One frosty day on the campus of Montana Tech, I casually mentioned to an alumnus that I was now teaching an introductory course on African Studies. He replied, "Wow, you teach African Studies at Montana Tech. That place is really coming along!" His response has been a source of inspiration for me when I encounter perplexed looks from some students, professors, and community people after I tell them that I teach an African Studies course. While Africanists may encounter resistance to their field of study in any part of the United States, I have found that in Montana the largest barrier is the perception that Africa has no meaning in the lives of Montanans. Perhaps it is difficult for Montanans to feel any link with a continent that is so far away geographically, as well as culturally.
My experience in Africa began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa. From 1985 to 1987, I lived and worked in a small village high in the Drakensburg (Dragon) Mountains. After teaching English and assisting in a UNICEF project for women and children, I moved to the capital, Maseru, for another two year stint with an agricultural project. Ohio University welcomed me home with financial assistance for my graduate degrees in International Studies (major in African Studies) and a Doctorate in International and Comparative Education. Later on, I received a Fulbright-Hayes Dissertation Fellowship to complete my dissertation research on the lives of women teachers in Botswana. Through these varied experiences and opportunities, Africa has become a big part of who I am, and I now consider educating Americans about Africa to be a significant professional and personal goal of mine.
Many people from Butte, where Montana Tech is located, boast of its diversity. That idea seemed incredulous to me when I first moved there in 1993 because I had rarely seen a person of color on the streets of Butte. People from Butte remember past generations when there were people from diverse cultures who worked in the mines. Poor immigrants searched for work: Irish, Cornish, Italians, Finns, Swedes, Serbs, and Croatians, while the Chinese community made money off of the miners' remittances. We hear little about the Black community of Butte, but there were 1500 people of African descent in Butte in 1905./2/ There was a "Colored Democratic Club", Black Baptist and Methodist Churches, and a "Colored Literary Society" that debated pertinent issues such as "Should Woman Have the Same Rights as Man?"/3/ In 1913, Booker T. Washington even came to Butte and spoke to a racially mixed audience about the Tuskegee Institute./4/ And we also know that the Ku Klux Klan existed not only in Butte, but throughout our state: Plentywood, Miles City, Hamilton, Billings, and Thompson Falls./5/
The Introduction to African Studies course that I offer at Montana Tech of the University of Montana is a first of its kind. I see this course as a tangible realization that it is in our students' best interests to give them a comprehensive picture of global affairs. After all, upon returning home from a trip to Sierra Leone, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya, U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, recently spoke out against international isolation of the continent; technology has advanced so that we can quickly communicate over vast distances, and transportation is so developed that the Atlantic Ocean can be easily traversed. My introductory class in African Studies is interdisciplinary: students learn about African politics, economics, geography, history, anthropology, literature, gender issues, and the arts. My course also deals with contemporary social issues on the continent such as environmental crises, AIDS, human rights, population growth and urbanization, and international development aid.
One activity that I have required in past offerings is the compilation of a scrapbook, whereby students collect information about contemporary social and economic issues in particular African countries by perusing the international section of The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, the Internet, and other library resources. Then, students make class presentations on what they have learned about these issues in Africa and their possible relationship to the United States. This semester, I am using Aman: the Story of a Somali Girl as a major text. In preparation for reading this book, a personal account of a young Somali girl growing up in a time of great social change (1950s and 1960s during the transition period from colony to country), my students are given a group research activity on various themes, such as religion, gender, family, politics, geography, history, international relations as they relate to the country of Somalia. I think it is important to place her life history in a context that is meaningful to students. So far, the students have been conducting research through sources that I have put on reserve in the library, reference books, and, of course, the Internet. One day as I was leaving the library, I noticed that a student had found an Internet cite about Somali culture. This Montanan was telling me about how she was going to cook us some Somali food for her presentation from a recipe that she found on the Internet!
African literature serves to teach our students about the human condition while exposing them to various African cultures and beliefs./6/ That high quality literature has been written in Africa is evidenced by the fact that since 1986 three African writers have received the Nobel Prize in literature: Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt, Nadine Gordimer from South Africa, and Wole Soyinka from Nigeria. In my class, students choose a book from a long list, (most books were generously purchased by the Montana Tech library) and write a review of it, analyzing how various possible themes of colonialism, nationalism, religion, traditional belief systems and family structure, interpersonal relationships, education, etc. combine in a particular piece of literature./7/ One modern African classic about the cultural changes brought on by colonialism and the advent of Christianity in Africa that I use is Nigerian Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Other powerful authors highlighted in the course are Ngugi wa Thiong'o from East Africa, and Alex La Guma, Bessie Head, and Athol Fugard from Southern Africa. One of the required texts for this year's course is Under African Skies, an anthology of modern African stories with writing from across the continent, and so far, the students seem to be fascinated with the short stories./8/ On a recent mid-semester course evaluation, students indicated they would like to read even more African literature.
