Niara Sudarkasa, my Anhropology professor at The University of Michigan -1969 <


i use her frame work in teaching on white supremacy <



Born August 14, 1938, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida<


grew up as a West Indian. There was never any question that I was a black American, but in Florida people would call me "a Nassau" because my grandparents were from the Bahamas and they were the ones with whom I lived. We had a very big family. My grandmother was one of twenty children. They all had big families so I grew up thinking that every second person I'd meet would be a cousin.<



When I went to Oberlin, I took a course on Caribbean cultures and came across a reference to esusu or esu, which are savings associations in Haiti and Jamaica and almost every part of the Caribbean. An article by a student of the Yoruba in Nigeria described esu as a Yoruba credit associa-tion. I believe that was the beginning of my determination to study Africa, because I had known about esu from child-hood. Instead of using banks or post offices, these Bahamians used esu. I felt thrilled because for the first time I really did concretely understand that there was a cultural link to Af-rica. I determined that I would go to West Africa to learn more about the history of the area from which we came.


That's how I came to begin this long-term association with the continent that I have had.


[In Africa], I felt for the first time what it meant to be a majority person. What struck me about the small Yoruba town I lived in were the similarities to things I knew as a child. There were postures, the way they did things. The fact that women were the market traders and had a life-style that made them very independent. There were no housewives among these women. This was something that I recognized. I think that being in Nigeria in the early sixties increased my sense of pride in the African heritage. I felt that we were all one people with a destiny that was very much interwoven.


I didn't come away feeling that home is only in America and Nigeria is another country. I felt definitely and deeply that this was a part of me.


Fort Lauderdale never belonged to me. I was always conscious that this was not mine. There was always that hand above us, people in control who intruded in our lives from time to time. I felt that it was my country but not my land.


But when I went to West Africa, I had the deep sense not only of belonging, but of possession. This was ours! The whole continent was ours!

Africans belie every stereotype about blacks. I'm impressed with how smart they are and I feel very hopeful because Africans have the intelligence, ingenuity, and now

ing to make this one of the great continents technologically, economically, and so on. As Ali Mazrui and others have said, "Africa is the world's richest continent with the poorest peo-ple." It's one of the great ironies of the twentieth century. I wanted to affirm an association with the continent by taking another name. It was a political decision that some black Americans were making. Sudarkasa came by marriage. The word nia in Swahili means purpose. So Niara was an adaptation and the name was given to me to mean a woman of high purpose. I didn't change my name because I didn't like it, or because I wanted to reject it as a slave name. Legally I'm still Gloria Marshall Clark and Niara Sudarkasa. My passport has both. At the University of Michigan, I was a part of the establish-ment. But I was very politicized about Africa so I was a vocal spokesperson for all the things that the students were advocating in those days, the early seventies: black studies, more black and minority students in the university. At Michigan I became the activist I had not been in the sixties, and most people knew me there as an activist-scholar. I was devoted to Malcolm X. I admired Martin Luther King but I thought Malcolm's analysis of the black condition was in many cases more apt, more accurate than King's. I think he understood that love was not going to conquer all and that this was a confrontation over power. I think that I bring to the study of Africa a concern for the way Africans look at their cultures that many European and white American scholars don't have. I also think I bring a respect for Africa that is important if one is going to give a picture of the continent that is balanced. At Lincoln, which had a long and very distinguished tradition of association with African institutions and the conti-nent, I feel that I'm in the best possible position I could be. It's a specially ordained appointment, because I don't think there is any other African-American institution of higher education that has had such a close tie to the continent. Lincoln was one of the best institutions of higher learning in this country at the beginning of the twentieth century. I want it to be one of the best at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We owe blacks the same opportunity for higher education that others have. And I think that black colleges are the primary vehicles for providing that. Niara Sudarkasa is the first woman president of Lincoln University, the nation's oldest black college, a formerly all-male institution. A graduate of Oberlin College, she earned her MA and PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Prior to her appointment at Lincoln in 1987, she was the associate vice-president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she was the first black woman to recerve tenure. 139