YouSaid · the spoken record

Dipo Faloyin

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-04-22
most recent: 2022-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so once you kind of accept that and appreciate that you're not on your own, I would say to any young writer, you know, if you're finding it difficult, there's no right that isn't finding it difficult. But as long as you're motivated to carry on and inspired by your topic, then you can't go wrong. And I will certainly motivate it and inspired to write this book.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, I mean, I did it and I sort of just got up and just like, I literally just went to go lie down for like 10 minutes. I just had a little lie down, a little prayer. And it was just an incredible moment of relief and joy. I say to writers, you know, it's also a very lonely experience writing. And writing is hard. And, you know, often writing is depicted as something that's just, you see it in films where someone will just sit in their computer and just crack it out. But there are ups, there are downs, there are, you know, it's communicating. It can also be joyful, but it's hard.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We stopped seeing Africa as a vast swaths of arid red soil where nothing but misery grows and a place that's only good for either handout or safari, but a place of richness, of experience, of people, and of a future that can be anything. And I really, really hope that that really is the main takeaway of the book.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“they can be and how they can contribute to the future and looking to the future i just i really believe that this is a really great opportunity for individual countries to if respected to really make an incredible mark across the world culturally and in you know really really special ways and so i really just hope that you know when people when people read this book they feel a certain connection with countries that they may never have visited cultures they may never have visited experiences, challenges, joys, food, they start to realize that a lot of the traditions that they enjoy today came from African countries and they start to appreciate that and understand that. And, you know, as we discussed earlier, understanding that helps build a connection, helps build an appreciation for the humanity of other people.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My main message is that Africa's place that can be anything and everything. It is a place of where there are people doing incredibly wonderful things every day and there are people who are doing incredibly terrible things every day and everything that exists in between. It is me, it's my family, it is our culture, it is our community, and there are so many so many similar examples of that throughout the region. And what I want people to understand is that Africa is a place that, like anywhere else, can be anything. It's not limited to a single story. It's a multitude of stories. It's a multitude of experience. It's a multitude of identities. And I hope that by understanding the context behind our history and our presence and the parts of our history and our presence that are shared, that you better get to appreciate those individual identities and how special and wonderful.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially across Central Africa, that I think there are really lots of really great opportunities to experience. A lot of people telling their own stories in their own languages, in their own accents.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cultures to the world representing their cultures and their own accents in telling the stories of their presence to the rest of the world and doing it in a way that doesn't try to cater towards the rest of the world, but doing in a way that makes sense to them and that people and trusting that others will understand because, you know, a lot of these feelings and emotions are universal. You look at sort of you go through writers at your mandara DG and you look at kind of Nollywood and the impact that's had there are lots of incredible journalists, a lot of great literary magazines on the continent like the Republic and others who are really really pushing about boundaries. I get so excited when I see this in so many different avenues whether it's food and music and art and fashion. I think that there's so much going on. There are lots of really great youth-led activism movements.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think we have such an incredibly rich cultural influence. And I would my first thought goes to sort of the Afrobeat artists personally, they are doing such an incredible job in bringing”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would have shown that they had learned from mistakes of the past, but instead they focused on, you know, a lot of the same imagery, sometimes literally, you know, they literally went out of their way to replicate, I believe, you know, a 1970s image of the queen and Prince Philip standing at the back of Range Rover and Open Top Range Rover. You know, stuff like that shows that we're still not, we still don't understand the impact that colonization had. And I think it's so important that by recognizing if when we do recognize that, then that will change with action. And I think that's why it's so important that this is taught in schools so the next generation genuinely understand what Empire was all about”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some drums in Bob Marley's house, and everyone will be happy. But instead, Jake People said, we don't have time for that. That's not what interests us right now. What interests us is our future and who we are as a people and how we're governed in the future. And I think that was an opportunity for the royal family, the British government, to learn from the past and to face it head on and say, look, here are the mistakes. It's more than just acknowledging it in a speech. It's saying It's acknowledging it through actions. It's saying, okay, look, here is the mistakes we've made in the past. We're not just going to come here and try and charm you and wave and smile. We'll listen to you. You tell us how you see your future. And if there's anything that we can do to contribute to that, to help, we can do that. If your message is, don't worry, we'll take it from here. We'll do that too. And in the future, like we do with other countries, we can build a new relationship.