Leah’s Reporter’s Notebook #2: Africa, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy
Zulfat Suara is a Nashville Metro Councilmember At-Large — the first Muslim woman elected in Tennessee and the first Nigerian woman elected to any office in the United States. Photo Credit: Leah Donnella
By Leah Donnella
“Where did you live before moving to the U.S.?”
“Africa.”
The first time this exchange occurred, it struck me as odd but unremarkable. Maybe I had phrased my question strangely, to elicit such a broad response. But the second, and fifth, and fifteenth time someone responded this way, I understood that people weren’t trying to be opaque. They were simply used to people not knowing – or, perhaps, caring – which of the 54 countries on a continent of more than a billion people, they were from.
Even when people did provide a country, they often felt the need to provide details – sometimes comically elaborate – about where the country was. People were not from “Burundi,” they were from “Burundi, a small country in central Africa that borders Rwanda to the north, DCR to the west, and Tanzania to the southeast.”
This didn’t just happen with smaller countries. During one conversation, someone casually referenced her home in “Nigeria, a coastal country in West Africa.” (I tried, and failed, to imagine someone from a comparably-sized country in Europe, for instance, doing the same. Then I realized that there are no comparably-sized countries in Europe; the population of Nigeria is 214 million; no European country breaks even 100 million people.)
Often, I felt some combination of indignation and smugness when someone gave one of these explanatory commas. Of course I know where Somalia is, I would say, stopping short of rolling my eyes. But it was remarkable how quickly this basic knowledge crumbled apart. Did I know what the capital of Somalia was? Mogadishu, I was pretty sure. Could I name a single other city, town, or landmark? Could I say, with certainty, what languages were spoken there? How the government was structured? What the climate was like, or the cuisine?
I laughed ruefully when a young Somali American woman told me that what most people knew of her country was “pirates.” And again when a professor from Kenya had to clarify, to a roomful of students, that he had come to the United States “on an airplane.” And again when a young man told me that people often ask him if he saw giraffes all the time when he was growing up in “Africa” (Lusaka, as it turns out, the capital of Zambia and a city of more than 3 million people.)
But there was discomfort in that laughter. I knew that Africa had cities and airports. I could point out on a map where every country was (thank you, Mr. Sklar’s “Global Issues” class.) I read what I could about people’s countries before I interviewed them. That didn’t exactly make me ambassador to the UN.
So during interviews, instead of expressing my inadequate solidarity about how little Americans know of Africa, I went back to doing the job of the interviewer and asking questions. Like, “What do you wish people knew about where you come from?” —LD
Dr. Gatluak Ter Thach, originally from what is now South Sudan, is the founder and CEO of the Nashville International Center for Empowerment (NICE) — which provides resources and services to refugees in the community. Photo Credit: Leah Donnella
Queen Titilé Keskessa came to the US from Ethiopia as a 15-year-old. Now living in Memphis, she is a multicultural affairs officer at the Memphis mayor’s office (as well as a realtor and author of a children’s book about Black mermaids). Photo Credit: Leah Donnella