My Generation: Our peers and the older generations.
A challenge we face also has to do with the views of our
peers and older generations. This is usually in regards to the negative views
and ideologies they have.
For instance they believed and think that certain things
that people will/and have studied have no place in the society simply because
they consider them to be a “white” people thing or only for the “first” word
countries however in the world we live in today that is a very unintellectual
way of reasoning.
I know someone who was being hounded due to the fact that he
wanted to study aeronautic engineering and by hounding I really do mean the
whole nine yards where he was called words and being insulted for being stupid
and a fool. Long story short he opted for something else as people usually do
in such situations.
However I thought about it and thought about it this way, if
he studied and graduated he could have easily gone back to his country
(Tanzania) and taught others. There are military planes and other commercial
and private airlines within the country that will need to be serviced and maintained.
Let’s face it paying a foreign contractor to do the work will be very expensive.
It is an untapped market that could easily flourish and bloom into something
bigger and very profitable.
This is a story of one individual but in reality there are
many youths who have all this discouragement around them which in turn will
impede their personal growth but worse off this will be a deterrent to the
progress of a society as a whole and it will cost us financially to outsource such
these services.
A lot of African cultures if not all are of a collectivistic
nature and although this has its merits when it comes to personal growth this
is the worst system to have grown up in. Case and point I know people who have
not gone to further their studies simply because they are older than their
other cousins and the care of their siblings is left to them because the
parents simply say they are old now and they did their part with the older
siblings (not financial aspects). In truth a parent’s responsibilities to their
own offspring is not supposed to end until that child is able to stand on their
own two feet. People who won’t leave home because of they will be made to feel
guilty about abandoning their family. Unfortunately this means that the person
will never have self-growth. There comes a point and time in everyone’s life that
your first priority is yourself, unluckily for us though, who have lived in our
very collective family dynamics.
“An older person always knows best.” WRONG. This train of
thought is why we can’t get hired or it ends up in us getting fired. It is note
worth that a lot of the youth in Africa are starting up companies, own and
manage companies but a majority of the companies and people you will deal with
are a generation or more older and they think they know it all because they
believe that they did something that worked or used a certain method then that
will always work and be that way. The world is ever changing and something that
worked yesterday won’t necessarily work today or tomorrow. Questioning someone
older is considered rude and wrong but without doing so we will again never
progress. There was a point and time people use to fish by throwing sticks of
dynamite however why don’t we do that now? It’s outdated and we have found
better ways to fish. People’s train of thought has to evolve and progress as
well. Just because someone wants to do things differently or has ideas that are
contrary to your own doesn’t make them less right or their methodology less
accurate. Thinking that due to a person’s age and years of work under their
belt they are always right is a mistake. If I was to ask one of my mother’s
peers about the best way to advertise to my generation she will talk about
billboards and things that worked in her generation. Tell them about social
media and activations they will have a blank look on their face (tried and
proved). Not saying that they are all like that but I’m sure we have all come
acroos people like this.
This kind of ideology
“An older person always knows best.” is
another problem we have in our quest to better ourselves.
Jah Bless
