Ten Ways to Improve Your Interpersonal Skills

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Don't discount the importance of interpersonal skills in the workplace. How you are perceived by your manager and coworkers plays a large role in things as minor as your day-to-day happiness at the office and as major as the future of your career.

No matter how hard you work or how many brilliant ideas you may have, if you can't connect with the people working around you, your professional life will suffer. The good news is that there are several concrete things you can do to improve your social skills and become closer to your colleagues, all of which will ultimately help you succeed in today's working world.

Here are 10 helpful tips for improving your interpersonal skills:

1. Smile. Few people want to be around someone who is always down in the dumps. Do your best to be friendly and upbeat with your coworkers. Maintain a positive, cheerful attitude about work and about life. Smile often. The positive energy you radiate will draw others to you.

2. Be appreciative. Find one positive thing about everyone you work with and let them hear it. Be generous with praise and kind words of encouragement. Say thanks when someone helps you. Make colleagues feel welcome when they call or stop by your office. If you let others know that they are appreciated, they'll want to give you their best.

3. Pay attention to others. Observe what's going on in other people's lives. Acknowledge their happy milestones and express concern and sympathy for difficult situations such as an illness or death. Make eye contact and address people by their first names. Ask others for their opinions.

4. Practice active listening. Actively listening is a way of demonstrating that you intend to hear and understand another's point of view. It means restating, in your own words, what the other person has said. Your coworkers will appreciate knowing you really do listen to what they have to say.

5. Bring people together. Create an environment that encourages others to work together. Treat everyone equally and don't play favorites. Avoid talking about others behind their backs. Follow up on other people's suggestions or requests. When you make a statement or announcement, check to see that you have been understood. If folks see you as someone solid and fair, they will grow to trust you.

6. Resolve conflicts. Take a step beyond simply bringing people together and become someone who resolves conflicts when they arise. Learn how to be an effective mediator. If coworkers are bickering over personal or professional disagreements, arrange to sit down with both parties and help sort out their differences. By taking on such a leadership role, you will garner respect and admiration from those around you.

7. Communicate clearly. Pay close attention to both what you say and how you say it. Being a clear and effective communicator helps you avoid misunderstandings with coworkers. Verbal eloquence projects an image of intelligence and maturity, no matter what your age. If you tend to blurt out anything that comes to mind, people won't put much weight on your words or opinions.

8. Humor them. Don't be afraid to be funny or clever. Most people are drawn to a person that can make them laugh. Use your sense of humor as an effective tool to lower barriers and gain people's affection.

9. See it from their side. Empathy means being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand how they feel. Try to see things from another person's perspective. You can help yourself with this by staying in touch with your own emotions, since those who are cut off from their feelings are often unable to empathize with others.

10. Don't complain. There is nothing worse than a chronic complainer or whiner. If you simply have to vent about something, save it for your diary. But spare those around you, or else you'll get a bad reputation.

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DNA study shows many African-Americans have Nigerian ancestry

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During the period of the transatlantic slave trade, more than 12.5 million enslaved persons were shipped from Africa to the Americas with about 3.5 million of them from Nigeria.

Today there are communities of people with Nigerian ancestry mostly in Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica who have retained some of their ancestral beliefs and traditions.

In the largest DNA study of people of African ancestry in the Americas, researchers found an overrepresentation of Nigerian genetic ancestry in the United States and Latin America compared to the proportion of enslaved people shipped to these places from regions within modern day Nigeria.

While the finds from the genetic study are largely supported by established narratives and historic records of the transatlantic slave trade, there were also inconsistencies.

The researchers put forward a new narrative explaining the variations in African ancestry in the Americas and how these variations were shaped by the transatlantic and a later intra-America slave trade whose impact was only recently understood.

The study which involved the DNA of 50,281 people of African descent in the United States, Latin America and western Europe was carried out by the consumer genetics company, 23andMe.

The genetic data was analyzed against historical records of over 36,000 transatlantic slave trade voyages that happened between 1492 and the early 19th century.

The overrepresentation of Nigeria ancestry is said to be a result of intra-American slave trade between the British Caribbean and mainland Americas.

Previous genetic studies have shown that African Americans in the US have more African ancestry from populations that lived near present-day Nigeria than from populations that lived elsewhere in Atlantic Africa (Western and west central Africa). In agreement, it was shown in this study Nigerian as the most common ancestry within the US, the French Caribbean, and the British Caribbean.

