Congratulations Class of 2021! The world is a new place and despite its inconceivable constraints, you have got this.
Paradoxically, it is directly from constraints that critical thinking and innovations emerge, as demonstrated in the four short excerpts I am about to read from Nigeria, Japan, Egypt, and the new world.
Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and his Arrow of God novels may lead to the easy conclusions that the heroes of each novel, Okonkwo and Ezeulu are ” typical Igbo Umuaro men,” used by the author to portray the “self- fragmentation of Igbo society” during the colonial era (Lindfors, 17). However, there are many more readers of Things Fall Apart who perceive a resilience in Umuaro society, which in their view ensures that the center holds, even if things have fallen apart (Sarr, 1993). … the source of that resilience is in the twin notions of duality and balance, central to the Umuaro view of life and the world. [You can] argue that these notions form the basis of the ambivalence at the core of the novels and that they help to explain the Igbo man’s tendency to look both backwards and forwards.
Additionally, in Achebe’s Arrow of God, Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu, is caught in the middle of a heated cultural-religious scuffle between the natives and a new religion that threatens to disrupt social cohesion and Umuaro life in general. Ezeulu explains to his son Oduche, why he must join the new (White) religion: ‘The world is changing’, he had told him. I do not like it. But I am like the bird Eneke-nti-oba, who when his friends asked him why he was always on the wing, he replied: ‘Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching’ (Achebe, 1986b, p. 45).
Ezeulu alludes to the Igbo philosophy of duality and difference. Among the Igbos they believe that ‘Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it’ There is no one way to anything—there is no absolute anything. This Igbo principle rethinks excess and tradition, flexibility and adaptation, and centers dualities.
In Japan, the Japanese engineer Nakatsu saw a blend with nature as the solution to a vexing problem. During the 1990s he was working on the bullet train to allow for faster travel times, but the existing design had an inherent drawback: the flat prow or face of its locomotive would create ear-shattering noise when moving at high speeds. Nakatsu , an avid birdwatcher, observed that the tapered beak of the kingfisher bird enables it to dive into water with barely a ripple. Nakatsu’s solution for the bullet train? give the locomotive a beak. The locomotive’s bird-like nose reduces the train’s noise as it speeds along at two hundred miles an hour.
For my excerpt from Egypt on the nexus of critical thinking and constraints, I chose a fable and like all the best fables, it is a bridge to the truth…
Once upon a time, in Egypt, there was a camel merchant who had three sons. When he passed away, he left 17 camels. In his will, he had stated that the eldest son should get half of the 17 camels, the middle son should get one-third, and the youngest son one-ninth. As it is not possible to divide 17 into half or 17 by 3 or 17 by 9, the three sons fought over the camels, but to no avail. They decided to go to a wise man for a solution.
The wise man listened patiently to the three brothers and after giving this some thought, brought one camel of his own and added it to the 17, making the total number of camels 18. Then, he began to read their deceased father’s will. Half of 18 = 9. and he gave the eldest son 9 camels 1/3rd of 18 = 6. he gave the middle son 6 camels 1/9th of 18 = 2. So he gave the youngest son 2 camels. Now let’s add this up: 9 plus 6 plus 2 is 17 and this leaves one camel, which belonged to the wise man who took his camel back. Finally, the excerpt from the new world states that automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a ‘double-disruption’ scenario for workers.
We estimate that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms. The top skills which employers see as rising in prominence in the lead up to 2025 include critical thinking and analysis as well as problem-solving, and skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility.
Class of 2021 these are skills Ashesi cultivated in you for four years and which you applied during the constraints of the last year.
Class of 2021, You’ve got this!
Congratulations!
