What is your story? When you grow up and talk to your grandchildren, what’s the story that you wanna tell? Will your story be more exciting than your resume? Will you say you woke up, went to work, completed projects, met deadlines and targets, got promoted every other year, didn’t make too many mistakes, but didn’t disrupt very much either? I think of the stories that I want to tell now and a few decades from now if I’m blessed to live that long. Our world today is essentially a grand storytelling competition. We’re all striving to present our own national, cultural, and personal stories in the most persuasive manner. Formerly, it was believed that if you want to poison a people, you must poison their wells. But in this day and age, if you want to poisonous a people, then poison their stories because stories sway people. Stories change the course of policies, politics, and indeed, the world.
It’s very important to be in control of your story and to actively shape it. Africa is a huge, wealthy continent that’s full of young people who will still be alive many years from now. We have hundreds of channels, vast social media presence, local and national newspapers and television stations, as well as a very aware and politically engaged populace. But we did not have a single news channel or newspaper that tells our story to the world like CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera, or The New York Times. Our authors, producers, and journalists are not sitting atop wealthy and powerful international platforms allowing them to inundate other nations with our stories. The foreign press shapes our self-image with their own lens, their own editorial biases, and in their own words. If you have a child, grandchild, or a niece or a nephew, you would have noticed something. They all ask for the same story to be told over and over again, just as we did with our grandparents. We know the story from beginning to end, but we want to hear it again and again because of the manner in which that story is told.
That’s what holds the magic. They sit snuggled by our side, watching our expressions, feeling our warmth, emotions, patience, and our enthusiasm while we speak in terms they easily understand. As an African creator, I need to be grounded but not so saddled by thinking about what I can and cannot do, which keeps me from flying due to self-doubt. As an author and video creator, I will not allow my mind to entertain limitations. I will not permit limitations set by other cultures, organizations, or groups which always follow social or cultural prejudice or preconceptions which tend to follow habit or precedent. I think of the number of times when we’ve had to struggle with this cumulative gravity. It’s the biggest hurdle in the path of innovation, and it kills ideas and the opportunity to step beyond the chains of thinking and behavior brought on by the colonial experience. We Africans have rationalized all of it in the name of practicality, but sometimes we have to be impractical and throw ourselves into the deep end and burn the bridges to safety in order to come up with something that is really transformative, and that is what is.
My Invention School graphic novels will not be like water, colorless, flavorless, and odorless. This is of African awakening, and we are going about finding our flavor. We must inform without making a fuss. We will give our audiences value for time, the time they spend with us. We’ll make our stories compelling. Ethos, authority, and character, which comes with credibility and commitment to the issues that we raise in our stories. This is primarily why I relocated to the African continent instead of the prison-like atmosphere in the Western world. People will trust us. If they do, they see us as an authority on a subject. If they do, they will listen to us. We are leaving an age ruled by emotions and are moving into an age of logic and reason. A logical appeal to our audiences must use data and facts to make a rational argument because you cannot make an assertion with no basis in fact or logic.
A genuine connection with the audience through honest and effective communication is paramount in gaining trust and loyalty. Invention School graphic novels make frequent use of metaphors, which helps the reader process complex issues. When we you give them relatable parallels, it makes our stories more memorable. Because of the inherent brevity necessary in a dense graphic format in book form using short sentences and punchy lines. What is the purpose of what we’re doing? What do I really wanna do, and to what end? Where do I see myself at the end of this journey I’ve embarked upon? In 1976, a globe-trotting journalist, Marian Caplan, traveled to West Africa for the national magazine, Sepia, to discover why a young African American family had taken up life in the small village of Medina, Ghana. That family was mine. Then, just as now, there reverberated across the globe a clarion call for freedom and renewal. If media and storytelling has such a profound impact on minds, my purpose as an element of Africa should be to find and tell such stories that inspire, that motivate, or at the very least, that trigger ideas and conversations in young people worldwide, especially young Africans and their leaders.