Of the many topics studied in class, the students are most enthusiastic about two diverse themes: Women's Studies and South Africa. I make a special effort to point out the life conditions of African women, being careful to distinguish between class, cultural, and religious differences. Students have been interested to learn about the much-maligned practices of forced marriages and educational disadvantages, as well as women's economic and political power, and their role in African food production. I show an award-winning documentary by female Togolese filmmaker Anne-Laure Folly entitled, Femmes aux Yeux Ouverts (Women with Open Eyes) which provides images of West African women working together for social change, financial gain, and the general improvement of their status./9/ In addition, three notable books concentrating on women's and girls' education in Africa available to my students are Nervous Conditions, an absorbing novel about a young school girl coming of age in colonial Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) by Tsitsi Dangarembga; and Not Either an Experimental Doll, a collection of correspondence among three South African women during the years 1949-1951. These letters, edited by Shula Marks, reveal the unequal relationships of women in South Africa, undermining the simplistic notion of "sisterhood" by illustrating the vastly diverse living conditions and educational opportunities for women from various racial groups and classes. Finally, the novel, The Joys of Motherhood by Nigerian writer, Buchi Emecheta, about a West African woman's struggles being a wife, mother, and wage-earner, is a favorite. Last year, a non-traditional student and her adult daughter were taking a day's drive together to South Dakota. Over this long journey, these women took turns reading aloud The Joys of Motherhood to each other. They had two chapters left when they reached their destination. The mother said the daughter insisted on borrowing the book because she just had to know what happened in the end!
Because the country of South Africa is so vastly different from the rest of the continent in terms of economics, culture, and history, it is important to study it specifically. I have found that students more easily relate to South Africa than other region of the continent. They can remember hearing about apartheid, international sanctions, democratic elections, and Nelson Mandela--to name just a few subjects that have received substantial American press coverage in this decade. Since most African countries gained independence in the 1960s, before our students were even born, those events seem more remote from their lives.
Through autobiographical writings and films from South Africa, students are exposed to the complexities of life in that country known for its racial exploitation, huge economic disparities and class struggles among ethnic groups. In Tell Freedom, a moving autobiography written by Peter Abrahams, a South African man of color describes his experiences growing up in the urban ghettos of Johannesburg and his journey into an intellectual life in England, where he escapes a stifling and humiliating existence under apartheid. When I showed the recently produced documentary, Mandela, in class, I was overwhelmed by the students' positive reactions. Most of them were wiping their eyes by the end of the video and later told me that they were intensely moved by hearing Mandela's life history. Some students said that they felt inspired by Mandela's perseverance throughout his 27 years as a political prisoner at Robbin Island. Other students indicated that they learned alot about the history of the country as well as Mandela's story. Through this film, I have been able to expose Montanans to one of the greatest contemporary leaders in the world.
Akin to students' strong emotions about the Mandela video are their delighted responses towards other African films and literature. Although I love their delight in the discovery of African arts, it is invariably a bittersweet experience, because they usually demonstrate their appreciation with expressions like, "Wow, I didn't expect this novel to be so good!" They seem to have assumed the worst from the continent and so are ultimately surprised by high quality productions. For example, when I show the Senegalese film, Hyenas, a satire about contemporary Africa and its economic and social problems since independence, students are shocked by its strength and literary elegance./10/ Without exception, students comment, "I couldn't believe it was so good. I didn't realize they made films like that in Africa!" But however grueling some lessons can be because of Americans' ignorance concerning Africa, I find watching students become acquainted with the beauty and complexities of the African continent most satisfying.
