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The act of telling one’s story is creative, re-creative as well as liberating. Storytelling is a healing art. Each of us finds meaning in life through the different categories of storytelling, such as plot, character, conflict and style. By weaving these categories into our own life stories, we simultaneously play the role of storyteller, listener, actor and reader. As an individual, it is not just the stories I tell about myself that affect the shape and direction of my self-creation, but the stories others tell about me as well. These stories help to create the social climate in which my life is lived and determine the range of options and opportunities by which it is bound. Insofar as I am a social being, what others say about me is as important as what I say about myself. In other words, I cannot separate my story from the story of my community.

The storyteller decides the cast, arranges the scene and decides which scenes to leave out or not. As we watch world leaders act and act and events unfold in the world today, we need to rediscover the art of storytelling. For Africans, economic and social freedom are not enough. Contrary to what many opined, political freedom is not even enough. The most important freedom, in my view, is cognitive freedom. Cognitive freedom is the freedom of Africans to tell their own stories based on their own experiences, so as to understand the present in light of the past. Africans must own the story they tell, and take control of telling it in their own language and metaphors. We need cognitive freedom to help us resist the danger of being storytyped (stereotype) again, as our ancestors were. Not only Africans, but men and women of goodwill across the world, need to ensure that world leaders do not distort the story of our world-  we are all members of the same ecosystem, a community of people united by love not by bombs. Follow us as we explore this theme on May 24 in one of the world’s oldest citadel of knowledge, Oxford University, London.