This is despite, nearly half of the slaves who landed in the United States coming from Senegambia (Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal) and West-Central Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola), a considerable number of the remaining half had their origins in Ghana as well as Ivory Coast.

The overrepresentation of Nigeria ancestry reported was found to be a result of the later intra-American slave trade between the British Caribbean and the mainland Americas.

The intra-American trade which was an inter-colonial trade involving over 11,000 slave voyages within the Americas stretched as far as Boston to Buenos Aires and also Atlantic and the Pacific littorals.

Intra-American trade records show that while the transatlantic voyages were going on, slave traders transferred nearly 500,000 slaves throughout the Americas with most intra-American voyages originating in the Caribbean.

Though the British outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and started intercepting slave ships, the intra-American slave trade continued.

The intra-American slave trade voyages on record sailed until the 1840s as there the slave trade continued in the US and between Spanish Caribbean colonies.

The researchers also reported Senegambia underrepresentation in the Americas such as in northern South America and Central America despite being the source of nearly half of the enslaved persons who landed at ports in the areas.

This underrepresentation was linked to the fact that Senegambia is one of the first African regions from which large numbers of people were enslaved in the Americas.

It was presumed to have resulted in reduced African ancestry in the population. A presumed high mortality rate in the Americas amongst enslaved persons from Senegambia was also given a possible reason.

Also in the study, the United States and the British Caribbean were found to have the highest African ancestry in the Americas. Previous genetic studies have also reported a lower proportion of Latin Americans with African roots compared to the proportion of African Americans in the United States.

This is despite historical records shows that over two-third of enslaved people who arrived in the Americas landed in Latin America with less than 5% landing in mainland North America.

This low representation was presumed to also be due to high mortality among enslaved people in Latin America and a high rate of intermarriage between them and native Americans resulting in reduced African ancestry in the population.

*This article was first published in Quartz Africa

Like most colonial atrocities, German crimes against humanity haunt Namibians

Germany refuses to pay reparations for its crimes in Namibia

In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, film-maker and columnist Farai Sevenzo asks why there are no memorials to those killed in Namibia during German colonial rule.

According to The Namibian newspaper, there was a 2.8% decrease in the number of tourists visiting Namibia last year while some 984,099 visitors had gone through Windhoek airport in the year of Africa's football World Cup in neighbouring South Africa.

When I read these figures, I assumed the slight decrease could only be due to the depressing global economic climate - for anyone who has seen the beauty of this stunning African nation would gladly return there were it not for the cruel fate of the gods of credit, who have ordered the tourists to stay at home instead of travelling to faraway lands.

After all, an elephant in the bush may look better in high definition television.

But as we were reminded in the last week, 107 years before this year's high definition nature programmes, a different kind of visitor had been in South West Africa - as Namibia was known before its independence in 1990 - in search of conquest, not elephants.

Between 1904 and 1908, German occupiers systematically massacred ancestors of the Herero and Nama people for daring to rebel.

Under the leadership of Lieutenant General Lother von Trotha, the rebelling groups were killed or driven into the desert, where thousands died of thirst - all normal practice at the time for conquering armies.

But it was what followed which has cast a century-long shadow over German-Namibian relations.

'Gruesome experiments'

Not content with mere conquest, the Germans placed the survivors in concentration camps, built their colony with slave labour and then shipped off thousands of heads belonging to the dead to Berlin - for the totally barbaric aim of proving the inferiority of the defeated Africans in dubious medical experiments.

Fast forward to free Namibia, which had been demanding the return of these skulls, lost to German storage units.

It is a fact of life that we all value our dead, that the living wish to honour the departed and the ruthless disregard for the humanity of the owners of these heads would weigh heavily on any African.

Much had been written about the parallels of the Namibian genocide with its gruesome experiments surrounding the African dead and the subsequent Nazi holocaust of World War II.

Modern German politicians were quick to offer their regret for the sins of their forefathers and claimed to accept "moral responsibility" for the genocidal crimes of the past.

But no reparations were to be paid to the Herero and Nama descendants of this bloody history.

Instead, the German government says it already pays through development aid and recently announced about $173m (£110m) in aid for 2011-2012.

'Prayer and anguish'

Despite the fact that the Namibian victims of this crime see it as genocide, Germany has never acknowledged it as such and the scars of the past remain fully visible in the present day.

Namibia is not a poor country - fish and beef exports, diamonds and uranium - should be supporting 2.1 million people.

Yet the legacy of German colonialism has left hundreds of thousands without land and German descendants still farm on land that was forcefully taken from the murdered.

