The Wisdom we can learn from Africa

Our guest this morning, Charlotte Kemp, is a futures alchemist, a futurist keynote speaker who works with organizations to co-create preferred futures. She is the past president of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa and maintains membership of the Association of Professional Futurists. Charlotte is also a Chief Relationship Officer for Voices into Africa, an events company seeking to raise the profile of speakers, events, and collaborations across Africa. Please give a warm welcome to Charlotte Kemp.

This time for Africa. This is without a doubt, friends and colleagues. The most challenging presentation I've ever had to do. Because how does one talk about in a short period of time and give justice to the vastness of an entire continent with over 54 countries, 200 languages, as many religions, 1 billion people? So I'm going to tell you a few stories and invite you to explore some of the things we have learned from Africa that we can all learn from Africa and that we as professional speakers can use as triggers to help us think about how we work with our clients and audiences. So let me introduce you to the first person. Chimamanda Adichie is a novelist from Nigeria, and she gave Africa an incredible gift when she did her TED Talk and she spoke about The Danger of a Single Story. When we only have a single story about something or someone, it's very easy for us to be prejudiced or biased towards that situation and to be too lazy to explore what that really means. So have a look at her TED Talk and really hear what she is trying to communicate in terms of that concern. The other thing we want to explore is When we have those prejudices, when we don't explore things, we also don't quite understand the impact of them. So, Africa is huge, and we can fit all of those countries in. There's the United States and China and everything else, but I thought I'd bring it home to you in Canada. The maps that we have that show land masses are designed to be visual and to fit onto a sphere and all of that. I'm sorry if you're a flat earther. So, So when you look at it, Canada looks like it's that big. It looks like it's bigger than Africa, but when you actually take it to the actual sizes and you put them together, Canada fits within Africa. Africa is huge. So we need to kind of challenge all of our assumptions, all of the things that we automatically believe about Africa, the stories that we hear. We will hear stories about poverty, disease, corruption, danger, wild animals. There are a whole lot of those stories about Africa, and of course, in any landmass, some of that is going to be true. But when we just blanket the whole of Africa and think Africa is poor, we obscure the fact that Africa is very wealthy in her land and in her people, but that wealth has been looted from the continent. This graphic changes a couple of times. There's a link to it, and it's kind of updated. $30 billion investment coming into Africa, but immeasurable amounts of money leaving Africa in terms of corporation profits, natural resources, and minerals, et cetera. Another thing that we have when we look at Africa are these automatic visual clichés, and this is one you will see everywhere. If you go and look in a bookstore, in a library, and you look for a book about Africa, you will very often find one of these kinds of covers with the beautiful African sunset, the silhouette either of a regular tree or a baobab tree, and then of course of animals. We're not above using clichés ourselves, but we recognize them when we are. So don't just adopt a cliché without exploring it. Another thing that we want to do in Africa is to cultivate reasonable hope, and that's what we should do as speakers, cultivate reasonable hope for people. For example, the so-called American dream is utterly irrelevant in Africa, and we can't talk about the— what like the so-called Western world might think of as success in Africa. Africa has other ways to measure that and other ways to make progress. So now I want to introduce you to my friend. Her name is Ylang-Prue Njinka. She's from Cameroon, although she lives in Johannesburg at the moment. She does documentaries about business and business areas around Africa demonstrating some incredible opportunities that are out there and work that is being done. Have you ever heard one of your speaking colleagues stand up and give a speech and you just go inside, oh, I love that content. I wish I could share that content, but you know, ethics. When I heard Yelang's message, I fell in love with her content. She has an absolutely incredible story, and I started putting her forward to anybody that I knew. You, you've got to hire Yelang. You've got to talk with her. She's got to come and speak with your audience. And eventually she came back to me and said, Charlotte, can we work together on this and turn it into something? So we, she and I, are now co-writing a book on her topic. This is an absolutely incredible gift. And her white paper at the moment is called Africa on the Brink of an Economic Miracle. And that's difficult to get our minds around when we're thinking about all the reasons why it doesn't work. But Yelang lists some very good reasons why it could work, why it should work. If we lean into those opportunities, we can change the story about Africa in the future. One of the examples we talk about in the book is about the incredible technology that is available in Africa and the technology and innovation and IT hubs around the continent. They really are phenomenal. They're doing amazing work. There's a report about how Africa is leading the world in mobile money technology. Now, I'm sure everybody in this room has got a smartphone and you've got your banking app on your smartphone. You can check your balance and see if your client has paid you or not while we're sitting here. But what is amazing about this product, M-Pesa, which started in Kenya, is that it's not run on a smartphone. It's run with an old-fashioned text-based technology. So people can get paid, pay other people, pay school fees, send remittances back home. They can make investments and savings, and they can buy insurance using text messages only because of this M-Pesa technology. So there's really some incredible things that we can do in Africa because we can leapfrog over all the kind of inherited technology that we might have in other parts of the world, and we can just get to the stuff that works for our people where it's necessary. There's another thing that Jelang and I are looking at is about the population in Africa. There's a concept called the population dividend, and what that means— demographic dividend. What it means is that if you've got a large number of younger people who will grow up to become earners in an economy and they're earning money, they're contributing to the economy, they're paying taxes, then that country has a huge economic benefit. But that demographic dividend can equally be a problem if we don't get it right. So I'd like to invite you one day to get a big cup of coffee, block off an hour or 2 on your calendar and play with populationpyramid.net. It is an absolutely fascinating experience. Yes, this is incredibly binary. The blue is boys, the pink is girls. Every line there represents 4 years at a time, and this is the global population at the moment. So you can see obviously younger people, older people, and a few there above 100. Do you want to know what Canada looks like? That's your pyramid. So what that's showing is that you've got fewer younger people who will be growing up into economically active adults later on, and you got older people who will be kind of aging out at the top of that, and you have to make, you know, policy changes and taxing decisions and retirement decisions based on that kind of information. That is what Canada looks like. Do you want to know what Africa looks like?