I discover how totally ignorant most students are about the continent (with the exception of South Africa) when, on the first class meeting, I give students a pre-test with some basic questions about Africa and her people, as well as a blank map of the continent. Invariably, students initially respond with frenzied questions as to whether the pre-test will count toward their final grade. Everyone sighs with relief when I explain that its purpose is only to help me evaluate their level of knowledge about Africa. The students would have a reason to worry if I did count the test, because the results are almost uniformly dismal. Examples of questions I sometimes ask are: 1) name one African writer, 2) name one African person who you have heard about in the media in the past year, 3) identify the capitals of two African countries and 4) identify the Secretary General of the United Nations, currently an African. Most students cannot answer these questions, but the hardest part of the test is the identification of African countries on the map. I remember several students who were unable to even identify one country from the continent--truly a statement about American's knowledge of world geography. Misconceptions and generalizations abound in Africa more than in any other world region. For example, most Americans do not realize that land the size of the United States fits into the African continent three and one half times, that there are approximately 1000 different languages spoken in Africa, or that there are over 50 countries in the African region.
Another reason to teach African Studies in Montana is that, whether Montanans know it or not, our state has a reputation as being a haven for racist, hate-driven groups of people. I am aware that Montana is also known as the "last best place" for those who love the great outdoors and wide-open spaces. However, among people of color, there is a general suspicion of a state so lacking in racial diversity, with the exception of Native Americans. When I attend African Studies conferences and tell people that I live and work in Montana, they commonly react in ways that suggest they wonder how anyone could live in that part of the country (a viewpoint which in itself reflects stereotyping). My response is that although we have had activities from the Freemen, the Aryan Nation, and the World Church of Creator in recent years, most Montanans do not condone such behavior. In fact, many Montanans either ignore the presence of these groups or peaceably demonstrate against such racist beliefs./11/ Let us remember the victorious campaign in Billings against the actions of the Aryan Nation directed at Jews./12/ The geographic and cultural distance between Africa and Montana makes African Studies a particularly important topic of study in our state, helping to diminish provincialism and to combat the potential for hate crimes.
An additional reason to teach African Studies in Montana is to help our students envision themselves as citizens of the world. While many Americans are unaware of the extent that United States political and economic decisions effect the rest of the world, Montanans are particularly removed from these issues because of the state's geographic isolation and rural qualities. Comprehending the international ramifications of multi-national corporations, mining and oil production activities, as well as other environmental operations, helps enlighten students and helps them make informed decisions about politics, economics, and international aid budgets. A required book for my last Introduction to African Studies class was A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary, by the late Nigerian intellectual, environmentalist, and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was brutally executed by the military government of Nigeria in 1995. While a fine memoir of his time spent in prison, this text is most valuable in that it describes the environmental destruction and consequent decimation of indigenous Ogoni people by Shell and Chevron in collaboration with undemocratic Nigerian leaders since the discovery of oil in the Niger River Delta in 1958. The subject of this book is particularly relevant to the students of Montana Tech, many of whom are destined for employment in large multi-national corporations with interests in resource extraction. This text helps students to "think globally" and realize that actions at home effect people throughout the world. Students not only learned about the problems of Nigeria, but they were also moved by a powerful human story of a courageous man fighting the overwhelming forces of multinational corporations and a corrupt state.
In the last decade there has been a push to internationalize the curriculum in public universities. This change has partly come about as junior faculty attempt to develop a curriculum that they feel provides students with relevant knowledge needed to live in the 21st century, as well as in response to a changing political climate within the United States. One example of the controversy--which flared over the transformation of a traditional curriculum to one modeled on multiculturalism--occurred at Stanford in the late 1980s./13/ Since then, most universities have made an effort to bring a more balanced, inclusive, and contemporary flavor to their overall course offerings. Clearly, African Studies and other Area Studies, such as Asian and Latin American Studies, add substantial weight to this endeavor, yet the true test of internationalizing the curriculum is whether international issues and works are incorporated into mainstream courses that reach a large number of students. For example, a course entitled, World Literature, could easily expose students to literature from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but at Montana Tech it only contains American and European literature. I believe that the internationalization of curriculum strengthens American education, enabling students to gain a better education than they would otherwise and that it would be a disservice to our students to limit their education strictly to courses based on Western Civilization. I see no inherent superiority in Western Civilization, (including the literature of "Great Books," European history and geography) that would make responsible teachers and intellectuals claim that such courses were more important than great work from and information about all world regions. There is a common and often unconscious assumption that Western thought is somehow better than thought generated in Africa. This pervasive belief that all of Africa is primitive and undeveloped is, I think, xenophobic and accounts for the continued marginalization of non-Western courses./14/
Responsible conservatives argue that because America is primarily European based, that is what we must study. While I acknowledge the fact that the dominant culture in the United States is European based, it is essential that Americans recognize that much of our country was built by African slave labor. There is much more to the history of the United States than simply a history of interaction among European immigrants. Even in a rural state like Montana that has little diversity, there is a history of African Americans, their communities, and their activities. In Butte, our Black community, just one of the many that stretched across the Western United States, was a part of a cultural and social network for African Americans./15/ If we delve further into African American history in the West, we find bodies of literature that explore slavery in the region, experiences of Black homesteaders in the West, "buffalo soldiers" (the approximately 25,000 Black men who served in four regiments between 1866 and 1917 and who helped "pacify" the West), "Black cowboys", and a slowly emerging body of literature about the interaction of Black Westerners with other people of color./16/ Can we honestly say that because Europeans dominated this country, that all the minorities who made up and continue to make up our country should not be represented in some way in higher education? And we also have to remember that a significant portion of the United States population is of African descent, that one out of every three member states in the United Nations is an African country, and that one out of every ten people in the world lives on the African continent./17/ In this rapidly changing world, students who come from a state with little cultural diversity need to know that there is a big world out there full of people with startlingly different cultural backgrounds and that their own culture contains more diversity than they have originally been taught.