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not happening quick enough, but it's essential. You know, this book is not just about African history. This is British history. This is about who Britain is today and who Britain can be in future. The Commonwealth and the Empire and the contributions of people from across the Empire have had on British culture today is huge. And by recognizing that it'll become a lot harder to make the same mistakes in the future. One example I'll give recently on the royal visit to Jamaica, I think that, well, as we saw, the royal family received huge pushback from Jamaicans. And I think that that could have gone very differently. You know, I think the path they chose was the traditional path of, oh, we can just go there and smile and wave and charm the local population and bang.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For people to find or for young people to believe that they had a specific voice and they had specific skills that could be brought, that could be brought to the movement in their own individual industries. And that was really, really key. And that's where we saw so many different industries trying to respond to the protest. And so I think that looking forward, I think that that's something that's going to be really key. By doing that, it's harder to break down into ethnic groups. You know, you break down into individual people with individual skill sets that can offer something to try and change the future. And I think that's something that was both at the NSA's movement and with the George Floyd movement were really key in ensuring that there was real global impact from both movements.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was what was incredibly important about that moment for me is that they had learned a lot of the lessons of the past. They had decided to decentralize power within the movement. There was no one leader. People brought to the table what they could. It wasn't about one figure saying that they're going to say the country from the government. You know, it was about saying, you know, okay, look, what can you offer? Okay, you bring that. You know, what can you offer? Okay, you bring that. Let's put the lives and humanity of those who were suffering. Let's make sure that they're the ones who are at the forefront, not individual, not, you know, people trying to fight for power. And I think that that was such an incredible moment. And I think, you know, that was something similar that we saw doing the George Floyd protest. This decentralizing of power, this willingness.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When similar incidents happen around the world, it's important that we see these people for who they are. And by showcasing and putting dignity at the front of everything we do, that helps people to connect to other people as human beings.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's so important that we see people as people. You know, one thing that we've heard time and time again recently during the Ukraine-Russia crisis is there have been a number of people who've come out to try and explain somehow that, oh, this particular migrant crisis is different from the crisis that we see in Africa and the Middle East, implying that Africans and people in the Middle East are used to suffering and nobody in the world is used to suffering. And that's the consequences of treating people without dignity, treating them like they're not really humans, that they're just people who are born to suffer, you know, they're just stock images. You lose the humanity. And rightly so, you know, the humanity that we're rightly showing to Ukrainians who are fleeing a crisis right now, we need to remember that humanity when...”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is far more variation in the stories we tell and how we tell these stories, but always to ensure that we bring context to the table. We explain the full crisis and we give people that time and space to tell their own stories where possible. And I think that if hopefully through this book, if it reaches as many people as possible in the media, we can start rethinking what is necessary. There are unfolding crises and there are many different ways of telling the story. It's important to show the human impact of a crisis. You have to ask yourself, is this necessary? Who does this image serve? Does it serve me? Does it serve the notion that what we need here is a quick fix? Or does it serve the long term? And I think that that's something that is incredibly important to remember.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the media probably play the biggest role in reinforcing stereotypes and have a great opportunity to break them down in the book I talk about popular culture and the charity campaigns that continue to play the continent, you know, the idea that Africans are helpless and they can't help themselves and the imagery that we use consistently of starving destitute Africans who don't have a voice who can't speak images that are meant to shock people into donating rather than giving people the context that they need to understand a crisis and then from there to try and then help where appropriate you know it's in the images that populate books and films and in the words pressed into books that we understand Different worlds, and unfortunately for Africa, pretty much as Chama Mando and Dichi sort of.