I hope that everyone is keeping safe. In the wake of the recent death of George Floyd, so many of our fellow citizens are protesting against injustice, bigotry, and racism. If you are among them, I stand with you and I’m wishing you safety.

On days like this, I don’t have a lot of wisdom to offer. Instead, I offer my favorite TED talk by an author I adore – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Back in 2009, she gave a powerful talk warning about the danger of a single story (http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en). An excerpt:

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story…

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story… The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar…

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Adichie has become a prominent voice engaging younger readers to African literature. She was born in Enugu, Nigeria and raised in Nsukka, where her father was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria and her mother was the university’s first female registrar. At 19, she moved to the US where she earned multiple degrees at a variety of US colleges (Drexel, Eastern Connecticut State, Johns Hopkins, and Yale). Her first published work appeared in 1997, and she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. Adichie is just over 40, but already has left an important imprint on the youth of this world. And while she has already proven to be a compelling storyteller, and an incredible writer – I believe the best is still yet to come.

In thinking about our own work, it’s easy to get swept away by numbers. 58 million children around the globe were not in school before COVID-19 hit. 1 million Zambian youth are not receiving a high quality education. Only 56% of students in Zambia progress to secondary school. In our own schools, we work with 6,000 students – and each of these students has not just one story, but many stories, that comprise who they are. We compile bios on our students – how Mary wants to be a teacher, and how Elizabeth was able to receive an education because of a school we opened. But these are not the totality of who our students are and what they will be. Each of us, whether a teacher working with our students every day, or whether here in the US working for our organization – has a collective responsibility to understand our communities better, our families better, and our students better. Let’s get to it.

-Reshma

Many Stories Matter...