Hasty Generalization

I just realized we did not take any pictures at all, but that’s beside the point now.

A few weeks ago we went on a field trip to Apapa Port and lodged at Bible Guest House, Palmgrove, Lagos. Splendid was the experience, fam. Service was great, you to your room, tasty dinner and breakfast that could last the whole day. You should have seen the room, I was surprised the school could even afford it for every one of us.

— —
What else did I say to sweeten the tea? I can’t remember now, but that was the narrative I painted to this pleasant stranger I met one day. It wasn’t a poor experience but it was surely a spiked one I narrated to him. I made it seem extravagant; it was like he wished he went with us.

If he knew any other person who was on that trip with us, he would have learned sorely fast that what I narrated to him was not the case at all. But he didn’t, and at that point, I could have made him believe anything I wanted.

— —
I made this point to him when he kept insisting the socio-economic situation for immigrant Nigerians in the US was exactly the way his cousin painted it and nothing else. Chimamanda Adichie in her talk “The danger of a single story” said, the problem with stereotypes is not that it is untrue, but that it is incomplete.

Hasty generalization is like a sub-context of what I’m trying to talk about here.

Deji Joseph