The Man &
The Myth

Whether you know him as Tumi or Ramarea or Tumisang Ramarea or Tumisang Ikefuna-Ramarea, he has probably told you that he is famous in his village. It is hard to measure his fame, but his story is the stuff of legends—at least as told by people from his hometown. It is there we begin the story behind the myth and the man. We start the narrative in the third person as a nod to this pseudo-celebrity status.

Ramarea completed his BGCSE at Seepapitso at a time when the school was a shadow of its former glory. The months-long civil-servants strike, which deprived him of some of his teachers, did not help the situation. If the shortness of the blankets in his family had not been an obstacle, he would have preferred to attend boarding school instead. Perhaps because of his track record of academic excellence since anyone could remember, he had a contagious belief that he can succeed at any school. After all, he was the same kid whose insatiable curiosity and talkativeness had earned him the nickname “Radio Botswana” long before he entered a classroom.

It is perhaps no surprise that he understood early that a single person’s urine does not flow. His education had always been communal — beginning with an older brother who taught him to read and count before school could. He co-founded a few study groups with his friends and enlisted the assistance of his generous teachers to advance his learning objectives. It is unclear what it was that drove him towards collective success since such an early age. Those close to him might have attributed it to all the injustice he had endured and witnessed in his brief years of life. No amount of past hurt or the resolution of his desire to succeed could dim his playful side. For example, when they took study breaks to devour magwinya, they would also engage in witty rap battles. They did not call him G-RaM for nothing!

In the end, Ramarea walked away from Seepapitso with 47 points out of a possible 48. This was a great result for Seepapitso, but not for him. Being the overconfident celebrity he believed he was, he had called into a national radio station to declare before the results were released that he would be going to study abroad on the prestigious Top Achievers Scholarship. He had missed it by one point. The people who used to think he was mad for walking along a busy road daily with his head buried in a book were more convinced now that he cried to anyone who would listen that he had failed. Since he had always been number one with little credible threat of being dethroned, Ramarea always competed with himself and so winning was not simply about being number one. It was about exceeding metrics he set for himself.

Thankfully, his tenacity did not allow him to give up his dream of studying abroad. Even in the face of unrelenting rejection, he continued to apply for opportunities to study abroad. His extensive resume at the time across academic clubs, social responsibility activities, and uncontested reign as the President of the Student Council gave him the edge he needed to earn a scholarship to attend the United World College Costa Rica. It was this experience that taught him that the number of rejections does not matter until one gets the single yes they seek.

Ramarea arrived a month late after navigating a challenging visa process by himself. As an example of the difficulty, he had to make a dangerous bus ride to Johannesburg to the one Costa Rican Consulate serving all of Southern Africa and ended up robbed at knife point in a crowded bus terminal. All that matters is he was able to develop enough street smarts to accomplish the mission and return to Botswana in one piece. This adaptability was what helped him make the most of his UWC experience. Life at UWC moved faster than anything he had known—so arriving late meant he was behind academically and socially.

It was his first time being so far from home. It was an especially difficult time to be away from home as his mother—his rock and shelter—was in the early stages of her early onset dementia. It seemed as though everyone had found their friend groups. For the first time in his life, he was behind on academics. It was the first time he studied alongside such a high calibre of students, students who were big deals where they came from. On top of that, he was not as smooth with the ladies as he had been in his village of Kanye. It was a lonely existence. His life was confined to the perimeter of the school as he did not speak a word of Spanish. For the first time in his life, he was a minority. Everything he thought he knew about himself and the world was challenged.

His ambition and adaptability ensured that by the end of his two years all had changed. He got the only admission to Stanford from UWC Costa Rica his graduation year. He surrounded himself with a loving community, in and outside the school. His Spanish improved significantly—although he once almost got a beating for accidentally insulting someone thinking he was using a slang greeting.

Palo Alto, California (USA)

Stanford was an unbelievable dream for Ramarea. Missing the Top Achievers Scholarship had eroded some of his overconfidence, and he was very conservative in his college choices when the time came to apply. A random encounter with a Harvard recruiter resulted in an early action application and a pleasantly unexpected deferral to the regular decision cycle. While Harvard went on to reject Ramarea during the regular cycle, the absence of an outright rejection inspired him to apply to his dream school. When he enrolled at Stanford as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, he felt a different kind of imposter syndrome—that he should not have been there, and so he might as well treat it as an adventure to satiate his curiosity.

Upon arrival at Stanford, he was suddenly faced with new identities. Now he was black—and he was just getting used to being African from his time in Costa Rica. He was also FLI (First Generation and Low Income) like a G6. It was at Stanford that he began interrogating his masculinity and that led him to therapy. Working through therapy was one of the best decisions of his life—it was also a great avenue to make sense of his mother’s deteriorating health. He explored his blackness as an Ujamaa Scholar in his sophomore year, and was relieved to discover that there was no one way to be black. Stanford presented endless opportunities for Ramarea’s unbounded curiosity including participating in overseas opportunities in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ghana. These trips often gave him the chance to check on his mother.

In the classroom, Ramarea followed his curiosity to the Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) department. He came into Stanford thinking he would study Economics, but declared Mathematical and Computational Science in freshman year. Some classes later, he was able to name what all these different fields he hopped between had in common: they used Mathematics to model complex systems to simplify decision making. He earned both Bachelors and Masters Degrees from MS&E in Decision and Risk Analysis. When he left Stanford, he aspired to help people and organizations make better quality decisions to improve how we live, play, and work.

I am always inspired when I hear the legend of Tumisang Ramarea told in my village. I am now far from where I started, and furthest to where I am headed. Professionally, I am part of Krikey AI’s mission to enable anyone to animate in 3D—expanding who can use 3D animation to tell their stories. With over 5 years in Product Management, I anticipate a lifetime career enabling the use of technology innovation to transform how we live, how we play, and how we work. I especially hope by the end of my career, I have played a role in enabling indigenous knowledge systems and technologies to also shine in moving the world forward.

With school behind me, I still do not know a lot. But that is okay! I have come to believe that the goal of curiosity is not to know everything, but to reduce how much we do not know. As such, it is not the answers that matter but the pursuit of worthwhile questions. Some of the questions I find worthwhile for this life are:

1. Who am I, really?
2. What do we owe to each other — and to the generations before and after us?
3. What is healthy ambition?
4. How do systems include or exclude people?
5. What do we inherit and what do we choose?

I am enjoying the journey of attempting to answer these. I would love to explore any of these with you—get in touch.

If I were to ever follow through on my plans to write my autobiography, I would have the following sections. Or maybe if I were to write it as a series of memoirs, they would be divided into the following topics.