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My
Visit to the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of African and
African American Research at Harvard University
Ghelawdewos
Araia, Ph.D.
April
21 2011
On
April 18, 2011 the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for
African and African American Research of Harvard
University honored the quintessential activist and
artist Elizabeth Catlett and I went there along with
my good friend professor Teodros Kiros to join the
spirited and enthused audience that virtually packed
the small auditorium in the second floor of the
Institute.
The event was opened by a brief
remark of the charismatic Vira Grant, the Executive
Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and then
the Professor and Director of the Institute, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. (popularly known as Skip Gates)
arrived and gave a speech on his long-awaited
‘Blacks in Latin America’ PBS series and the
biography of Elizabeth Catlett. According to the
brochure distributed for the event, “throughout her
career, Catlett has been committed to art as a vehicle
for social change.” This wonderful woman has just
turned 96 and it is quite a blessing to enjoy such a
longevity especially for a person whose entire life
was dedicated to the liberation of humanity from
oppression by the dominant classes, be it in the
economic, social, and political realms.
Ms. Catlett is physically frail
and in fact she was seated on a wheel chair and she
had difficulties hearing the questions forwarded to
her from the audience, but she is mentally very alert;
one can tell that she still has a brilliant brain
behind her very expressive forehead and above all she
was very witty and answered almost all questions with
substance and sense of humor.
Following the conversation of
Henry Louis Gates with Elizabeth Catlett, the audience
was invited to view the work of Ms. Catlett on the 3rd
floor and to a reception. Long before the event
started, however, Professor Kiros and I had toured the
Institute and I was very much impressed by the overall
organization, libraries, and exhibition rooms of the
Institute, and I said to myself, “Skip Gates must
have been doing a superb job in intellectually
embellishing the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.” The
African and African American Research at Harvard is at
once a research center and a custodian Institute of
the Black experience.
During the reception, Vira Grant
came along and with bright and twinkling eyes behind
her eyeglasses and a big smile on her face –
altogether pleasantly hospitable – she approached me
and asked for my name. I said, “I am Ghelawdewos
Araia, Professor of African Studies at the City
University of New York,” and then she exclaimed,
“Oh wow! You came all the way from New York” and
she left. Then came Skip Gates walking toward his
office and he came directly to where I was standing
and to my pleasant surprise greeted me with the
Ethiopian language (Amharic) and said Tiena
Yistlign (literally ‘may God bestow health upon
you’ but figuratively it means ‘how are you’).
This is the first time I met Gates in person although
I have known him for a long time and even corresponded
with him when I founded the Institute of Development
and Education for Africa (IDEA, Inc.) in 2002 and he
was one of the many who wrote me letters to
congratulate me. I also used to correspond with him
when I served as senior editor to the African Link
magazine and to which Skip Gates contributed views and
articles. Incidentally, I deliberately took one issue
of the magazine so that I can share it with him; I
showed him the Volume 8, No. 4 of the African Link
magazine in which a debate between him and Ali Mazrui
on the ‘Wonders of the African World’ was posted.
We published the debate so that readers can have the
privilege of learning from both perspectives, but the
ultimate objective of posting the debate was to
“call a truce” between the two giant Africanist
scholars.
In any event, Mazrui’s
“preliminary response” and “further
reflections” on the ‘Wonders of the African
World’ was constructive and he even calls Gates “a
friend”. By the same token, Gates in his rebuttal
was extremely civil and humble and her is how he put
it then:
“Only rarely as a scholar does
one have the opportunity to discuss one’s passion
for a subject, the reasons for one’s choice of it as
one’s life work, and the raison d’étre for the
production of a specific work about it. The
extraordinarily energetic reactions to my film series,
“Wonders of the African World,” provide such as an
occasion for me to address these issues generally and,
more specifically, to respond to questions raised by
the distinguished African scholar, Professor Ali
Mazrui.”
When the reception was about to
end, Professor Teodros Kiros and I were seated and
relaxed, and Gates while entertaining his guests
pointed unto us and jokingly told the other guests
seating nearby, “these two came from Ethiopia!”
and soon after Vira came out from her office, saw us
and rushed back into her office and came back with a
camera to take a picture of us. We were perhaps the
best-treated guests throughout the reception and I for
one felt very much at home at the W. E. B. Du
Bois Institute.
When I returned back from Cambridge and the Boston
area, I watched the first episode of ‘Blacks in
Latin America’ of Henry Louis Gates on April 19,
2011. The first episode is about the Dominican
Republic and Haiti, two contrasting nations that
evolved out of Hispaniola.
I am delighted that Skip Gates’
‘Black in Latin America’ is out for public
consumption, and luckily for me the documentary will
visually reinforce one of my popular courses,
‘Politics and Cultures of African People in Africa
and the Diaspora’ that I have created for the
General Studies Department at Lehman College of the
City University of New York (CUNY). The objective of
the course is to introduce students to the basic
tenets of politics and cultures of the people of
African descent in Africa and the Diaspora. The course
is designed in such a way that students would be able
to explore specific cultures and political parameters
of particular African, Latin American, Caribbean, and
US societies in due course of class lectures and
discussions.
I have no doubt in my mind that
my students are going to enjoy the ‘Blacks in Latin
America’ series and it is for the following simple
reason:
During the brief conversation I
had with Skip Gates, I told him (and this is from the
bottom of my heart) that I am proud of him and he
reaffirmed to me by saying that he is doing his best.
Professor Gates has accomplished enormously, but his
achievements are our achievements as well (especially
for those of us in the academia) because his works
(books, documentaries, interviews, and speeches) are
remarkable corpus of scholarship enriched by
ineluctable facts that are altogether inexorable.
Unlike some self-contained
professional discourse, Professor Gates ‘Blacks in
Latin America’ is a reconstruction of the history of
African people in the Diaspora, and most importantly
it is a discussion of the Black experience in a
socio-cultural and political contexts that
systematically embraces a larger perspective and, in
turn, links the context of African Americans (the
macro sense of the concept) daily encounter with the
distant past of their cultural ethos.
‘Blacks in Latin America’ is
dynamic and innovative in its presentation of the
relevant frameworks and unified synthesis of the
history of African presence and experience in the
Caribbean and South America. But at times, during his
interactive dialogue with scholars and ordinary people
alike, Gates seems to capture and encapsulate the
subtle nature of race relations in Latin America. For
instance, the narrative on how the people of the
Dominican Republic identify themselves is a shocking
revelation. Although the learned men and women or the
politically conscious segment of the population
acknowledge their black heritage, a significant
majority suffers from deracination. This is not simply
a “double consciousness” psychological makeup á
la Du Bois; it is a total negation of African ancestry
and an attempt to obliterate black consciousness and
identity. In a word, Negritude is dead in the
Dominican Republic and it seems to thrive in Haiti.
We at IDEA like to invite all
students at all levels and scholars and academics all
over to watch ‘Blacks in Latin America,’ which
could serve as a companion educational film to
relevant subject matters in the academia. The
documentary has a tremendous amount of information and
it makes a systematic survey of the generic borderland
of race relations in the Americas. It is also a
well-synchronized synthesis of the Black life (their
ordeal and achievements) and a demystification of the
stereotype on people of African descent in the Western
hemisphere. It is in effect a break away from the
present dominant ideology that negatively portrays
Africans without completely losing touch from the
past.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright ©
IDEA, Inc. 2011. Dr. Ghelawdewos Araia is Adjunct
Associate Professor of African Studies at Lehman
College of CUNY and Professor of International Studies
at the Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) and
he can be reached for educational and constructive
feedback via dr.garaia@africanidea.org
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