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Global Partners in East Africa
Carol Summers, University of Richmond
The East Africa Travel grant, when I combined
it with support from my university's travel committee, allowed me to do
three things, all of which were useful and really fun. First, and most
straightforwardly, the money supported my trip to the Women's Worlds Conference
at Makerere University, in Kampala, in July. I presented two different
papers there, and it was a valuable opportunity for me to present some
of my research and ideas to a predominately African audience of activists
as well as historians, and make new connections that way. But it was even
more interesting to sit and listen to the non-academic papers and questions
at the conference, many based on personal experiences, years of work in
NGOs, and thoughtful assessments of what worked, what problems happened
in reality, and how it felt to struggle, year after year, for change in
things that were and are important. I listened carefully, collected anecdotes
and examples, and have used them to enhance my classes, including a new
class on women's activisms.
My second agenda in Kampala was to talk with people at Makerere and sort
out some details for work on a new project that I expect to do next summer
(now that my book is finally out). I did a preliminary interview with
one person, discussed possible witnesses to the 1940s with several others,
met with Makerere faculty in History, Women and Gender Studies, and the
Makerere Institute for Social Research, and collected new scholarship
and fictions available in Uganda since my previous trip in 2000.
In visiting Kampala, I was revisiting places I have traveled to regularly
since 1987. The travel grant, though, allowed me to do even more. While
Tanzania has been prominent in my teaching for years, I had never been
there. So I used part of my grant to fund an excursion to Northern Tanzania,
where I visited a variety of places I have read about, and taught about,
but not seen. The Shambaa and Pare regions, Mount Meru and the Kilimanjaro
region, all of which are places with substantive patterns of colonial
educational development, were standard comparisons for Uganda and Kenya
in the period before independence. I visited schools, farms, shops, sisal
plantations, towns, lumbermills, and markets, walking alone, taking several
cultural tourism excursions with local guides, and chatting with nuns,
Lutheran church workers, drivers, and others. It was all terribly unsystematic,
but I have photos, anecdotes, and even a few props that I brought back
to use with my classes, along with a new understanding of the variety
of people's experiences and attitudes under different governments and
economic constraints in the various countries of East Africa that I have
now visited (Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tanzania).
I plan to return to Uganda this summer for a month of interviewing and
archival work and hope to spend next year on leave, beginning a process
of writing up some of my research on the youth politics and political
imagination of Uganda during the 1940s.
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