Coordinates of a restless mind, by Stephanie Shaakaa

As a teenager, I sat in rooms not meant for girls my age. The chairs were too wide, the conversations too heavy, the air thick with the seriousness of men who believed the world could tilt overnight. Wars. Elections. Sanctions. Oil. Terror. Words rolled across the room like distant thunder. I listened.

While my peers chased music and fashion, I chased headlines. I remember the hum of a stubborn generator keeping the television alive through power cuts. I remember the smell of ink on newspapers opened wide across my lap. I remember the blue glow of late night broadcasts washing over my face while adults argued about America, about the Middle East, about the future of Africa. That noise became my classroom. That room became my frontier.

Osama bin Laden dominated the airwaves then, not just as a man but as a force. He reshaped fear itself. Airports changed. Borders tightened. Foreign policy hardened. The world rearranged its security architecture around a single name. I watched how one figure could bend continents.

George W. Bush answered with war. Iraq burned across our screens. Afghanistan stretched into something long and exhausting. Saddam Hussein fell from absolute ruler to a man pulled from hiding, then tried, then executed. I watched the arc of power collapse in real time. Authority, I learned, was not permanent. It was conditional. It could evaporate.

In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto returned from exile like elegance wrapped in danger. She walked back into a storm she knew could swallow her. It did. When she was assassinated, something shifted in me. Leadership was not abstract. It carried a price.

In Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before the world with unapologetic defiance. At the United Nations he did not soften his tone. He did not adjust his language for comfort. He spoke of nuclear sovereignty as if it were sacred ground. Whether one agreed or not was almost secondary. He forced response. He made the room react. Behind him stood Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, steady, ideological, unmoved by Western pressure. I was too young to understand every layer of theology and geopolitics, but I understood posture. I understood conviction.

Hugo Chávez filled television screens with fire, railing against imperialism, promising dignity to the forgotten. Fidel Castro lingered, aging but still symbolic, a relic of a revolution that refused to fade quietly. Vladimir Putin began reasserting Russian strength with cold calculation. The West underestimated him at first. Kim Jong il loomed distant and unpredictable, his nuclear ambitions wrapped in secrecy.

Then came a different tone. Barack Obama rose with language that felt almost lyrical. Hope sounded intelligent again. Change sounded possible. I watched grown men who rarely agreed fall silent during his speeches. Europe wrestled with itself. Tony Blair defended the Iraq decision. Jacques Chirac resisted. Angela Merkel emerged steady and composed, a physicist guiding an anxious continent through economic tremors. Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi blurred politics with spectacle. Recep Tayyip Erdoðan was reshaping Turkey’s identity in real time. Ariel Sharon remained polarizing and central. Yasser Arafat’s recent death still echoed across the Israeli Palestinian narrative.

In Africa, Thabo Mbeki, Robert Mugabe, and Meles Zenawi embodied different experiments in post colonial power. Some inspired. Some disappointed. All mattered.

And then there were the quieter anchors.

Nelson Mandela, even in his final years, felt like a moral horizon. When he appeared on screen, rooms softened. History itself seemed to pause out of respect. He represented dignity after struggle, forgiveness after imprisonment. He proved that power could be exercised without cruelty.

Kofi Annan carried a different authority. As Secretary General of the United Nations, he spoke in the careful language of diplomacy, trying to hold fractured nations in the same sentence. He represented negotiation in an age of confrontation. Watching him, I saw that influence did not always shout.

Condoleezza Rice stood at podiums during the Iraq era with composure that struck me deeply. A woman navigating rooms of strategy and war, speaking in the language of consequence. I did not have the vocabulary for it then, but something inside me took note. Power did not belong to one gender. It belonged to those prepared to carry it.

Even secrecy became spectacle. Julian Assange exposed cables that embarrassed governments. Edward Snowden revealed the scale of global surveillance. Pope John Paul II and later Pope Benedict XVI moved spiritual authority through political storms. Margaret Thatcher, though no longer in office, remained proof that conviction could outlive tenure.

These were not algorithm politicians. They were epoch figures. They represented ideologies, revolutions, wars, collapses, ambition, belief. And me, a young girl in a room full of adults, tracked the whole thing. 

Not because it was fashionable.

Not because it was trending.

But because it stirred something in me.

When adults said, you are this young and this informed, it was not flattery. It was initiation. I was entering a world of consequence. I was learning that my mind could travel far beyond the walls around me.

So when I hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s name tied to death, what unsettles me is not allegiance. It is recognition. Another coordinate fading from the map of my adolescence. Another voice from the era that trained my intellect falling silent

What I am mourning is not a man. It is a stage.

The era of speeches that felt ideological rather than scripted. The era when global politics carried the weight of belief, not branding. The era when I first realized that my curiosity was not a hobby but a compass.

I am no longer that teenage girl sitting at the edge of adult conversations, memorizing the rhythm of power.

I understand it now.

I understand the strategy beneath defiance.

The economics beneath outrage. The choreography beneath diplomacy. I understand how conviction can mobilize millions and how miscalculation can fracture nations.

Those names are not relics to me.

They are coordinates.

They mark the moment I discovered that my mind could travel borders without permission. That it could sit in rooms it was never invited into and remain.

One by one, the figures of that era recede. The stage resets. The noise evolves.

But I did not remain the girl watching.

I became the adult who can read the storm.

And that is not nostalgia.

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