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The negative stereotypes of Africa, you know, whether it's in tech or it's in business or finance, you know, or politics, every single person is in an industry where they look upon Africans and Africa in a very specific way. And I think people out the diaspora can play a really, really important role in telling that story. But I think they should always ensure that where you can you're working in coordination with people on the ground to do that.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge role that I can play, and I'm trying to play in trying to sort of tell the story of Nigeria and of our history and the history of West Africa and as many different histories as I can through trying to speak and give a voice to those on the ground where they want that sort of, where they want that sort of coordination, trying to ensure that you're best representing the genuine views of those on the ground in your own country. So I think the people in Diabolic can play a huge role in every single, I don't think there's a single industry that isn't impacted by”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think they could play a huge role in the diaspora, certainly. I think it's incredibly important whether you are a journalist or you're in the charity industry or you're writing books, making films to try and use your position to ensure that the fullness of your own personal experience is represented where you can, but also to coordinate with people. I use Lucy, but back home and to work with people on the ground to help build the bridges between you and your own nations to try and say, look, how can we, if you are in that position to better tell the stories of those who are working on the ground? Even, you know, I'm someone, my family, I live in Nigeria. I live in either London, I'm back in Nigeria a lot. My experiences of being Nigeria is different to those who are on the ground there across the country every single day. And I think that there's a huge...”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Histories are just too specific with each country. Everyone has to try their best to acknowledge the histories in their own countries and then move on. And I think those who have managed to sort of really understand and acknowledge their history are those who have been able to look to the future and to try and start creating a path that is effective.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matters the most. What matters is when people decide to take action that is the most effective towards their people. And you see it at the moment with someone like Bobby Wyne, you know, probably the first serious millennial political candidate to get relatively close or to build a really strong following, you know, that there is no guarantees that should he get into power that he's successful. But hopefully he'll learn from the mistakes of Museveni, who was himself once a young, exciting power who overthrew a sort of a stale leadership. So the key thing is just action, it's learning from the past and trying to work out as many different ways of healing the wounds that have come from these quarrels amongst ethnic groups. But again, that's going to be different with every country.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking towards the future in a way that benefits as many people as possible. Often sometimes it happens, you know, suddenly, as we see in Tanzania, you have people who take the moment when it comes. But often it happens when you get a sort of a consensus amongst multiple ethnic groups to try and look towards the future rather than constantly rehashing the challenges of the past. And again, that will come naturally as we move further away from, I think, the independence era and the challenges that that face as I speak to my nephew and nieces, I tell them that, you know, it's all about action rather than promises of the future. You hear a lot of kind of vague promises of hope across the continent and, you know, the average age is in the 30s. And it's like, that's not necessarily what...”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, things go right when in terms of sort of demographically, it's easier in countries where you have less ethnic different ethnic groups, often smaller countries, you know, like Botswana, which is largely dominated by one ethnic group. Things go right when you have people who are”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Numbers of British Prime Ministers you have in the US they're still struggling with the democracy and their most recent election you had a sitting president challenge the challenge the results the way that was reported is very different to the way that would have been reported if that was an African country and so understanding the dynamics at play between you know founding fathers and in Western influence is incredibly important to understand governance across the continent”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the colonialists turned up and broke everything up, divided about 10% of all ethnic groups were split up during the colonial era. That is an incredibly different dynamic to play out, especially in countries the border each other and you have people of the same ethnic group living in different countries that in itself creates a certain instability. And so a lot of those, you know, with time, a lot of those challenges are being overcome in some countries and other countries it might take more time, but you're seeing a lot of countries as they move further away from the independence era, the influence.