Yes.

There. Just compare it again. Canada, Africa. So we got the huge number of people, that can come into the economy, can do some amazing things if we can educate them, if we can put the right kind of businesses together, if we really kind of double down on the entrepreneurial activities that are available in Africa. So that's the African population. Play around and have a look. This is China, just for fun. And the United Arab Emirates looks like that. Okay, so that's just for fun. Go and have a look. But what we're looking at with Africa is this incredible opportunity with all these people. It's the only continent where we have more younger people than other parts. So many parts of Europe are really struggling. They're trying to change decisions. Japan is changing how they kind of entice people to marry and have babies, please, otherwise they're going to have problems. And Africa's got the exact opposite situation. So another thing we want to look at while we are comparing these issues is to explore the narratives that we have, the stories that we tell, because the stories that we tell reinforce the perceptions, the incorrect assumptions. And if we don't pause every now and then and say, what does this story mean that I'm telling? We're going to be perpetuating all of the things that don't work for us. So, here's another absolutely wonderful woman. Her name is Charity Ekezie. She's from Nigeria. She is a journalist originally, but now she is TikTok famous and she's YouTube verified. She does an amazing amount of work really kind of challenging the narratives and the stories that people have. So, on her TikTok channel, she'll post like they do on TikTok, that little question that somebody has and she will respond. And she's responding with a very playful, sarcastic response to the assumptions that people in other parts of the world have about Africa. They will say, you know, do you have electricity in Africa? And she'll be sitting in front of, you know, the television and she'll be saying, no, we don't have electricity. We just, you know, wait for lightning. And they'll say, do you have rain in Africa? No, we don't have any rain in Africa. When we need water, we go to the the center of the town and then, you know, we cry to the ancestors and that is the water we use. It's a little bit playful. The one— she's always got these things where she's saying, we can do this. We have these things that you have in the rest of the world, but we prefer what we have in Africa. So, she's really kind of demonstrating that just because something exists somewhere else doesn't mean we have to adopt it. One of the latest videos that I saw her speak about is she says, People in the rest of the world look at Africa and say, oh, but you're so poor. And we look at the rest of you and we say, oh, but you have so much debt. And one of her really fun ones is she says, somebody posts and says, do you speak African? And she says, yes, everybody in Africa. Africa is one country with 54 cities. And we all speak African, and I'm speaking African right now. The only reason you can hear me in English is because I prayed to the ancestors and they're translating it. So what Charity does is challenge us to think about the automatic assumptions we have about somewhere else in the world or some other part of the world that we're not familiar with. And she teases us so that we can laugh and then look at ourselves and then reexamine what it is we believe. Please spend some time with Charity on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and really enjoy the content she's got. We want to change some other narratives. This is a country in Africa, maybe you know, but this is a country in Africa that has the highest population of women in government in the world. It is a country with incredible IT technology, technology hubs, innovation hubs, where people are being employed into that sector and trained up, and obviously a lot of women, almost as many women as men. It is also a country that has decided to be the transportation hub in the area, so they built this airport, this incredible transportation system. It's also the country in Africa that has the worst story about genocide, about the Hutus and Tutsi and how they Fought against each other, neighbor killing neighbor. It was absolutely horrendous. It tore the hearts out of that country. And as they started to recover, they made a decision to change the story that they tell about themselves and that the rest of the world tells about them. And now we look at the Rwandan miracle. We look at the promise that Rwanda offers to the rest of us. Another thing that happens across Africa a lot at the moment is a very intentional deconstruction of our indoctrinations and a decolonizing approach to the work that we have. We will look at everything like the music we have, the forms of government, the laws that we have, education, and we will re— like decolonize it and reconstruct it for how Africa used to be. Africa was cut up by the various European powers and kind of parceled out so that everything that was in Africa could just be sent to other parts of the world, and we spent so much time having to do to address that and reclaim it for ourselves. We've lost so much. And sometimes it really doesn't make any sense that we just import these models from other parts of the world because I'm enjoying being here in Canada at the moment and seeing the snow, but when I get home for Christmas, I'm gonna be on the beach like Santa here. So some of these things that we import just don't make any sense. A lot of our history has been taken away from us. The oldest university in the world is in Africa. Al-Karim, founded by a woman in 859 AD. And we've forgotten this. We in Africa have forgotten these stories. But worse than other parts of the world taking away our history, taking away our culture, importing and imposing religion onto us, it's when we do this to ourselves. So I grew up in apartheid South Africa and I went to a segregated school. And of course, I was at that age where I would be questioning this racial divide, and it was just before our government really changed and started to address that. We got the new government.

