Meet the Anton Fellows: A Ghanaian Odyssey
Brooks Marmon's project, summer 2006
Thanks to funding from an Anton Fellowship, Brooks Marmon is spending summer 2006 in the Republic of Ghana, a West African country that was once a key center for trade in slaves, gold and ivory.
Brooks is volunteering for approximately two months with youth education programs at the Buduburam Refugee Camp, established in 1990 to shelter refugees fleeing civil war in Liberia. At the Camp he will be affiliated with Ghanaian affiliate of RESPECT International, a Canadian based NGO (non-governmental agency) that promotes refugee education and awareness, and the Apeadu Children's Peace Center. Research projects on Liberian history for two courses, Writing History and Introduction to International Relations, provided Brooks with valuable background knowledge for his work with Liberian refugees.
Brooks plans to spend the last two weeks of his time in Ghana observing Emancipation Day festivities (commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the United States), exploring Ghana's coastal UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and visiting museums and libraries in Accra, Ghana's capital.
Brooks became interested in Ghana after reading African-American Richard Wright's 1955 book Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, an exploration of what was at that time the British colony of Gold Coast (now Ghana). As a history major/government minor, Brooks has developed an interest in Pan-Africanism, a call to African unity of which Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah, was an early advocate. In his senior honors thesis, Brooks plans to apply a Pan-African perspective to the work of African-American E. Franklin Frazier, who completed a master's degree in sociology at Clark in 1920. Frazier willed his library to the University of Ghana, and although most of the collection is now at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Brooks hopes to find information at the University of Ghana's Balme Library that would shed additional light on his subject. Brooks also plans to visit Accra's W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Studies and the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs. African-American Du Bois and Trinidad native Padmore were key figures in the pan-African cause, and the former was a close friend of Frazier.
Brooks has had experience working on refugee concerns before. He spent the fall semester of 2005 in Namibia as a participant in Clark's study abroad program there, during which time he interned with the National Society for Human Rights. There he assisted with issues pertaining to the Osire Refugee Camp in Namibia and the Dukwe Refugee Camp in neighboring Botswana.
Brooks follows in the footsteps of an earlier Clarkie, Jay Shapiro, who also visited Ghana with the help of an Anton Fellowship.
Brooks has agreed to share with us, via his weblog, news of his experiences and reflections on his work this summer. Check it out to see what he's up to!
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Additional Resources
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Brooks' Weblog and Emails
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