Stereotype: A single mindset

I’m a writer, what I do is to paint pictures with words; I love to write and read. So I'll write this.

I began reading at the age of 4 or so I was told, I started out reading any American and/or British book I could find, my mum though not a teacher by profession, guided me, I didn’t think I could write as a matter of fact I never thought of writing, I just loved reading. I began writing when I was about 10 I think, and I started with writing play lets in Pidgin, I wrote plays like “Life and Death”, “The creation” and the “Fall of Man” all in pidgin, I wrote some others too. They were quite fascinating and funny. I wrote plays and slowly I started writing poems, I realized that my poems were aimed at changing the opinions, thoughts or ideologies of a particular sect concerning a particular subject. However, growing up, it was very easy to form a belief system about a particular gender, tribe, race, or even a person. The truth was that I may not even have had any idea or fore knowledge about that tribe, race or person, I formed my beliefs from what I had read or heard. When I began writing my novel “The Innocent thief”, it was a little difficult to place the characters properly, because all I had ever written aside the play lets in Pidgin, had foreign characters, why? Because all I had read had foreign characters and if people where to read it then it must have foreign characters besides how will the foreigners relate with the story if it had Nigerian characters? I didn’t want to write a book hoping Nigerians would read it because I had this belief that the average African man doesn’t read, I had read somewhere that “if you wish to keep a secret from a black man, write it as a book” because he wouldn’t read it, so here I was thinking to myself as a growing child, Africans don’t read, but I am African, and I read. What this means is that what we read or hear has a great influence on the way we think, especially as children.

Recently I went to fix an IT problem for a foreign couple, and we got talking, the woman stood as if she was in shock, her husband asked her if she was okay, she said she was and then she asked me where I grew up and were I went to school, I told her I grew up in Nigeria (Abuja and a village in Bayelsa), I went to school in Niger Delta University, Bayelsa state, and then she asked where I learnt to speak English that good? Obviously while coming to Nigeria she already had this belief that Nigeria’s educational system was poor as result will produce very poor specimen for graduates, another wrong belief system. There’s no denying that there are a lot of Nigerian graduates who can’t speak English or even make a complete sentence in English, but this is not true for every Nigerian graduate.

I was on the internet a few years ago when I got a request from someone I didn’t know to be added to my contacts on an instant messenger I use, I accepted the request and we began chatting getting to know ourselves, and then he asked ASL (age, sex and location), I replied 24, Male, Abuja, almost immediately he said he was sorry for sending me the request, I asked why he was apologizing as I did not see any wrong in what he has done, he said he wants to remove me from his contacts list, he didn’t know I was Nigerian, I asked him what he had against Nigerians, he said “they are all scam artists”, “dear God!”, I exclaimed. I tried to convince him that wasn’t true; as we were chatting I realized two of his friends had been scammed by Nigerians, to him that was enough to adjudge all Nigerians to be scam artists, and there was nothing I could say or do to change that belief, again another wrong belief.

I was speaking to a lady the other day, we were just discussing on several issues when she said “all men are the same”, I asked her to explain, she couldn’t, I asked her what help her form that impression about men, then she began to narrate several gory stories about how men had mistreated her friends, how they all behaved in the same way, I asked her are you married, she said yes, I asked has he ever mistreated you, she said no, I went on to ask about her parents, and what she revealed points to one fact, she made her deductions from what she had heard, besides how would she even know that all men are the same, did she try all men?  Yet another wrong belief system.

Nigerians are believed to be fraudsters, a people who would do anything dubious to make ends meet, everywhere I go I’m surrounded by men and women, even boys and girls who complain about the government not doing this or providing that, yet they survive, they survive in spite of the harsh economic conditions, they smile and laugh regardless of the governments insufficiency.

In the world today a lot of people have different opinions about certain things that are wrong, opinions that were formed from experiences, books or tales, even I, I am guilty of this.

If only I had grown up reading books written by Africans maybe using African characters for my novel wouldn’t have been a difficult thing, maybe if the American couples I fixed something for had met a Nigerian like me before coming to Nigeria, they would have believed that there are Nigerians who excel in the face of educational challenges, maybe if the young man I was chatting with had met me before his friends were scammed he would have thought differently about Nigerians.

I am not biased about my judgment, there a lot of scammers in Nigeria, a lot of bad men, etc. However, it isn’t enough to adjudge any gender or race or tribe. We are individuals with different personalities, embracing and accepting these individualities helps us relate as we should.

Nigeria is but a nation I chose to use as I am her son; mindsets are formed not only by foreigners of Nigeria, but of other nations as well.