Introduction
The Need for Radical Inclusion
Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
—FRIDA KAHLO
In the summer of 2004, when I was still a teenager, I went to the Freetown International Airport in Lungi, Sierra Leone, to board my first international flight to Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire. I had received a scholarship to attend the Red Cross Nordic United World College in Norway that fall. Since there was no way to obtain a visa in Sierra Leone, citizens—those who could afford to—went either to Ghana, Guinea, Senegal, or Côte d’Ivoire to get one. It was my second time on an airplane, but the experience this time was completely different. That first flight had been from Freetown, where I was attending secondary school, to my hometown of Bo to visit my mother. It was in the late 1990s, during the peak of Sierra Leone’s eleven-year civil war. The 151-mile route between the two cities was filled with roadblocks manned by armed rebels; driving cross-country could easily be a death sentence.
That first time I flew, I knew my mother would be waiting to greet me with a hug at the dusty airfield in Bo; this time, there would be no one waiting for me on the tarmac. After I arrived in Abidjan, I remember being scared and uncertain, but also curious. I felt like an outsider (which I was), but I opened myself up to the generosity of strangers, and I was helped at every turn.
The Red Cross Nordic United World College is one of eighteen schools on four continents that bring students together from all over the world. Everything about living in Norway—the food, the music, the language, the culture—was foreign to me. For starters, I found myself shivering violently in the cold as soon as I stepped off the plane, even though I was wearing a suit—and it was still summer. Each of my new schoolmates, 199 young people from ninety different countries, had their own story of how they had come to be in Flekke, a small village amid the fjords of southwestern Norway. Mine was rather straightforward: I had gone through public secondary school, done well in my national exams, and been awarded an academic scholarship. While each of the participating schools focused on diversity and promoted peace and sustainability through education, I had chosen to go to Norway precisely because it was so different from Sierra Leone. I thought different was cool.
During my travels to and from Norway and throughout Europe over the next two years, I was often the only Sierra Leonean in the queues at the border control kiosks. Almost every time, I was pulled aside for extra questioning. It was as if I’d misread the green sign on the lane that said EXIT. NOTHING TO DECLARE. The first and second times I was pulled into a small room and asked to open my bag for inspection I assumed it was routine, but by the sixth, seventh, and eighth times, I knew there was nothing random about my selection. When I compared notes with other students, I discovered that most of my Black and African friends had had similar experiences. That was when I first began to understand that different wasn’t always pleasant. One time, frustrated by this perceived injustice, I chose the STOP. SOMETHING TO DECLARE lane, even though I had nothing to declare. Since they were going to pull me aside anyway, I thought, why not make it easier for them, and save myself the time and the worry? Several hours of questioning later, I decided not to use that strategy again in the future.
Sometimes the officers who questioned me were cradling their rifles in their arms. I’ll never be comfortable around guns because of what I experienced during the civil war, but I tried to stay as calm as I could—to not make any wrong moves or say the wrong things—because I knew that any misunderstanding could have deadly consequences. This was something my mom explicitly warned me about when we fled Bo when it was attacked in the late nineties. She knew my penchant for asking questions and challenging authority. “The person with the gun in hand is always right,” she’d said. Instead, I tried to turn those stressful interrogations into learning opportunities.
It was a skill that would come in handy a couple of years later when I came to the United States. When I matriculated at Harvard College in 2006, I was the only student directly from Sierra Leone. After I received my undergraduate degree, I pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before moving to Nairobi, Kenya, for work. Throughout my academic and professional career, living and working in Norway, the United States, Kenya, and South Africa, I have been either actively or indirectly forced to recognize that I am different countless times.
Looking back today, I can see that I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was a young, Black Sierra Leonean man with blond-tinted dreadlocks, studying biomechatronics at institutions far away from my home. Most of the people I spent my time with did not look or talk like me. Still, I tried very hard to be included. That made it all the more painful when I did not succeed, but it also gave me empathy for other Sierra Leonean young men, who looked and talked like me, but had been left on the margin because they’d lost limbs during our brutal civil war.
I decided to use technology to help them and other people with physical disabilities be more included. For my doctoral work at MIT, I combined multi-material 3-D printing, magnetic resonance imaging, and soft tissue modeling to create novel prostheses. The work attracted notice and in 2014 I was invited to co-host TEDMED—one of the world’s biggest medical conferences—at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. But what I’d hoped would be a joyful event provided yet another lesson in exclusion.
After my talk on the main stage, I was accosted by a drunk on the street just a few blocks from the Kennedy Center. To my surprise, he correctly identified my accent. “Go back to West Africa!” he shouted. “Go back to Sierra Leone where you came from!” I felt angry, humiliated, and also scared for my safety, as he was brandishing a bottle. I thought about the news headline that my mother would read (if it even made the news) should the situation escalate any further: UNARMED BLACK MAN KILLED IN WASHINGTON, D.C. One of the friends I was walking with—a tall white man with a well-built frame from playing lacrosse—stepped in, told him to cut it out, and scared him away. But at the exact moment that I should have felt not just included but embraced by American society, I had been made to feel the opposite.
Of course, I knew that I was far from alone.
If you watched the news any time over the last few years, even for just a few minutes, you would have seen any number of stories about the world’s seemingly irreversible social inequities. In America, Black people were protesting the racial injustices they experienced day in and day out. In Great Britain, there were bitter debates for and against Brexit, most of which turned on who belonged and who needed to be kept out. The cry for inclusion and equity led to major political shifts, some of them positive, and many for the worse. Far-right groups that promote hate, division, and violence became increasingly visible and influential, even in once-stable European democracies.
Inclusion has become a subject of extensive scholarly research. It’s hard to find any modern global institution that doesn’t list it as one of their organizational values. Debates about exclusion and inclusion can tear families apart—or bring whole societies together.
Almost by definition, someone in every group feels excluded sometimes, for any number of reasons. The inclusion-exclusion border is fluid. No one is on one side of it at all times; but across domains, some people are more often excluded than others.
The one thing that’s guaranteed is that everyone involved in exclusion—whether included or excluded—is affected by it, even if they don’t know it. A positive way to look at it is that when we build inclusive solutions, we all benefit, even if we do not know it. As a simple example, wheelchair ramps that increase accessibility for people living with disabilities are also used by parents of all socioeconomic classes pushing baby strollers.
In these debates about inclusion, some people are vocal, some are silent, and many more are in between. There are activists on both sides whose positions, as often as not, are as deeply rooted in history, culture, religion, and tradition as they are in the realities of modern-day life and politics. Whether through legacy systems, legislation, bureaucracy, or just plain hatred for our human differences, systemic exclusion persists and is deepened and made more intractable by the widening socioeconomic disparities that exist in all societies. Social media provides a platform for the most extreme views. If not addressed, systemic exclusion will continue to divide us, leaving us ever more vulnerable to global crises like climate change, pandemics, and threats to our physical and digital security.
This book addresses inclusion, but it is not about its history or science. Its aim is to offer us, as individuals and as a society, some insights into why the fight against exclusion is so important, and a set of tools that can help us if we choose to join it.
I am not suggesting that everyone should believe in the same things. In fact, quite the opposite: research from the world of business and management shows that teams perform much better when they are diverse, and not just in gender, race, language, and all the other crucial aspects of identity that so often divide us, but in opinions and life philosophies. Inclusion as a social construct is about accepting everyone and recognizing all they can contribute to our homes, schools, and communities—not irrespective of their differences, but because of them. On the flip side, exclusion levies emotional, financial, social, and other costs that affect not just those who are excluded, but those who exclude and work to keep that exclusion in place. The more inclusive a society, the more it is perceived as a just society; and just societies are safer for everyone. Simply put, the pursuit of inclusion is in everyone’s interest.
But achieving inclusion is not easy. The topic often feels impossible to address; it is easier to ignore the exclusion and its associated inequities than to fix it. That’s why so many of us hesitate to intervene when a child with a physical disability is left out of a playground game. Or why too few of us speak up to counter sexist statements in boardrooms, even when it’s clear that many of those present are uncomfortable. Or why we join in the laughter, however awkwardly, when a friend in a bar makes a bad joke about gay people or a woman’s place being in the kitchen.
It’s why so many of us engage in “code-switching.” Code-switching is when individuals change who they are—how they talk, dress, or show up—so they can feel seen and feel a sense of belonging. This solution is often necessary for survival, but it can carry a high emotional cost. I know that because I’ve practiced it throughout my life. It’s a temporary solution to a permanent problem. To achieve lasting change, new policies have to be instituted and societies have to shift so that we can be who we are wherever we are, unless we freely choose otherwise.
What we need is radical inclusion, and that cannot be achieved with inaction and silence. We need to take committed actions that drive us toward it. To get at this, I want to share a very specific story with you, about a time in my life when I was called to action and felt I had to speak and act up.
I had left Sierra Leone alone but returned with a wife and a young daughter. In 2018, when I was thirty-one, I was appointed by His Excellency Brigadier General (Retired) Dr. Julius Maada Bio, the president of the Republic of Sierra Leone, as the government of Sierra Leone’s first chief innovation officer. A year later, in 2019, I became Sierra Leone’s youngest-ever minister of basic and senior secondary education.
The two institutions I lead directly serve more than three million people. Both enjoy great autonomy and receive substantial budgetary allocations. I saw my cabinet position in education and my role as the nation’s chief innovation officer as exciting opportunities for me to transform the future for my children and all the other children in Sierra Leone through the power of technology and education. But on the very same day that I took my oath of office as cabinet minister, President Bio unknowingly and unintentionally threw me the most important professional and personal challenge I’d ever faced. He announced to the world that his government, of which I now was a part, would uphold a policy that banned visibly pregnant girls from attending school, which had been passed into law ten years before.
What in the world? I thought to myself. How could I enforce such an unjust law when I had two beautiful daughters of my own? (My second child was born in June 2019.) As someone who had felt excluded himself, and whose academic research was devoted to inclusive technology, it was out of the question. For a moment, I thought about walking away from what until that minute had been my dream job. But if I did, then who would fight for those pregnant girls who simply wanted to learn? I had known the ban existed before I took the job, of course, but I had never dreamed that the president I so admired would want to continue it.
In the chapters that follow, I will tell you how I worked with the president, his government, the ministry, and my fellow citizens in the fight to overturn the ban. The path was neither clear nor linear; I wasn’t sure if, how, or when our efforts would succeed. But what I came to discover, through very painful trials and many errors, was the approach that I have distilled into what I now call the Seven Principles of Radical Inclusion.
People around the globe are working to build more inclusive environments, addressing racial biases, religious intolerance, gender discrimination, migration, security, and climate change, among countless other inequities and issues. In order to succeed, these movements must transcend individuals. However, they are often pioneered and powered by individuals or small groups of people who dedicate their lives, resources, and time toward inclusion. Some of them will stop at nothing, often fighting to their graves until the change they pursue happens. I’ve tried throughout these pages to pay tribute to these heroes. But I also have attempted to highlight the contributions of others who mobilize every day to take seemingly small actions in their homes, schools, and communities—like building a sidewalk ramp for a neighbor who uses a wheelchair, setting up rules that allow all voices to be heard at public meetings, or helping a visually impaired classmate navigate the uneven paths that cross a campus. I’ve learned and am still learning from all of them; my hope is that the principles of radical inclusion will serve as a guide for anyone who joins the fight.
Radical inclusion is radical because it involves a commitment to intentional and persistent action and seeks to help all people who have been excluded, directly or indirectly, due to the tides of history, current actions or inactions, unjust laws, systemic inequities, or reasons that are hard to pinpoint but nonetheless exist.
Radical inclusion isn’t a destination. It’s a journey where the best you can do is to try to get ever closer to the destination, which is a more just society. The principles are also steps, and while they don’t need to happen in the sequence I’ve presented, aspects of each are necessary for inspiring and driving lasting change.
The Seven Principles of Radical Inclusion
1. Identify the exclusion: You cannot promote an agenda of inclusion if you do not identify, name, and recognize all the ways in which people are excluded, as well as the associated impacts and costs of that exclusion. You must define your terms precisely if you are to see the opportunities that exist for solving the problem.
2. Listen, to understand and learn: You have to listen to understand how everyone, including the perpetrators, the advocates, the victims, and the silent observers feel; how they are impacted by and how they benefit from exclusion in society. Only then can you begin to build a case for radical inclusion that works for everyone. Oftentimes, the ones you disagree with the most are the ones you should listen to the most attentively.
3. Define your role—why you, why now? You must define the role of all actors—active and silent—both those who are fighting to maintain the status quo, and those who are working to change it. And you must look unblinkingly at yourself. What is it about you and the situation at this time and this location that make it possible for change to occur?
4. Build a coalition: You cannot change systems that are rooted in history and culture by yourself. For radical shifts to occur, you need to identify and mobilize a critical mass of allies. You need as many people and institutions to work and fight beside you as you can find.
5. Advocacy and action: Taking action is the most direct way to enable inclusion. In fact, it is the only way; silent advocacy is not an option. You must make a commitment to take the sustained actions that are needed to remove the exclusion you have identified.
6. Adapting to a new normal: Because change is new, it can be difficult. To make the inclusion permanent, everyone—both the previous excluder and the newly included—needs a framework to respond to, accept, and be a part of the “new normal.”
7. Beyond inclusion: Once the previously identified exclusion has been eliminated and the new normal established, the best way to solidify it is to immediately identify the next exclusion that needs to be addressed, whether in your home, school, community, nation, or the world at large. We must always be working toward a more just society by identifying new areas of exclusion and dismantling them through radical inclusion.
The fight for inclusion is not easy but it is deeply fulfilling. To borrow words of wisdom from a leader who not only devoted his life to the fight for inclusion but died in it, Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In our efforts to reverse the ban against pregnant girls attending school and to build a more inclusive education agenda in Sierra Leone, we went against the largest and most dominant social constructs in our society. The stories I will tell are filled with examples of courage and perseverance, examples that I hope will inspire you. (I have changed the names of some of the people in them, as a courtesy.) When coordinated action is directed toward a shared goal, justice will prevail in time. Someday, perhaps, we will live in a world where no one is made to feel left out, and most important, where no one feels the need to make others feel left out.
1 Identify the Exclusion
You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance.… You have to get close.
—BRYAN STEVENSON
At home in Sierra Leone, I hardly ever use an alarm clock. When I’m visiting rural communities, I’m more likely to be woken up by the kokorioko sound of a chicken, the melodious calls of songbirds, or the Muslim azaan, the call to prayer. In my neighborhood in Freetown what usually rouses me is the deep baritone of a bread seller singing “tapalapa two thousand,” a man preaching the Gospel of the Lord through a megaphone as he walks down the middle of the street, or the beeping horn and revving motor of an okada (motorcycle taxi) transporting early risers to work.
Once roused, I open one eye and reach for my phone, which is usually lying on top of whatever book happens to be sitting on the white table on my side of the bed. Squinting against the light shining through the thin white linen curtains, I turn it on and start browsing through the headlines. Most mornings I am interrupted by a knock on the door before I can click on any of the stories, and a chorus of tiny voices shouting “Dadaaaa, bu waa!” (“Good morning, Daddy!”). As soon as I hear that, I slide my phone under the pillow and lift the blue mosquito net that hangs over the bed so our two children—Nyaanina Sophia, now seven years old, and her sister Peynina Athena, three and a half years younger—can join us. Both love their morning routine, which includes tight hugs and cuddles mixed with tickle attacks and laughter. Nyaanina and Peynina are similar in many ways, yet also very different, so their routines vary accordingly. Nyaanina describes herself as a “love person”; she could easily spend hours expressing and receiving affection, so she gets a longer cuddle. Peynina is eager to begin her daily explorations of the house, so she only wants a quick hug and a kiss on her forehead. Their older teenage cousin, fourteen-year-old Kadija, often follows them into the room and whisks them away to breakfast. Kadija is my elder sister’s oldest daughter but I treat her as if she were one of my own. She moved in with us soon after we returned to Sierra Leone because space in her parents’ home was tight. Also, we wanted our girls to grow up amongst extended family and my sister wanted the same for Kadija.
