I don’t know the full history of the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s, but I do wonder where the machetes came from. Would things have been different if we African-European-Americans* had The Prime Directive or better if we had never gone back at all? This is Africa Week at Harvard. Tonight a Film: The Invisible Children; The lives of children soldiers in Uganda. Tonight Thurs. April 5, 2007 @ 7:00 PM Emerson 305.<\/p>\n Last night, Professor Jacob Olupona from [among many places] Harvard Divinity School ** In graduate school I learned that multilingual people are also better at understanding non-native English speakers than I am. My Greek colleague could understand by Chinese colleague’s English and ‘translate’.<\/p>\n ***My mother’s commentary on “Gone with the Wind” and a fortiori “Amos ‘n Andy” was tragedy and farce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I kinda learned that in grade school, but it remained a blur. It was a dazzlingly brilliant day, so much that it almost hurt. And there she was. Her traditional robe gently unfurling in the breeze. She had to be African. Not African-American*, African-African*. I was right. She is Ashanti. She looked lost. It took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI know a man from Tanzania<\/a> and young man from Eritrea<\/a>. They have pretty good ideas where they are going. If you work at Harvard long enough the whole world drops in. Slowly the fog is lifting.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/files\/2007\/04\/olupona.jpg\")
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\naddressed the question, “Is Jesus a White Man’s God?” I speak not even one African language. Fortunately he spoke English. Unfortunately, I still had a hard time**. Hopefully the text will be posted to the net. But I heard what I most needed to. “It is often assumed that Christianity in Africa is nothing more than a tool of colonial oppression. This racist assumption is false.” After duly noting the disclosure implicit in his job title, I still feel compelled to take this seriously. It is the assumption I held. It is tenaciously held by some on the ideological left, who seem to believe that denouncing others magically makes them free of racsim. I almost wish it were that simple. For me, unlearning the racism of youth*** has been and may well be a lifelong task. I am a work in progress.
\nFull schedule of events in the Science Center
\n*According to the Human Genome Project, we are all African-somethings.<\/p>\n