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Alhaji Papa Susso, from Gambia, West Africa, plays the kora, or African harp-lute, at USF in October.
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Africa Programming Growing at USF
There is only a handful of faculty at USF with ties to Africa and there are even fewer African students, but campus interest in the continent is being fueled by a burst of colloquia and classes about its history, politics, and culture.
Next fall, a minor in African studies will launch. Courses approved for the minor include A Season in the Congo, taught by Karen Bouwer, associate professor of modern and classical languages; Economies of Modern Africa, taught by Tetteh Kofi, professor of economics; a Survey of African History to be taught by an adjunct faculty member; and two more classes on modern Africa and African literature.
The minor caps a year-long effort to imprint Africa in the USF community’s consciousness by the African Alliance, a coalition of students and faculty interested in promoting positive public images of a place many of them call home. This spring the group introduced the Africa Forum, a colloquium series on current issues in Africa, ranging from the genocide in Rwanda to media controls in Zimbabwe. The coalition also managed to add five films about Africa to USF’s international film series and invite political leaders and musicians from Africa to campus. This summer, 20 students will travel to South Africa to aid street children as part of the first USF-sponsored trip to Africa. (See story, “Witnessing the New South Africa”)
“We are trying to vary the academic with a social and political approach as a way of breaking out of an image of Africa as only about misery, poverty, and disaster,” said Bouwer, who is from South Africa and is a member of African Alliance and co-chair of African studies. “If we offer people as broad a picture as possible, then people get a more complete picture.”
The African Alliance was founded last year by Ange-Marie Hancock, an assistant professor of politics, and Charles N’Cho-Oguie, an associate professor of economics. Membership, which started at about 25, has risen to 100 members, according to information printed by the alliance. Faculty members include N’Cho-Oguie, who is from the Ivory Coast, Kofi, who was born in Ghana, and Ahmed Bangura, associate professor of modern and classical languages, who is from Sierra Leone. The other faculty member with African ties is Stanley Nel, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, who is from South Africa.
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