An issue of substance discussed in African Studies courses that, I believe, can positively affect human relations, is the root of contemporary racism in the United States. Michael McCarthy, an African American academic, claims that the highly unfavorable and dehumanizing images of Africans as barbarians, heathens, and savages helped justify the inhumane treatment of African slaves./18/ He connects contemporary racism with the residue of the heinous crimes of the international slave trade and the taking of African sovereignty by European powers during colonialism. Basil Davidson, another scholar of Africa, believes that those "old views about Africa...though vanished from serious discussion...still retain a kind of underground existence."/19/ One important goal of an introductory African Studies course is to dispel dehumanizing myths and stereotypes about Africa and Africans. For example, people from the dominant European American culture often assume that without missionaries and colonialism on the continent, Africa would be in a far worse economic and political position than it is now. While we can never know what would have happened if history had taken a different path, surely that attitude reeks of ignorance of African history at best and of racial superiority at worst.
Another racist Euro-centered theory debunked in an introductory class is that Africans had no great "civilizations" of their own. For example, there used to be a prevalent European belief that Africans were not capable of building the Great Zimbabwe. The Great Zimbabwe is an extensive archeological, stone ruins of an empire that dates back at least 800 years ago in Southeastern Africa. It probably served as the capital of a centrally organized empire that produced gold for international commerce within the Indian Ocean trade network. Explorers of the 19th century hypothesized that the Great Zimbabwe was built by a fictitious "tribe" of light-skinned people. Then, there is the debilitating stereotype of Africa as a singularly inhospitable and dangerous place. While acknowledging that there have been many recent examples of violence on the continent, it is altogether too easy for Americans to forget ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the violent acts committed by Europeans during World War II in Nazi Germany. And of course, there is the common geographic misnomer of the "country of Africa" that the vast majority of Americans, even news commentators, are guilty of making.
We also examine contemporary images of Africa in American pop culture. The latest Disney version of Tarzan is a striking example of the misconceptions that American children are learning about Africa at the end of the twentieth century. While I found Tarzan to be a beautiful adoption story, I was once again reminded of the marginalization of Africa in America. There was not one African person in that film! It seems as if Africa is comprised only of gorillas and Western explorers. What does this film say about the importance of Africans in mainstream American culture? What attitudes toward Africa are our children learning early on in their lives? Remember that this film is not an isolated case of American images of Africa. Tarzan films dating back to the 1930s, when Buster Crabb played Tarzan, are equally disturbing because Africans are portrayed either as passive zombie-like creatures who drone endlessly in the jungle, or as threatening barbarians poised to attack unsuspecting White people. On the brighter side, there have been two mainstream films released in the 1990s that depict life in South Africa in a truer light: Cry Freedom, starring Denzel Washington as anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko, and Cry the Beloved Country, based on the novel written by South African, Alan Paton. Although these films are a huge improvement on "Tarzan," they still unnecessarily emphasize the role that Whites played in the anti-apartheid struggle and marginalize the actions of Africans.
