Black History Month/Inspire Aspire - Peter Oguntoye, Microsoft Engineer -16 October 2019

Eliud Kipchoge 

Nigeria

Peter started the session by talking about his homeland of Nigeria. He reference the foods, smells, and the interesting fact that Nigeria is significantly above sea level so people have less oxygen generally. 

 Peter talked about the Kenyan marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge and his recent amazing 2 hour marathon run. Peter used this to discuss how activity keeps us busy but that it is important to recognise he difference between ‘keeping busy’and ‘making an impact’.

Experiences moving to the West

 Peter is half German and half Nigerian. He  compared his  life in Nigeria to Germany (at age 14) where he felt marginalised – treated differently because of the colour of his skin. Peter used this example to highlight the importance of being kind to people and treating everyone as human beings. He further discussed the importance of respecting others through his work at Microsoft - identifying the multicultural nature of his work colleagues and the unified power of having the ability to do a job well regardless of where you come from or what you look like.

Google Earth

 Peter looked at his home town of Zaria in Nigeria to show the students.  He showed us where his mum, a doctor worked in the local university - ABU University (the largest university in West Africa). Peter is Christian but he grew up in a predominantly missed Muslim area. He told us about the value of friendship regardless of background – how we attended by Islamic schools and Christian schools. 

 Unconscious bias 

The reason why Peter wanted to use Google Earth was to challenge stereotypes about Africans and Africa in general. When he was growing up he was asked a lot of offensive questions such as “Do you travel to school on a lion?”
 Peter discussed the way in which we asked questions and the importance of not causing offence to others.   His message of ‘having more in common’ was highlighted through his insight of living  in a nice house with ducks, dogs, cats, mango, guava and eucalyptus trees and having livestock who were spared the chopping board due to their  family member status!

Other important messages:

“You might know what you want to become and this might change depending on your personality and character.... but you/we should all enjoy the journey, be able to both think about and dream about what you want to be... Then the  trick is to work hard towards achieving it.” Peter Oguntoye, 2019