Humility

In my house, at least whenever my mum is around, CNN is always on at night. My mum likes to stay up to date with what’s happening and enjoys having CNN as background noise (weird, I know). Anyway, I happened to be listening the other day and one of the speakers (he wasn’t one of the normal news presenters) was talking about the Mar a Lago search with Trump. And he said (I paraphrase) ‘this is something we’d expect from third world countries, not from a country practicing the rule of law’, and this chafed a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, even in high school, we were thought to think of Nigeria, our country, as a third world country. I remember cramming a list of qualities and characteristics by which you would classify a country as ‘third world’ or ‘developing’. It wasn’t until I came to the UK to study the IB and learnt some more about this and how these classifications leak into the way these countries are treated globally that it began to upset me. I’m not denying the fact that Nigeria and a lot of these other countries classified as ‘developing’ have a lot to work on or have clear areas that need improvement. But who doesn’t? This whole thing with America recently and over the last few years, just goes to show that even ‘developed’ nations are not without their issues and just because the issues are different, doesn’t make them inherently better or of a more ‘developed’ nature than others.

One of the main issues for me with this already very problematic statement is that it comes from a place of blind confidence… and I’m going to talk about this a bit more. I take issue with the categorisation system of countries, because once a country has one of the qualities a developing nation is known to have, they are dumped into that category and people never really look again to see if there are nuances. In the same vein, once a country is lumped as ‘developed’ no one really takes a second look to determine whether things have changed or whether behind the influence and money, there’s a whole host of problems just waiting to be untapped. We don’t ask enough questions. We don't vet our categories enough to determine whether they are still appropriate.


My family and I, my brother in particular, were talking about instances when we’d heard people talking about certain countries (that we’re from or have lived in) and when they'd stated grossly untrue facts with great confidence. My brother related a situation where someone said something about Nigeria. And he disagreed (having been born in Nigeria and lived there for most of his life). And this other guy actually insisted he was right. There in lies the problem. No one can reasonably be expected to know everything about everywhere (if you can do that, kudos!). But personally, the line is drawn when you refuse to entertain the idea that you could be wrong. When you refuse, as a person (but I’m also thinking countries now) to accept that natives, that locals, may know more than you. May understand more than you. Isn’t this what colonialism was all about? (I know, that got deep quickly). People had different ways of living and some groups were convinced that their way was better. Right now, we have all these big organisations and unions and countries trying to help ‘developing’ and ‘third world’ countries without taking the time to understand the nuances of their problems and culture… and as we can expect, it hardly ever works.

All this to say, I know that there are a lot of countries that are struggling. Nigeria is definitely one of them. But these countries are not relegated to one side of the globe. And their issues stalk their ‘Western’ counterparts as well, albeit in more subtle ways. If we really want to help, I think we need to come to a place of humility where admitting that you don’t know something isn’t such a bad thing. Where it’s common enough that we can trust each other and actually learn. I don’t think there’s anything more humbling than learning from someone you’ve convinced yourself you’re better than. But maybe there’s also nothing more necessary.

God bless

Dera