ABSTRACT
Based on personal experiences of a scholar from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a French-speaking country in sub-Saharan Africa, this chapter analyzes some critical issues and challenges relating to cultural competence that he identified among predominantly white institutions and areas, where he worked, or studied, and the coping strategies of academic survival that he mobilized in connection with his home country. Experiences chronologically presented as stories reveal the obvious lack of cultural competence associated with other factors including racism and restrictive policies towards foreign-educated scholars within the American colleges and universities observed in predominantly white areas. In the first section, the “students’ evaluation” is analyzed as a strategic tool for grasping the extent to which the cultural competence is both a long-term missing piece and a needed component for the making of real global students among Americans. The tale of “a good wine in a bad container” is discovered through students’ comments that tried to contrast an African instructor with a PhD from an African country, and the fascinating content of material on globalization in Africa they would like to learn earlier at elementary, middle, and high school. The second section addresses a new tale, “From the Curse of the Foreign Credentials to the Spiral of Ethnicity,” where the African scholar, whose fellowships were over, struggled unsuccessfully in finding a new position as a faculty member: foreign credentials, his national origin, primary language, and other subtle cultural dimensions. Finally, the concluding remarks stress the necessity of reinventing the tradition of employment. Since cultural competence is lacking in many professional settings of the new land, African scholars should imagine new ways of dealing with exclusion from the job market. They should smartly resist exclusion by creating their own business or responding promptly to calls from their home (Africa, motherland) for jobs as an affordable alternative for surviving with dignity in many ways.
