The CEO of Tereos Amido e Adoçantes, Kwami Alfama, is one of the leaders of agribusiness in Brazil and has a strong presence in favor of diversity in the agro market.
In this trillion-dollar market, agribusiness represented 21.4% of the national GDP in 2019, according to the Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil.
TO CNN, Kwami Alfama says he completed high school in Coimbra, Portugal, where he was the only black student at his school. Later, when he came to Brazil, he thought he would find a country with more plurality.
“I thought I was going to find a more diverse place, and my discomfort was great when I arrived at a federal engineering school, a good school, where, in addition to having few blacks — there were two in my class and there was a class of 40 and in the school as a whole, there were no more than four or five – they also had few women. There was only one engineering student in my class and that got a lot of attention.”
Kwami Alfama reports that he suffered an episode of racism from a colleague in the engineering class, when he was in a selection process for a job opening.
“I was at the end of college and was going to apply for a position at a big company that everyone wanted to join and he turned to him and said: ‘With that name and that face, do you think you’ll make it?’ That moment was very strong, I felt a lot and I couldn’t understand why someone who was my friend said that to me”, he says.
Over time, Kwami Alfama began to understand where violence against blacks came from. “It’s how people are educated, it came from things they hear, children hear and it all forms this unconscious bias that at some point comes out and hurts.”
However, this account is fortunately accompanied by a retrospective story that had a positive result.
“I had the privilege of using this episode not for the bad side, but for the good side and today I’m here as CEO of a large multinational”.
Reference: CNN Brasil
