly recalled all of the research I've done on Africa, which is truly a quite fascinating continent. Let me tell you a little bit about my past with Africa.
My first in-depth exposure to Africa was when we were doing the Human Rights paper in 9th grade. You're probably assuming that I did some report on refugees or starvation or child armies, aren't you. I actually wanted to do something related to language and the barriers that languages can create, as this was around the era in which I was first discovering my love for Korean culture. Luckily, I found that South Africa is a hot bed of conflict due to language barriers. South Africa is a country comprised of many people of various ethnic, geographic and cultural backgrounds, including Dutch and English settlers as well as MANY tribes of Southern Africa. As a result of this smorgasbord of people, South Africa has 11 official languages. ELEVEN. Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, Tswana, Tsonga, Sotho, Venda, Northern Sotho and Southern Ndebele. Yeah. As you can imagine, this creates quite a bit of conflict within the country. Government documents have to be translated into almost a dozen languages (at a great expense), mass amounts of prejudice arise among neighbors and coworkers, and children are punished at school for speaking certain languages (even if that is their native tongue). Not good at all. So yeah, that's something important and hardly recognized by the rest of the world.
My biggest experience with Africa was last year when I was on the African Union for Model UN. I was representing the country of Gabon and man was I reppin' it good. I even had the Gabonese national anthem memorized, yo. Unfortunately, Gabon doesn't have a lot to do with the three prompts we were discussing (and I was a quivering scaredy cat when it came to speaking in front of the whole African Union), but I learned so much about Africa. We came together to settle a dispute on the eradication of malaria and discussed the use of DDT, an extremely effective pesticide that both exterminates mosquito populations and causes birth defects in humans. I had a great point about using DDT only in mosquito breeding grounds that were a safe distance away from crops and drinking water used by the local Africans, but no one listened to me. I'm still a little bitter about that. The best part of the conference was when we were discussing how to handle the M23 rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose views and actions resemble those of the SPLA in South Sudan. On the last day, we decided to release a press statement about moving in on the rebel troops. To our surprise, the leader of the M23 rebel group, Sultani Makenga, paid a visit to our conference room. He came in clad in camouflage cargo pants, threatened to kill us all in an improved Congolese accent, and proceeded to murder our security guard with a shot from his Nerf gun. What a day. If that doesn't make you want to join Model UN, I don't know what will.
Between Gabon, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I think I could have a fairly lengthy and intelligent conversation about how intriguing of a place Africa is. Now go listen to Gabon's national anthem.
I can name (at least) 40% of the countries in Africa, I can point out half out those on a map, but I couldn't tell you anything about most (if not all) of the countries. I guess that goes back to me being more geography-minded than history-. However, I think it also tells a lot about the American education system. You know a lot about Africa, but how much of that did you learn on your own, and not because it was school assigned? Sure, the Human Rights project was an assignment, but you didn't have to do it on Africa. Why do we, as Americans, constantly and consistently lump Africa into one giant group? We hate when America is stereotyped: "We're so big! We have so many different cultures! You can't put us all together; it's not fair!" Okay, but Africa is more than three times the size of the United States, and has for more cultural divides. This unit has really taught me that I can't assume anything about anyone. Especially not an entire continent.
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