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Office. In many cases, that's what we have in a lot of countries. And that has an impact. It's a thing that lingers in the background. But there are all these dynamics at play. It's not just that Africans don't have any sense of the importance of democracy or they don't understand the importance of community ownership because that's largely what the continent was about before the colonial powers turned up. There were lots of larger kingdoms, but many people were living in smaller communities. And they were being governed by smaller communities where there was a lot of democratic say there was a lot of sort of community input in how everyone was governed. And so that is all there in the history of many countries, but it's something that was put to the”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who felt like it was their turn to reap some of the rewards that maybe they were not able to reap when Clonia Powers had favored other ethnic groups during the colonial era. So that's probably the biggest impact that on governance around the continent, but also just the fact that how many different ethnic groups are in each country and the impact that the impact of Britain's divided rule policy, which deliberately found the most corrupt men within the country armed them people who are very slick to a bribe, gave them power and influence. And some of those cases were happier to hand over to those sort of people. And, you know, in many cases, many of those people are still alive today. I use the example that in the book, for Americans, imagine if Alexander Hamilton was still walking around running for”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Difficult for them to give up power because they felt at the time that they'd been the ones to fight for their countries. They'd been the ones to push the colonial powers out. And so in many cases, that was the initial dynamic that these countries had to deal with. These founding fathers who had defeated incredible odds to gain their country's freedoms. And so that dynamic plays out in many circumstances. And as you rightly said, these are shared experiences, but the experiences differ. Some of these men were heavily influenced in the years after by Western powers who tried to play, continue playing ethnic groups off of each other, especially during the Cold War. Some of these military men were influenced internally by ethnic groups.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most common thread was that impact of independence for leaders. Many of them were military men who fought incredibly hard for the independence of their nations. And they worked against incredible levels of white supremacy, incredible suffering, and racist afflictions upon their nations. And they fought incredibly hard and they fought incredibly long. And eventually they won. And what then followed was a period of time where you had these men who were certainly better suited for the battlefield at the top of their countries. And at that point, it was”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of our own making, but let's see how we can make it work for the future. And in many cases, many countries have done an incredible job. In some countries, you know, that has been incredibly challenging. And, you know, they've struggled with civil wars moving forward. But it's not something that is easy. And our starting point was not something that very much was our own fault.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is effective for the future, but it's not an easy discussion in any way. So many countries that are incredibly big, that are full of so many different languages. In 1960, still remained today. Who does that work? One wrong borderline here and a smaller nation can get completely eaten up. You know, how do those smaller nations set up for themselves? And it would have been easier for many of the larger countries to try and eat up the natural resources, but they showed an incredible amount of restraint that the European colonial powers, unfortunately, did not show. And that again is really testament to the independence leaders at the time who recognized that this is the 1960s. Nigeria, where I'm from, is a country that is younger than my parents. The rest of the world is moving on in scientifically, technologically, culturally. And so the independence leaders recognize this and decided that, you know, maybe it's time to move on and try and see whether we can make these countries, though they're not”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, almost during the independence era of the 1960s, the African countries through what is now the African Union decided to meet and discuss this very question, should we stick or twist? Should we try and redraw our boundaries? Should we try and come up with a new solution for the future? And to their credit, what they decided was that it is better to stick. And the reason it's better to stick is because How do you even begin to partition countries when you have larger nations like Nigeria and South Africa and Kenya, Ghana and bigger powers both militarily and politically who would just work in ways that would likely try and benefit themselves? How do you even begin to redraw these boundaries? How do you work this out in a way?”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's to pain a better picture. It's to give context to the circumstances so that the bigotry that continues that perhaps there's something inherently wrong with Africans. The same bigotry that existed in 1884 at the Berlin Conference existed today. You see it in many Western magazines that keep asking, what's the problem with Africa, the African problem. And when you just do a little bit of research, you start to realize that what you might consider as a problem is actually a success story that they've actually managed to get to this point many countries against the odds because, as I said, toppling over was built into the foundations of these countries. And yet they've not only managed in many cases to survive, but also to have huge influences on the rest. Of the world, culturally, politically, and in so many different arenas.