Students in Africa

I’ve thought a lot about the TED Talk we watched in class, “The Danger of a Single Story”, and have been reflecting on what single stories I’ve heard in my life. I grabbed a copy of The Wall Street Journal and began searching for single stories within the text. I came across an article entitled, “Students in South Africa Protest Slow Pace of Change”. I thought about what the TED Talk speaker, Chimamanda, said about Africa and how people call it a country. I thought about what my exposure has been to Africa and the school situation there. Most of what I’ve heard has been about Americans donating and traveling to Africa to build schools, and children risking their lives to gain a primary education. Based on the artifacts I found, the single story that the U.S. media presents about this group is one of often helpless but very hardworking youth. 

The messages from most of these artifacts are saying that it is difficult for youth in Africa to gain a good education for a variety of reasons, including early pregnancies, inequality in countries like South Africa, and poverty. While each artifact shows that youth in Africa sacrifice and work hard to become educated, three of the four leave the audience with a feeling that the young men and women have cultural obstacles they cannot escape. The magazine article talks about an American girl’s volunteer work that raises money for tuition for girls in Africa, but doesn’t include any commentary from the students or show their point of view about education or how they fund education. The Humans of New York post, however, conveys confidence and success as it shows a girl discussing how she will help people in rural areas learn to read after she graduates. 

These messages matter because they shape how the world views students in Africa and how the students view themselves. It’s important for everyone to be able to tell the world their story. While it appears many of these students sacrifice and work hard to gain an education, there is a looming feeling of doubt in the artifacts not coming directly from the students. There is also a feeling of of determination and hope as one article describes how a student took on a leadership position at his school to bring awareness and change to the problems in his school's education system. The implications of the message can vary from the rest of the world discrediting education received in Africa to students in Africa feeling defeated that the rest of the world has a poor view of their education system. If what the artifacts present is true, then the message might motivate students and leaders in Africa to change the education system, or change the rest of the world’s perception of it. 

I found another picture on Humans of New York from the Congo captioned, "It is not good to deduce an entire country to the image of a person reaching out for food. It is not good for people to see us like this, and it is not good for us to see ourselves like this. This gives us no dignity. We don’t want to be shown as a country of people waiting for someone to bring us food. Congo has an incredible amount of farmland. An incredible amount of resources. Yes, we have a lot of problems. But food is not what we are reaching for. We need investment. We need the means to develop ourselves."  While this isn’t portraying a student, the quote brings up an important point. A single story simply cannot capture all that a person or a culture is. It’s important for us to seek out the whole story and encourage the media to do the same.