So Many Journeys

The Doctrine of Discovery

I’ve just spent a few hours preparing my PechaKucha presentation which I’ll preview for the Westport PechaKucha leaders on Monday. I’m calling it, at least tentatively, Columbus and I Make Discoveries, with the subtitle My Journey to Advocacy for Racial Justice. 

My first slide of the 20 is a picture of Columbus’ three ships. Next to last I have a picture of protests at the UN, by Native Americans, protesting Columbus as Americas’ First Terrorist. The last is a picture of the header of my blog.

In between I talk about Junipero Serra and his canonization, justly protested by Native Americans. He did convert many Native Americans, but his conversions were often accompanied by force, even torture, and powerful persuasion.

I have twenty seconds to talk about each of the slides. I timed it and it’s close. I will need to practice it several times to get it right.

There was also force, though not the torture practiced by Serra, in Nigeria. Even more powerful were the tools used by the British. I give two examples – education and religion. I even include a picture of the secondary school my husband attended. I add it here for you.

I believe deeply in the cause of racial justice, with my focus on black Americans. But native Americans have been denied their rights for even longer! Perhaps instead of talking of voyages of discovery and periods of colonization, we should talk about invasions and acts of conquest.

The Chibok Girls

The New York Times had a recent article on one of the girls who escaped from Boko Haram after she and her schoolmates were captured.

“She spoke to Women in the World on the sidelines of an event in Manhattan on Monday, where she took the stage with United Nations Special Envoy for Education Gordon Brown. The event, called Up For School, was hosted by UNICEF and children’s charity Theirworld, drawing leaders from around the globe to talk about the importance of getting kids to school,” the article says.

She described her experience after the girls were taken. “On the truck, Saalome said, she decided to jump because she did not want to vanish from her family forever. ‘I was thinking of my family at home,’” she said. ‘They didn’t know what was happening.’”

Photos from a Nigerian Train Ride

More from The New York Times, this time from the magazine.

Last Sunday’s magazine was called The Voyages Issue. The first photographic spread,  by Glenna Gordon, took us on the train from Lagos to Kano. I loved it.

Fifty three years ago I took the train from Enugu in the east to Kaduna with the Peace Corps volunteers from our group, Nigeria IV, who were going to their posts in the north. Roger and I were assigned to Lagos, then the capital, but our housing was not yet ready and our schools weren’t open. So Peace Corps took us along.

A few months later I took the train from Lagos to Kaduna. My friend Art was supposed to come with me, but he decided not to join me, so I went on alone and had the good fortune to meet John Harris, then the librarian at the University of Ibadan, and friends of his.

They took me to small villages in the Middle Belt where I found that people no more than five miles apart spoke different languages. At least one person in each tiny village spoke Hausa and could talk to our driver. After that I had no trouble believing there are over 200 tribes with their own languages in Nigeria.

The issue also has an introduction by Teju Cole, a Nigerian writer and photographer.

Review and Prepping for Class 2 at LLI

I’ve had a request to tell you more about Samuel Ajayi Crowther. I said in my last post that he was Yoruba. He was rescued as a boy from a slave ship on its way to the Americas and taken to Freetown.

He was sent to school and performed well. He then was sent to London for further training. He was taken along on one of the early voyages of missionaries from Britain to Yorubaland and was active in the mission work in Abeokuta. On returning to London he wrote an account of the journey. It was highly regarded by church leaders in Britain.

So when the Church Missionary Society wanted to create the position of bishop in the eastern part of Nigeria, he was the first choice.

I’ve also been interested in the story of George Goldie who has been called, “The Founder of Modern Nigeria.” Yet his name is not well-known in the country, nor did I know it, except a vague memory either from Peace Corps training or from teaching Nigerian history at Awori-Ajeromi Secondary Grammar School from 1962 to 1967.

I found that he was as influential an explorer and administrator as another better known man of similar achievements.

Britannica online told me, “Although his importance in West Africa may have equalled that of Cecil John Rhodes in South Africa, he differed from Rhodes in his preference for obscurity; he destroyed his papers and pronounced a curse on any of his children should they write about him after his death.”

He “set about amalgamating the various Niger companies, impressing erstwhile rivals with the advantages of co-operation through sheer force of personality,” I read in Michael Crowder’s book. I ended the class last week with part of his story. That set the stage for this week’s class when we’ll talk about the Berlin Conference that divided West Africa  between the major European powers of the time.