My highlight of my experience in Washington D.C thus far is the session we had at the United Nations with the founder and secretary general of the United Nations Council of Women Leaders. Everything discussed in the session really impacted on my existence as a leader and woman, well young woman.
but what stuck with me was the legend or tale she shared with us about the elephant and the mouse, where the mouse always knows everything about the elephant but the elephant knows nothing about the mouse and this in relation to humans would explain why dominant groups are always ignorant about minority groups, for me this answered a question that had made me so unsettled I started to question my ability to be objective and made me to look at myself as an angry black woman.
Ever since I arrived in D.C I have had to answer the most awkward questions from whether South Africa is a province in a country called Africa to dealing with the amazement of Americans who had visited other Africa countries such as Congo and could not in the word of God understand how I did not know the friends they had made there or why I could not speak French or Portuguese. I have also had to deal with people who have made no effort to pronounce my name correctly but comfortably choose to call me “Asife” which means lets die in my language.
From this legend I got to understand that many citizens of this country had never bothered to educate themselves about Africa because we don’t really matter I mean we are just a poverty striken country from which nothing good is expected from but what pains me the most is to listen to South African descendants who are so divorced from the realities of their own country, each and every individual has their own experience of life thus people will not have the same views or narrative but at the same time that is very different from one being blinded by their comfort so much that they know nothing about the realities that exist beyond that comfort. how can one contribute to finding solutions when they have no knowledge of the problem?
In an earlier session with the Disrupting Whiteness Movement, the facilitators made a very interesting point about how it is not the duty of black people to teach white people about racism or the struggles we face on a daily basis, nor is it the duty of women, homosexuals or any minority group to go around educating people, in this day and age there is no excuse for one to be ignorant about such issues and it is exhausting to have to justify and explain your struggles to people.