I once remarked to my friend who teaches at my old college, "Oh, I would love to come and deliver a guest lecture" and he has taken me up on it. The subject? The Changing Roles of African Women: 1800-1990. My rection "Oh, no", "I do not have the time", "I need months to research".
The conclusion? I am delivering the guest lecture this Friday mainly because I think it's a worthwhile thing to do - it presents herstories to young people - and it's a subject which I am very interested in (but need to do a whole lot more research on). I was also inspired by the motivation of the teacher who is leading this class and it is simply that there is not enough taught about the history of African women.
Putting together this presentation has reminded me of the importance of documenting our own stories and in this day and age putting that information into cyber space. There were some women i googled (Madam Tunubi and Madam Efunsetan - who were women who had taken part in the slave trade although the trade as a whole was carried out by men)and what I got back was minimal. I did get the impression that some information about these women were in books BUT this information needs to be online. Online is where a lot of people go to for research.
What are your thoughts? Is online research the future or is it for lazy people who cannot be bothered to read books? What else needs to be done to document the stories of African women? I think we all need to take responsibility for the latter. I am currently interviewing my grand aunt with the goal of writing her biography.
Nana Sekyiamah
Programme Officer
Fundraising & Communications
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2 comments:
Nana,
Online research is the way of the future. No, it is most definitely not for lazy people. I think there are certain subjects and types of information (e.g. African history) that will still be predominantly found in books.
In general, Africans have not done a great job of documenting our history. It seems that we have tended to leave our stories to be told by others. Tools like blogs make it easier for us to record and share our everyday stories; and hopefully this will get us into the habit of writing things down.
Ore
Ore you are so right. I am a fan of blogs for this purpose. I am currently documenting the story of my Grand Aunt (she is over 90 so has lived through the colonial era, nationalist struggle and the post colonial era). Perhaps I shall publish it as a blog initially.
Thanks for reading.
Nana
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