I first met Dr. Sheila S. Walker in 1994 at the UNESCO World Conference about “The Slave Route” in Ouidah, Republic of Benin. Since then, we have traveled together to various parts of the world. But who is she?
Walker is the director of Afrodiaspora Global LLC (afrodiasporaglobal.com), a nonprofit organization. “I created [this nonprofit] to educate the public about the African diaspora, which contributed to the formation of global civilization,” she said. “One fundamental understanding we teach is that every nation in the Americas––from Chile to Canada––has a population of African descent with a culture that defines their identity.”
Walker holds a B.A. cum laude from Bryn Mawr College. She spent her junior year studying in France at the Institut d’Études Politiques and at the Sorbonne, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Walker was most recently named to serve as chair of the international academic council of the Pan-African Heritage Museum (PAHM), which is being established in Ghana to reflect on the realities of the global African diaspora and make visible the historical and present creativity of Africans and people of African descent, and their contributions to global civilization.
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AmNews: Tell us about your first connection with Africa.
Sheila Walker (SW): I was the only Black person in my class at an elite white university, and I needed a cultural balance to protect me against the alienation of a privileged upbringing that had taught me nothing about my reality. I spent two months in Cameroon in a student exchange group, living with a wonderful family in the Bamum Kingdom. This family knew their culture well and was proud of it. They were also Pan Africanist. It was in that context that I discovered that there was an African diaspora, of which I was a part, and I wanted to get to know it, so I did research first on the African diaspora in the Americas and then in the world.
AmNews: Where did you teach African Studies?
SW: I taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I was director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for African and African American Studies and director of Spelman College’s African Diaspora and the World. I have been a member of the Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route since its creation in 1994 and worked on that for about 10 years. The idea for the project was to make visible the process and results of the enslavement of Africans. I protested from the beginning against the name of the project because of the use of the word “slave.” In the end, they changed the name to Routes of Enslaved Peoples.
AmNews: Can you tell us about your academic and activist connection with African diasporic brothers and sisters in Latin America?
SW: While I was teaching at Spelman College, I found out about a grant from an African American foundation that supported projects at our universities: the United Negro College Fund Global Center. It was a mission to create curricular materials about Afro Latinos. Since I couldn’t imagine creating a project about other people, since I am not Afro Latino, I invited Jesús Chucho Garcia from Venezuela to collaborate with me, so it would be a project with, rather than about, Afro Latinos.
The problem was that you have to have a knowledge base to create curricular materials, but there was only a Eurocentric “knowledge” that denied the existence of Afrodescendants in certain countries and minimized and distorted the history of those who existed in others. Mr. Garcia and I invited representatives from the nine Spanish-speaking countries of South America to a meeting in San Jose de Barlovento, Venezuela (where the name of our group, Grupo Barlovento, comes from), to talk about our realities.In our discussions, we realized that we did not know our history, and that we needed to “generate knowledge from within,” using a comparative perspective, since our compulsory schooling systems throughout the Americas did not teach us about our true history. We created the first book where African Americans tell their own stories to inform honest curriculum: “Conocimiento desde adentro: los afrosudamericanos hablan de sus pueblos y sus historias” (“Knowledge from Within: Afro-South Americans Tell the Stories of Their People”).