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deadlier fight during the independence era of many of these regions. But, you know, the idea that your border can The idea that your border can shrink and it can grow without your control in which ethnic groups live on borderlands. And one moment they complete Cameroonian. Another moment they could be Nigerian. That has created a lot of conflicts. But we won't hear about that a lot of times when we talk about potential civil wars or fights between countries. All we hear is, oh, there goes another African conflict. There goes another fight between African countries. Why can't they get their act together? But it's not us who are to blame for this. It's the European powers who came and drew these borders and created countries that were effectively built to topple over. And so the fact that so many of them are still standing, in fact, is, you know, in many ways is a success story. And it's not my intention with this book to simply ignore all the challenges that countries might face.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That were created by pretend borders being drawn by not understanding what was going on on the ground. And there has been conflict between Nigeria and Cameroon because over border that neither countries had anything to do with. Across the world, about 30% of the world's borders are in Africa, but over 60% of disputes that have been taken to the international courts over borders have come from the continent because in many cases A lot of countries don't know where their borders begin to end. There are rough borders drawn into mountains because on the ground a lot of the explorers didn't bother visiting. Again, it wasn't in their interest. What was in their interest is extracting the natural resources that they could for themselves. Luckily for a lot of countries in Africa, a lot of these natural resources weren't fully discovered by the colonial powers or else they would have been afar.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible. You had a lot of people drawing borders and boundaries in regions that they never visited. They made just wild assumptions about different areas. And so one example is the border between Nigeria and Cameroon and the Aquafe River. Now, whether it's in river or an estuary matters because it expands, it contracts in certain times, it shifts. And what happens when it does shift is that the border changes. Now, what is around that border is an area called the McKinsey Peninsula. And it is an oil-rich region. Now you have two countries and you have epta groups in that region. There's oil there. The border keeps changing. Both countries want that oil. Ethnic groups want control of that oil. They want their own ethnic groups to enjoy the splendors of that oil. What comes next? Naturally, it's conflict. These are conflicts.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better understand Nigeria to work to help Nigeria better face the future rather than forcing certain things constantly onto the continent. And that for me is the key thing. That's the impact that the Berlin conference had on Africa is the sort of uncivilized people who could not look after themselves. A lot of that mentality has continued today. And I think that's why it's incredibly important that we work as hard as possible to create a different narrative.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When word spread around the world of all of the atrocity, he wasn't punished, but he was eventually forced to give up the DRC. That's the birth of the DRC. And as a country, they've had to try and work it out ever since, you know, when that is the basis for your existence. It is incredibly difficult. And there are these stories all across the continent. And it's understanding that you get to understand the present state of many countries. You know, both the successes that they've had in navigating these incredibly difficult challenges, but also the difficulties that they've had in getting these ethnic groups to cooperate even up until now. That paints a far richer picture, a better mosaic of what's actually happening. And when we better understand that, we can work where necessary to help these countries as an OJ myself, if I want to, you know.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“quickly King Leopold realized that running culture was incredibly expensive and Belgium was spending money and they couldn't have Belgium spending money so they put previously free Central Africans to work as slaves and by the end of King Leopold's reign about half the population of Central Africa had been murdered just trying to force them to extract as much natural resources to pay off King Leopold's basically his boredom and the devastation is unthinkable. The lives that were lost, the communities that were destroyed, the ethnic groups that were broken up and”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The conference King Leopold II of Belgium was an incredibly bored man who did not have any real responsibilities. He needed something to do so he convinced the other colonial powers to give him a large chunk of land that was about 10 times the size of Belgium in the center of Africa.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was to build things that were unstable, which meant that it would be a lot harder for those individual countries to rise up against the European powers. If you have a country that has a hundred different languages, three or four large ethnic groups who don't speak the same languages, who don't worship the same gods, whose moral compasses don't align in the same way, it becomes incredibly hard for all those individual ethnic groups to create enough cohesion to overthrow the European powers. So building these unstable countries was part of the plan so that for as long as possible, the European powers could take and extract as much as they could. You look at probably the best example is what happened with the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was the first nation to be created after.