It is not difficult to imagine how such a situation may end, particularly as a tiny fraction of the population continues to run the economy and the landless remain without land.

As 20 skulls from the thousands that were taken arrived in Windhoek last Thursday, many voices were raised in prayer and anguish and, Africans being as close to their dead as they imagine their dead are to them, a deep sense of gravitas seemed to overlay proceedings.

But no firm answers were given on the issue of reparations - nor when the Herero and Nama can expect the rest of their ancestors' heads to be returned.

And in present day Namibia, frequented as it is by hundreds of thousands of tourists - German and other kinds - there is no standing memorial to the Namibian dead, no plaque at Luderitz, Swakopmund or Shark Island to mark the sites of German concentration camps or the mass graves of those who died.

Why should such a story matter? For those of us with such short histories, the past is a permanent shadow, forever by our side or right behind us.

Just 27 years before South Africa's Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu - 80 last week - was born, a German army commander was issuing orders, in writing, to exterminate Namibians, drive them into the desert and poison the wells.

There are volumes of records in the Windhoek Archives detailing the massacres and recording every death of enslaved laborers.

Of course, there are those who say we must move on, we must close the chapters on tragic histories.

It is our lot on this continent to forever be urged to forget the past when such a past is so near and is as tangible as a four year old's skull in a medical laboratory far from African lands.

No amount of development aid could erase that.

Great African Civilizations Through History

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West African slave Onesimus taught America the science of vaccination (Video)

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In the 18th Century, Boston, which later became part of what is now called the United States of America experienced a deadly small pox epidemic.

The epidemic killed hundreds of people and there seemed to be no medical solution.

An African, known as Onesimus, who was shipped as a slave from Ghana, provided the therapy, by introducing the principle and procedure of inoculation.

According to what he taught his master, the inoculation worked by extracting the juice of small pox, from an infected person and then cutting the skin of an uninfected and putting a drop of the juice.

It worked.

Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who Onesimus told about this African therapy used this knowledge to advocate for inoculation in the population, a practice which eventually spread to other colonies.

According to Wikipedia, Mather's advocacy met resistance from those suspicious of African medicine.

Doctors, ministers, laymen, and Boston city officials argued that the practice of inoculating healthy individuals would spread the disease and that it was immoral to interfere with the working of divine providence.

Mather was also publicly ridiculed for relying on the testimony of a slave.

Nonetheless, a physician, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, carried out the method Onesimus had described, which involved sticking a needle into a pustule from an infected person's body and scraping the infected needle across a healthy person's skin.

Dr. Boylston first inoculated his 6-year-old son and two of his slaves.

A total of 280 individuals were inoculated during the 1721-22 Boston smallpox epidemic.

The population of 280 inoculated patients experienced only 6 deaths (approx. 2.2 percent), compared to 844 deaths among the 5,889 non-inoculated smallpox patients (approx. 14.3 percent

Boston and London in 1726 and 1722, respectively, performed trials on citizens and, on average, decreased the mortality rate from 17% to 2% of the infected population.

In a 2016 Boston Magazine survey, Onesimus was declared number 52 on a list of the "Best Bostonians of All Time".

Onesimus's name cropped up recently on MSNBC in this Twitter post shared by a certain Osaretin Victor Asemota:

As the world searches for a vaccine to curb Coronavirus and its accompanying COVID-19 disease, let the world remember that an African pioneered a solution for health crisis of this nature ahead of western medicine.

How and why Argentina wiped out its Black (African) population

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Still on Constitutionalism: A wake-up call

Late Nigerian Dictator Sani Abacha

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By Abdulrazaq Magaji

Over the past several months, the restructuring debate has understandably been pushed to the front burner with opinions on the issue being as impassioned as they are divided. Expectedly, every Nigerian appears to have an idea on how, when and what to restructure.

That is the way it should be! But, with popular opinion in support of preserving the continued existence of Nigeria as one, united country, attention should be focused on restructuring to strengthen political structures. It is good that the ninth Senate has activated a nationwide debate on securing a people-oriented constitution.

It might not have been top on the agenda when then Head of State, General Sani Abacha, convoked the National Constitutional Conference in 1994, but, little did he know that he had surreptitiously set the country on the path of restructuring.  Had death not abridged General Abacha’s plans, it is safe to say that all the hot air over marginalization, more imagined than real, and some of the ills we are grappling with, would have been consigned to history.

