March 5 | Campus
MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at 847-491-4890 or w-leopold@northwestern.edu
Exhibit Celebrates 50 Years of African Independence
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EVANSTON, Ill. --- On March 6, 1957, the British colony then known as the Gold Coast became Ghana -- the first modern African nation to achieve its independence from colonial European powers. Between then and the day in 1994 Nelson Mandela became South Africa's president, no fewer than 47 African nations emerged from colonial rule.
A Northwestern University Library exhibit titled “Fifty Years of African Independence” celebrates this remarkable half-century of African self-definition. Located on the first floor of the Main Library, 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston campus, it is free and open to the public during regular library hours.
The exhibit also commemorates the role Melville J. Herskovits -- founder of the University's pioneering Program of African Studies and what has become the world-renowned Herskovits Library of African Studies -- played in the independence process.
For example, programs from the 1957 official independence ceremonies in Ghana that Herskovits attended with his wife are on display. Also on view are publications from some of the early independence conferences as well as original copies of the constitutions and acts of independence of Botswana and Zambia.
“Because he was recognized as one of the most knowledgeable American experts on Africa, Herskovits was named an advisor to the Allied war effort in the 1940s,” says David Easterbrook, curator of the Herskovits Library. “He was convinced that independence would come to African colonies more quickly than their European rulers imagined.”
Herskovits established Northwestern's African Studies program in 1948. By providing a pool of Americans knowledgeable enough about African cultures to conduct diplomatic relations with the new republics, the program served as a training ground for many Foreign Service officers working in Africa in the early 1960s.
Herskovits established Northwestern's Africana library with the goal of collecting comprehensively. The exhibit draws from a vast archive of materials related to city and rural village celebrations of African independence. It features photographs, postcards and commemorative cloths of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first head of state, and of Winston Churchill, who was still well regarded in some former colonies.
Also on view are comic books -- a familiar form for mass-market biography -- exploring the lives of South African hero Mandela and Felix Houphouet-Boigny, first president of Ivory Coast and a seminal independence movement figure.
For information about the Herskovits Library -- which today is the world's largest separate collection of Africana -- or the “Fifty Years of African Independence,” call (847) 467-3984.