Western exclusiveness in the classroom is, I believe, a disservice to our students, even if, or perhaps especially if, the vast majority of them are of European descent. One of my current students told me that she had been looking for a non-Western social studies course and so was very excited to find my African Studies class. Unfortunately, many institutions of higher education have tight budgets that limit the number of courses that they are able to offer, and they cannot require students to take every course that is available at an institution. One answer to this economic problem is to truly integrate aspects of all world regions into our classes, such as "World History" and "World Literature" so that "world" is not synonymous with America and Europe. Instead of teaching Western Civilization, why not teach "World History?" A colleague of mine at Montana Tech has successfully incorporated Africa into his Media & Messages class by having students develop an AIDS awareness and prevention campaign directed at the people of Swaziland in Southern Africa. One problem with the solution of internationalizing already existing courses in the short-term is that even if we have faculty who are dedicated to expanding their definition of world or including Area Studies in their courses, they may not have the expertise to competently teach their students about the world as a whole. Team-teaching might alleviate some of these faculty difficulties.
Another way to ensure non-Western based courses in the curriculum is to make them part of a commitment to cultural diversity on campus. In response to the ghastly murder of a gay, University of Wyoming student last fall, Montana Tech has initiated some fledgling campus activities, such as diversity forums, that explore controversial issues such as race, sexual orientation, and gender. Another way--and, I think, more effective way--to integrate such issues is to offer intensive, 16-week courses on African Studies, Gender, Gay Studies, etc. At Montana Tech, we now offer African Studies, Gay Literature, Intercultural Communication, and Gender and Communication. There is a well-known phenomenon that a minority culture knows more about a dominant culture, either for reasons of survival or because the loud messages produced by a dominant culture transcend cultural boundaries. Reversing this phenomenon in Montana means teaching our students about minority cultures. In other words, unless we make an effort to teach our students about the world as a whole, they may never have to delve any further than understanding their own culture, and that would be a shame.
Even those intellectuals and academics who strongly adhere to a Great Books curriculum do not have to limit study to Western works. A recent article, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, examines the revival of Great Books programs in higher education. The article notes that the majority of programs are exclusively Western; however, at some schools, such as Louisiana State University and Tennessee State University, Great Books programs are being designed which will expand the canon to include works from "Africa, East Asia, and South America, such as Snow Country, by the Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari, and Petals of Blood, by the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o."/20/
By studying Africa, students not only learn about Africa, but are also exposed to thought-provoking ideas: differences between collectivism and individualism, the similarities of the British colonial policy of social segregation as it was played out in the development of Indian reservations in the United States and African "homelands" in South Africa, the unequal distribution of wealth in the world, and cultural relativism versus universal truths.
And for those who still say that their students need a Euro-centered curriculum in order to understand American culture, my response is that there is no better way to understand our culture than by studying cultures that are different from our own. Take for instance, students who study abroad for an extended period of time. Upon return, they not only have learned about the culture in which they were immersed, but they are also better able to understand their own culture. While for now I am unable to physically take my students to Africa, I do my best to bring Africa to them.
Notes
Abrahams, Peter. Mine Boy. Oxford: Heinemann, 1946.
---. Tell Freedom. Second Ed. Boston: Faber and Faber Limited, 1981.
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1959.
---. No Longer at Ease. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1960.
---. Anthills of the Savannah. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
Brink, Andrè. A Dry White Season. London: W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd., 1979.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. London: The Women's Press, 1988.
Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995.
Emecheta, Buchi. Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, 1979.
Fugard, Athol. My Children, My Africa. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989.
Gordimer, Nadine. A Sport of Nature. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987.
---. The Conservationist. Penguin Books, 1983.
Head, Bessie. When Rain Clouds Gather. London: Gollancz, 1969.
Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. Ambiguous Adventure. Chicago: Heinemann, 1962.
Kuzwayo, Ellen. Call Me Woman. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink., 1985.
La Guma, Alex. Time of the Butcherbird. Chicago: Heinemann, 1979.
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995.
Marks, Shula. Not Either an Experimental Doll. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Mathabane, Mark. Kaffir Boy. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Mwagi, Meja. Going Down River Road. London: Heinemann, 1976.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The River Between. London: Heinemann, 1965.
---. A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann, 1967.
---. Devil on the Cross. Chicago: Heinemann, 1982.
Ramphele, Mamphela. Across Boundaries: the Journey of a South African Woman Leader. New York: The Feminist Press, 1996.
Sembene, Ousmane. God's Bits of Wood. New York: Anchor Books & Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1970.
Soyinka, Wole. Lion and the Jewel. Three Crown Books, 1966.
---. Kongi's Harvest. Three Crown Books, 1967.