We Tell Our Story

Share individual stories -
So we can Learn from each other
Share community stories  -
so we can work together to help each other
Share how we got here -
So  we can Document and learn from our Culture and our Heritage
Share what we want to accomplish - So we can Develop Plans and Action Strategies
First, we need to define the problem. Most people in Africa today are witness to a long cycle of the flight from correct understanding and the terrible direction the continent is taking. The good news is that our collective consciousness has finally become aware of its own prevailing, almost systemic, flight from correct understanding. Africans, and their friends, are increasingly asking the right questions, which means the right answers are soon coming to bear. Talk Africa Radio will seek to help fun this spark of enlightenment, using three major strategies.

1. The African Story Teller:
Storytelling, both for entertainment and for teaching, is a well-known African practice. We intend to extensively use this practice for, other than dance and music, nothing comes close to its utility as an expression of what it is to be African. We shall use the rich oral tradition; a tradition embedded in the social consciousness of the African society, in the tangible form of the elders, as championed by the griots’ poems, artists’ songs, and playwrights’ drama plays, to bring wisdom to bear. We shall employ techniques such as reading stories from well-known books that are abounding with African wisdom. Each reading will be followed by a reflection and interpretation of what it means to be African today. The intended goal is to elicit pertinent questions; questions that will steer us into the direction where learning is intended to action, and not simply to get a good paying job. Building upon the past is especially important for only then can true development occur. As Lonergan has said, “For we can learn inasmuch as we can add insight to insight, inasmuch as the new does not extrude the old but complements and combines with it”[1].

2.      The Socratic Method:
This question and answer method leads to self-discovery. We believe the African people and all those persons who regard the continent as home are the experts about what is really going on and what to do about it. These people have gone to bed hungry, cold and hurting; they have walked through mud, and dust to go to school; have waded streams barefoot, to go to places; they have braved forests and jungles looking for firewood. They have smelled death in from gunfire, snakebite or curable diseases. Yes, they have been dispossessed of property and had no recourse to the law for the law is corrupt. They have lived through these and many more.
We believe by using a self-discovery method championed hundreds of years ago by Socrates, we are the best positioned to isolate the many symptoms and to come up with pertinent workable remedies to them. Through a variety of programs that will be set up, most of them will be geared at engaging people to ask and answer questions like, what does it mean to be African; how are black people perceived in the world; what are the existential benefits and threats that are facing the African race, and what can be done about it?
We do not have ready-made answers. That is a prerogative of the gods. However, we, the people, have to generate these solutions and that is what we mean by the Socratic method- Africans finding solutions to their own existential problems. This is very possible for before the advent of the technologically superior colonialists, Africans were sovereign in their own right.
Like all societies, the African village too had mothers who gave birth; fathers who made sure the family had food, and occasionally, to wage war. We know that when the people needed to go about their daily businesses, they did so in a modest manner rather than stroll around stack naked. They clothed themselves, with either plant or with animal products, and they used the same to keep out the elements at night, or in bad weather. We further know that when people fell sick, through trial and error, the medicine people eventually found a remedy, and indeed, water and housing were widely available. We also know that as people grew up, instruction was required as to do so properly; so rites of passage came in handy to handle this; and when someone erred, means were found to exact justice without destroying social harmony. Finally, we know it to be true that when the time came and people died, proper means to ensure decent repose for them and recovery for those left behind came to be widely practiced. With the advent of external influences, much of this systemic growth has been lost but we are hopeful much has stayed in the deep recesses of the African’s consciousness, individual as well as communal, and is waiting for the right time, the suitable circumstances, and the proper means to reemerge.