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What great riches were there on the ground? And each country unsurprisingly came back and said, this looks like a pretty great place. Let's see what we can take for ourselves. And so the conference really set the ground rules for the scramble for Africa, for what is effectively a large-scale invasion of the continent. They all agreed that firstly, they will have the right to do it. They had agreed that they were, if anything, gifting Africans the three C's, Christianity, commerce, and civilization. There was this idea that Africans were uncivilized. And the European presence would civilize them. But in reality, all the Europeans wanted was to extract as much as they could from the continent. And so what they didn't do was try and build stable countries. That wasn't in their best interest. What was in their best interest?”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think it's important to remember that these are artificial countries. They were not created by the Africans on the ground that the European colonialists met. There was no continent-wide agreement. There was no great big African conference where everyone sat down and tried to make a case for their own personal communities for centuries before the Berlin conference, you had large African kingdoms, you had small ethnic groups, you had nomadic groups and everything in between. What happened in 1884 was that the great European colonial powers came together and basically decided that they each wanted a chunk of this region. They had, they had sent explorers people who we lionized in schools into the region to discover.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's not trying to put up border walls between these countries, trying to say, you know, everyone just ignore each other and leave each other alone. It's respecting the richness of each individual nation. And by doing that, you can then better understand how these countries, when they choose to intertwine and how the region was created and gives you a sense of what could happen in the future.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unthinkable for the whole of Europe to be judged based on Spain's COVID response, for example. We just would never do that. But it comes so easily when we talk about Africa. And that's the thing that, you know, really, really needs to stop.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think you absolutely nailed it there. It's been a rallying cry for the continent, for people in probably every single region. You hear it all the time. The way in which people speak about the continent, I get pitch stories every day from writing. Makes sense for them and their own people. And so that is something that's for me that constant reminder that this is a place of 54 countries, 1.4 billion people over 2,000 languages, you know, innumerable ethnic groups. It's a complicated place and it should be respected as such.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To people in a way that they can relate to their own experiences. You know, the best ways people have of relating to others who might have grown up in very difficult, different circumstances to them is by trying to connect certain shared histories, certain shared experiences at home. And a lot of the things that people consider as Very specific challenges to Africa are challenges that the Western world has faced and continues to face. But the difference isn't they've had hundreds of years to try and sort a lot of it out, whereas a lot of these African countries are battling with very, very short histories. Ensured that I read widely but also kind of varied as well to hopefully create something that feels like in some places it could feel like a novel, could feel like an academic textbook, but created both knowledge.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the research phase was extensive. One thing that it's a mixture of sort of things that I've read for years and years and information I've been taking in and through my day job advice, but specifically before I started writing any chapter, I'd make sure I did sort of months and months at research and reading and to better understand sort of for each topic, you know, even things in which, you know, I thought I had a pretty strong grasp on to hear as many different voices as possible from around the continent, you know, both history is personal to people. It's not, I didn't want this to be an academic exercise. You know, you want to mix both, you know, historical information. With map reading, with novels as well, because that's such a great way of capturing feeling and tone and moments. So I kind of wanted to bring all that together to tell a story that's successful in understanding.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pushed ever since the colonialists met in Berlin to try and carve up the continent. At some point that has to stop. And when it does stop, I think that we can then start to really have serious discussions about the future of the continent. future of individual countries and how that can be progressed because you know these countries are incredibly young and there's huge Opportunities for change and development for all kinds of different avenues for every individual country to go down. And so I just think that until we start relating to these countries in a way that is actually based on what is actually going on in each individual region, a lot of that growth could potentially be stunted.”
2022-04-22 · Intelligence Squared · Africa Is Not A Country, with Dipo Faloyin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT