Omoju’s TEDxEuston Story

I have always known that representation matters, I just didn’t really understand how important that would be to me. I have thought about this post for a while now. In a way, I know Chikwe and Ike will be like, “Madam, slow down small now, biko, save you?” But TEDxEuston helped save me. Its a long story and I am going to tell it to you now.

Late 2008, my family and I had just moved back from New York. My son was two and my marriage was breaking apart, I was going through an unwanted divorce. It felt like a nuclear bomb had just been detonated. I learned that the body deals with trauma in different ways. My body shut down. I went numb. At first I thought I was going through a profound depression, but I wasn’t, it was just a shut down. I was alive, I could get up, bathe, find something to eat, even remember that I needed to be a mother, but that was about it.

Even in this fog I was certain about something, my identity as I had known it was done. I was no longer the person that I thought I was. The question now became who was I? Who was the real me, the person that existed outside of the couple, the person that will exist beyond the couple, beyond the parent?

During this period I spent most of my time in bed. I was lucky enough to be a stay at home parent with the luxury of time and a life of relative ease. What I ended up doing all those months in bed was ingest massive amounts of narrative. I probably gained the equivalent of a doctorate in Nigerian history. I started the search for my identity with the country of my birth.

I knew I was a Nigerian, but I didn’t know what that meant, or what that could mean. Until I came upon a series of videos from a conference called TEDxEuston. The first video I saw was of Funmi Iyanda.

I had never heard the stories of any Nigerian that grew up in real urban poverty. Her story moved me. I became rapacious, I wanted more. Then came the video of Segun Aganga, the final one that made me say eureka, this is who I can be, this is what I can do, these are my tribe, was the story of Nasir El Rufai.

Between stories from TEDxEuston, Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement, and researching my grandmother’s story as a woman in the world, I knew I would ultimately survive my divorce. I knew that it wasn’t an end but rather a beginning of something else, a something that I didn’t know what, but a something that could connect me to my core essence.

I found a list I had made years before about who I wanted to be, and the things that I wanted to do. Somehow with marriage, I had abandoned those things. The first on the list was attend a doctoral program from a prestigious global institution. I didn’t even bother reading the rest of the items on the list. I fixed my intention on that one thing and that was it. I would now have a goal I could move towards. Five months later I was at Berkeley. Alright, I have achieved that goal, check, now what?

I had no earthly clue what I wanted to be when I got to Berkeley, all I had on my roster was go to a great school, when I got here, I had to make up the rest. I decided to lean heavily on my gut instinct. My grandmother was a prolific entrepreneur, so was my father, so was my brother, clearly this was something that we could be good at, so why not me. So I started looking into things that could teach me about that. I came upon an application to University Innovation Fellows. I applied, I got in, and had to do something big to establish my name on campus as someone to watch. They suggested doing an TEDx event.

It immediately resonated with me, after all, one of the reason I made it to Berkeley was TEDxEuston, I did the event-TEDxEucliveAve-and moved on. Then came the email from TED about an invitation to TEDxSummit in Doha. Whoa, AWESOME SAUCE.

Totally wasn’t expecting that. Hells yeah am going. Little did I know I would meet Chikwe and Ike in Doha, that was four years ago. Whoa, these dudes helped me so much; if they only knew the narratives they brought to the world help me find my identity when I was lost in the wilderness. If that wasn’t enough, they were down to earth and just cool.

If the story stopped there, that would have been enough for me. But it didn’t. TEDxEuston continued to have yet more effects on me. Fast forward a year or two, and our Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave her “We should all be feminist” talk at their event. What a talk. What a talk. Man.

Xmas 2013, there I was in Golders Green, London, chilling with my fam, when the one and only Beyonce blessed us with flawless. WHAT!!!!! Are you f**king kidding me! Chikwe and Ike have created something that has influenced Beyonce. Adichie’s talk was sampled in Beyonce’s top single from her self-titled album on the song flawless. It took me a fresh couple of months just to come back down from that high.

These men had created a venue that showed us who we were, that inspired us to keep reaching, that reminded us that we are more than a people who come from an continent that has been plagued with wars and disease.

Last Xmas, I made up my mind that I owed so much of who I had become to TEDxEuston, that I needed to attend in person. I was lucky I did, because of circumstances beyond their control, last xmas was the last time these gentlemen would guide the ship that was TEDxEuston. Chikwe and Ike, I want to say thank you, thank you for having the courage to create a forum that has touched so many lives. On behalf of all of us that dare to believe in being unabashedly bullish about Africa, I give our profound thanks.