The journal of Pan African studies最新文献

{"title":"American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era","authors":"Jahi Issa","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-1074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-1074","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout their history in the United States, American Africans have constantly advocated the concept of Black Nationalism. Eighteenth and nineteenth century Black Nationalist such as Paul Cuffe, Martin Delany and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, either sponsored or promoted various forms of Black self-government for Africans in the Diaspora. Although this concept reached its apex during the Garvey Movement, and continues today, Kevin Gains points out that during the 1950s-60s; Black expatriates from the United States and other parts of the Diaspora, saw the newly independent country of Ghana as a beacon of light that could possibly serve as modeled Pan-African State that would protect the interest of Africans throughout the world. Diasporain Africans such as George and Dorthy Padmore, W.EB. and Shirley Graham-DuBois, Efua Sutherland, Maya Angelou, St. Clair Drake and Julian Mayfield are only a few who chose to leave the lands of the birth and participate in the nation building process in Ghana during the zenith of the American Civil Rights Movement and the turbulent period of the Cold War.","PeriodicalId":92304,"journal":{"name":"The journal of Pan African studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88711148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route","authors":"S. Hartman","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-0418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-0418","url":null,"abstract":"Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (NY: Farrah, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 288 pp. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is Saidiya V. Hartman's autobiography. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, she embarks on a journey to search for strangers \"who left behind no traces\" (15) and to find answers to her unknown ancestral connections in Africa. Hartman's book does more than unearth the experiences of an individual whose story and life intersect with others cemented in the archaeological remains along the coast of Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana and other locations on the continent. Lose Your Mother reveals Hartman's imagination, curiosity and anguish about an aspect of her ancestral roots and identity that she grapples with as an African American living in America. In many thought-provoking ways, Hartman's book epitomizes the dream and experiences of Diaspora Blacks who congregate at sites of slave memories in Ghana to inquire, express and articulate personal and collective yearnings to unknown ancestral spirits in earthly and heavenly realms. Hartman \"was not trying to dodge the ghosts of slavery but to confront them\" (42). This well-written twelve-chapter book is engaging, poetic, historical and sometimes humorous. Chapter eight not only underscores Hartman's motivation for the journey, but draws striking comparisons between the humiliating treatments the enslaved endured in Africa and North America. Hartman blends her skills in poetry and prose with her limited knowledge about her heritage to make sense of the Middle Passage. Hartman's major argument underscores challenges that confront returnees as they refashion their identity in ways that allow them to embrace their dual identity as people of African descent born in the Americas. Chasing invisible voices, exhuming hidden spirits, uprooting concealed echoes, unearthing shadowy ancestral images entrenched in the dungeons for centuries can indeed be overwhelming. This daunting task not only requires an attempt to bring to light the spirits of one's forebears in unfamiliar territories along the coastline of Ghana. Indeed, this exploration demands a rigorous search as Hartman as walks in vicinities where the enslaved were paraded the last time before they entered through the \"Doors of No Return\" into waiting ships; and as she navigates through human remains at various sites of memory tracing a history without transparent evidence of enslavement and ancestral linkages. At the same time, Hartman describes the somber experiences of Diasporan Blacks and the apathy of Ghanaians at sites of slavery: \"We were encouraged to mourn because it generated revenue, but our grief struck no common chord of memory, no bedrock of shared sentiment\" (171). According to Hartman, her \"grand-parents erected a wall of half-truths and silence between themselves and the past\" (12-15). Hartman does no","PeriodicalId":92304,"journal":{"name":"The journal of Pan African studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81931926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Virtues and Challenges in Traditional African Education","authors":"J. K. Marah","doi":"10.4324/9781315162232-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315162232-2","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the virtues and failures of traditional African educational systems, in the context of continental Pan-Africanism, and argues that traditional African educational systems must be complemented by a Pan-African educational system that transcends confocalisms and micro-nationalisms. The process of traditional education in Africa was intimately integrated with the social, cultural, artistic, religious, and recreational life of the ethnic group. That is, 'schooling' and 'education', or the learning of skills, social and cultural values and norms were not separated from other spheres of life. As in any other society, the education of the African child started at birth and continued into adulthood. The education that was given to the African youth fitted the group and the expected social roles in society were learned by adulthood. Girls were socialized to effectively learn the roles of motherhood, wife, and other sex-appropriate skills. Boys were socialized to be hunters, herders, agriculturalists, blacksmiths, etc., depending on how the particular ethnic group, clan or family derived its livelihood. Because there were no permanent school walls in traditional African educational systems, as in the case of the Western countries, some European writers on African education tended to be blinded by their own cultural paradigms and viewed traditional African educational process as mainly informal. Some early European writers on Africa in general went to the extent of saying that Africa, especially south of the Sahara, had no culture, history or civilization. Murray (1967: 14), for instance, states that \"... outside Egypt there is nowhere indigenous history. African history has always been 'foreign' history.\" Laurie (1907), in his Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education, did not even include Sub-Saharan Africa in his scheme of analysis or exposition; he started with Egyptians and ended with the Romans. He equated education with civilization and culture as he knew them and, by implication, Sub-Saharan Africa was primitive. Boas (1983: 180) defines \"primitive as those peoples whose activities are little diversified, whose forms of life are simple and uniform, and contents and form of whose culture are meager and intellectually inconsistent. Their inventions, social order, intellectual and emotional life should be poorly developed.\" Boas goes on to justify a civilized culture by using technical developments and the wealth of inventions as yardsticks. The types of technology he singles out as making a culture civilized are those which go beyond merely satisfying daily basic needs; thus, Eskimo techniques are primitive since they do not greatly reduce the Eskimo's daily physical preoccupation with livelihood. One sees that Boas is favoring West European culture as a measure of civilization; however, the academic tradition of putting Europe at the pinnacle of civilizations has now largely been addressed and refuted by both Western and non-We","PeriodicalId":92304,"journal":{"name":"The journal of Pan African studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"15-24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83364899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}