But this is—

this one thing here is something that I didn't realize until very, very recently. The signs there are in Afrikaans and English. So the one on the right-hand side says net blankers, Europeans only. Net blankers means only whites, blanka being white. So in Afrikaans we would say only whites, but in English we said Europeans only. So I was a European in, in the country of Africa, South Africa, and it wasn't until recently I'm going— at that stage I had never yet stepped into Europe. I've never been there. I've got 5 generations of family born in Africa, but I'm being called a European. And I need to address that. But it's also uncomfortable in South Africa to kind of really address that because we have a whole lot of tensions, obviously. And then Yalang Prujenko, when we're together having a conversation, she was saying something really profound, but all I heard was this. She said, Charlotte, African woman like you and I. And that was the first time anybody had ever called me African. And I started crying. That is what we have lost because of A lack of Ubuntu, a lack of respect for what is in our continent. So we can't talk about Africa without mentioning Nelson Mandela, but he really kind of epitomizes that Ubuntu nature. He talks about we can't enjoy our humanity if the other people are not able to enjoy their humanity as well. So let's just take this home to speakers so that you can see what is happening in your profession in another part of the world. My home association of PSA SA had up until the president who came before me, who was Joni Petty, all of our presidents had been men. Apart from Belisa Lekani, all of our presidents had been white. Up until this point, everybody had been a South African for an association that represented the region of Southern Africa— Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, etc. This year our president is Tsitsi Matende. She's a Black woman from Zimbabwe, and she is in no way a token. Her CV intimidates me. She has started Montessori schools, she has a magazine, she started an association, she does her own work. She is absolutely incredible and a beautiful person. So we're starting to see that kind of change because of a lot of work over time, a lot of patient addressing these things. I'd like to encourage you, if you see online anything like our hashtags, Speakers from Africa, please go and support them. We've also done a collaboration with PSASA and the Virtual Speakers Association International to do a Pan-African Speaker Summit. So we've done 2, next year will be our 3rd, and we go and look for the fledgling associations in Tanzania and Nigeria and Cameroon. We get them together, we find the various speakers, we pull them into a community, we connect them with associations, we give them support, and we raise up their voices so that we can export the wisdom from Africa. Thank you. Some of our sections of our conferences would stand up against any other conference anywhere else in the world. It really— we have some incredible talent there. So, please do support that if you see that online, and we're also looking for sponsors. So, what can we learn from all of this for our own selves? Well, first of all, we want to challenge our assumptions. When we're assuming something about an industry or a part of the world, We want to challenge those assumptions and not just walk in there thinking we know exactly what is happening. We want to cultivate reasonable hope. We want to cast visions, not fairy tales. We want to explore our narratives. What stories are we telling? Are we automatically telling a story we've heard, or can we challenge it and deconstruct it and really understand what we're talking about? We want to embrace Ubuntu because Ubuntu is, like I said the other day, I am because we are, and we are everyone here. We are a community because of every one individual of us, and we can see that blooming up in various places in the world. We want to embrace that Ubuntu, and we want to champion our speakers. So as we close, I'd like you to consider this one thing: Africa is a part of the world, and what has happened in Africa has been because of things that have happened in the rest of the world. But just as we are in person, I am because we are, we are because of Africa, and Africa is because of all of us. Thank you.

Thank you.