Breakfast, like every meal chez Krontiris-Sengeh, is an event. My wife, Kate Krontiris, is a social scientist and trained facilitator. That means discussion and debate are always on the menu, no matter the time of day, and everyone is expected to participate fully, even Peynina. Kate and I first met at MIT where we were graduate students. Kate was part of the MIT Africa team that had invited me to speak in the spring of 2012 on the topic of African Youth: Entrepreneurship and Education. Kate and I started dating right after that conference and got married three years later. Those topics have remained constant themes for debate in our home as my life’s work has revolved around them.
My workday is typically between nine and ten hours and, unlike my mornings with my girls at home, it is anything but routine. As cabinet minister, I engage with a cross section of stakeholders including representatives from teacher organizations, civil society institutions, and development partners, and parents who, I’m glad to say, often take me up on my open-door policy. The meetings only stop when I leave my office to attend an external event or make a surprise visit to a school. During those school visits, I regularly find myself at the blackboard teaching. I try to connect with students as often as I can, to better understand their daily realities. In the midst of all this, I’m always on standby to attend a meeting with the president or one of his delegates since, as chief innovation officer, I am his primary adviser on science, technology, and innovation.
I’m quite mindful of the clock during the day because it’s very important to me to be home on time for dinner. Kate, Kadija, Nyaanina, and Peynina usually wait for me to get home so we can eat as a family. We use that time to debrief one another about our days and also debate about topics that concern us. Nyaanina loves being the one to ask, “What’s your peach and what’s your pit?”
In between the start and end of my days, my mind is fully dedicated to work. I try to be fully present at home, although I’m not always successful at that since my work does follow me everywhere. Kate usually makes a point of reminding me to log off and leave my phone far away from the dining table and our bed, but as evidenced by my morning scroll through the headlines, it’s a challenge I’m still working on. I’m successful sometimes, but when I’m not it causes understandable tension and unhappiness.
On the evening of November 20, 2019, when Kate asked me, “How was your day?” I had plenty to tell her. And it wasn’t good.
That morning, less than twenty-four hours after I had been approved by the Parliament of Sierra Leone to be the new cabinet minister in charge of the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, and just hours after I’d been sworn in, I’d slipped into the back of the Freetown International Conference Centre to attend an event. I was a bit late because I’d been meeting my new staff, and the speeches were already underway. On the agenda was a commemoration of World Children’s Day, and then our new president, Julius Maada Bio, would deliver the keynote address.
Students, teachers, civil society organization representatives, diplomats, and heads of development partner organizations all sat quietly in the dimly lit, jam-packed room to listen to the president’s speech on the status of children and their right to education in Sierra Leone. I was physically in the room, but I wasn’t fully present.
My mind was stuck on the image of a girl we had driven past on the way to the convention center. Although my SUV’s dark-tinted windows were closed, I could tell it was windy outside because her long purple skirt was billowing. Her hair was finely plaited and her face shiny and well oiled. Had her skirt not had a flowery pattern, I would have assumed she was wearing a uniform and on her way to school. She waved for us to slow down, and my driver stopped to let her cross the road. As she paused in front of our vehicle to let an okada in the opposite traffic lane pass, I noticed she was pregnant. She couldn’t have been any older than sixteen—about the same age as the schoolgirl I happened to be sitting next to in the auditorium. She could have been attending the same school as my niece Kadija, I thought. How did she get pregnant, and how was her family and society advocating for her future? Under the current government policy, she wasn’t allowed to attend school and I wondered if she would ever go back. Thank goodness, I thought, that the policy would soon be overturned.
Girls and young women face unique challenges, whether in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere, that prevent them from safely accessing classes, staying in school, and obtaining quality education. In many places, girls, or certain groups of girls, are denied access to education purely because of their gender, depriving them of their best opportunity for improving their lives, and perpetuating the cycle of intergenerational poverty. The problem had been at the back of my mind for years. Until the challenge it poses to equity and justice is addressed, development at local, national, and global levels will be stunted. Finally, I was in a position to do something—something radical—about girls’ educations.
Copyright © 2023 by David Moinina Sengeh
