Nothing astonishes and troubles me in my traverse of Africa and the world more than the naivety and judgmental sentiments I see supposedly knowledgeable men and women display with regards to describing a race, a nation or a people by the ‘sin’ or misdeed of a single person or some persons.It is particularly pathetic and mind-rending how unfounded generalizations and meaningless biases have being hitherto allowed to stand in the way of sound reasoning and good relationships.
There are just three sets of people in the world; the good, the bad and the ugly and they are not exclusively confined to a country or region. Suffice to say that wherever you find humans, you find both positive and negative tendencies and characters on display.
Indeed, it is true that systems and institutions are stronger in certain places than others. This however does not remove or reduce the propensity for people to exhibit anti-societal behaviors everywhere.
Think of describing all South Africans as being xenophobic, all Middle Easterners as suicide bombers or all American business executives as financial schemers. Indeed these descriptions are not true; they are rather sheer generalizations and they should be strongly condemned.
To me, life would be better if we do not build or place barriers in the way of friendships and relationships and feed separatism, favoritism and racism by holding on to baseless sentiments that moves society and the world nowhere.