Reference here is to stillborn report of the 1994/95 National Constitutional Conference. A review of salient provisions of the report shows that, had it seen the light of day, Nigeria would have transformed from a country of contending ethnic nationalities into a modern nation-state in a matter of thirty years! In a manner of speaking, the Abacha draft is the best effort at constitutionalism since independence in 1960.

Sadly, General Abacha died suddenly after holding the country together for five impossible years. Imperatively, survival instincts demanded that General Abacha be disowned by those who succeeded him. The national emergency then was to heal wounds and woo the aggrieved South-west geo-political zone back into the fold. It was, therefore, expedient for his stopgap successor, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, to distance himself as much as possible. The biggest casualty was the report of Confab ’94.

One of the committees hurriedly assembled by the new administration to explore the way forward was led by an eminent jurist, late Justice Niki Tobi. The Committee appeared to be in a haste to deliver; after all, it had its briefs well spelt out. The Committee took one hasty look at the Abacha Report and dismissed it offhanded as ‘anti-people’. Remarkably, the eminent jurist rationalized the decision to throw away the Abacha document by claiming it was the ‘product of a disputed legitimacy’. In its place, the 1979 constitution was lazily window-dressed and closed shop!

As things stand today, Nigeria continues to grope partly due to the lethargy with which the Abacha document was handled. The nation’s official six geo-political zones remains an enduring legacy of General Abacha. In any case, the zones were meant to be the building blocks for the fundamental changes envisaged by the 1995 draft constitution which made provision for the offices of president, vice president, senate president, house speaker as well as the position of prime minister and deputy prime minister. A five-year single-term for political offices. Public office holders were restricted to a five-year single-term tenure.

The ‘Abacha document’ had something for everybody. Had political exigencies not prevailed on General Abubakar into literally throwing away the baby with the bathwater, Nigeria would, by now, have experimented with the Abacha formula for twenty-two   of the ‘thirty-year transition period’ which aim was to ‘promote national cohesion and integration’, after which merit and competence would replace rotation in determining who gets what.

In strict adherence to the principle of rotation envisaged by the Abacha document, at no point in time would any of the six geo-political zones have cause to complain of marginalization since there was always going to be one ‘juicy’ office to be vied for by each of the zones every five years. What this means is that, in 2018, the fifth of the six zones would have produced a president for the country and, by 2023, all six key political offices would have gone round the six geopolitical zones on rotational basis.

Of equal importance is that the unique provision eliminates the incumbency factor and its attendant abuses. Since the draft envisaged its replication at state levels, the president and other principal officers as well as state governors and stand disqualified from standing election for the same office during their five-year single term incumbency!

More than two decades after ‘throwing away the baby with the bath water’, Nigerians are still playing the ostrich instead of sobering up and still living in denial.  overgrowing the prejudices of the Abacha era. As a matter of fact, the Abacha document was so comprehensive to have anticipated the untenable and wrong-headed agitations across the country and the hollow talk of marginalization that comes with it. Now, can and, should Nigerians continue to play the ostrich and allow lawlessness to dominate the political scene? Are we to allow a rambunctious few to continue to stampede us and dominate national discourse in the face of quick-fix solutions?

Of course, the talk of dissolving Nigeria is hot air that lacks substance. Yes, there is need to restructure and this should not be mistaken for a breakup as some have been programmed to believe. We need to restructure in a way every section of the country will, at all times, be appropriately represented in governance. The ‘Abacha document’ took care of these and more. The document suggested a five-year single-term for elective posts. To restructure in a way that lawmaking will be inexpensive and effective, the draft made provision for part-time lawmaking!

Of course, Nigeria should restructure in a way that treasury looters will not get dubious clean bills from regular courts or be shielded from prosecution. It may interest Nigerians and their elected representatives that there is no proclamation for the much-abused immunity clause for any public office holder in the Abacha draft for the president and vice president as well as governors and their deputies. The pestiferous eighth Assembly that canvassed for a dubious immunity for its principal officers was not expected to look at the document; it didn’t!

Nigerians should give the thumbs-up to the leadership of the current Senate for taking the bull by the horn. To achieve desired results, Nigerians must begin to look beyond General Abacha and ditch the prejudices that characterized his days. The task ahead may seem insuperable but it is not invincible. 

The task will be made easier if we tinker with report of Confab ’95. 

The Deception of AfriForum as Julius Malema debunks the Elon Musk engineered misinformation troll against majority African rule in South Africa

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British Citizen Phil Craig Seeks To Carve Out Western Cape As Independent White Homeland From South Africa

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The Best Rendition of Nigeria’s True National Anthem

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