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This Week at MHC

January 31, 2003

Five College African Scholars Program Welcomes First Group of Scholars

Although living in New England—particularly at current numbing temperatures—will be a big change for three scholars who arrived in the area from Africa three weeks ago, Adam Mwakalobo, Sanya Osha, and James Zaja should feel right at home at an upcoming welcome reception in their honor at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. The three men will be surrounded not only by area faculty, students, and staff, but also by more than 400 handcrafted African objects from their homeland. The works are currently on view in African Forms, an exhibition that will continue at the art museum through March 14. The welcome reception is set for Friday, February 7, at 5 pm. Preceding the reception, Rebecca K. Gearhart '89 will give a talk titled "The Swahili Art of Life: Artists and Expressive Culture on the Kenya Coast" at 4 pm in Gamble Auditorium.
Mwakalobo, Osha, and Zaja are the inaugural group of visiting scholars in the new African Scholars Program launched by the Five College African Studies Council this semester. The new program has its origins in the desire of Five College African studies faculty to further the work of faculty in Africa. "Over the past four years or so, we have come to realize more and more that the important work being done by our colleagues in Africa could benefit from leave time, access to current scholarship, and a sustained conversation with other scholars from throughout the continent," says John Lemly, MHC professor of English and director of the African Scholars Program.

More than two years ago, Lemly and his colleagues sent out grant proposals to establish an African scholars program. With a $1-million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded in 2001 and added funding from Smith College and Five Colleges, Inc. and its member institutions, the program was born. "The scholars' arrival marks a triumph of Five College cooperation," Lemly says. "Many people on every campus have worked long and hard getting ready for these visiting colleagues. I'm delighted they're here."

The competitive program will bring up to thirty young faculty members from African universities to the five campuses between 2003 and 2007. More than 150 scholars applied to participate in the program this year. While they are here, the scholars will work on their own research, writing, and publishing projects and will have many opportunities to interact with each other and the Africanist faculty of the Five Colleges. There are no teaching obligations, and each scholar has been provided with a laptop computer and a modest research expense allowance and is hosted by a faculty member at one of the five colleges.

According to University of Massachusetts anthropology professor Ralph Faulkingham, who served as interim director of the program at the outset, faculty at African universities often labor under staggering teaching loads, and few have the opportunity for sabbaticals to complete research projects and to bring them to print in journals with a global reach. With one of the largest concentrations of faculty with Africanist interests anywhere in the United States, the Five College community is the perfect venue for African scholars to take a productive sabbatical and to lay the foundation for future collaborations with each other and with host faculty, said Faulkingham. While African universities gain by developing their faculty's research and publication profile, there is a substantial payoff for the host faculty here as well, he added. The visiting scholars bring with them a wealth of experience, research, and insight into contemporary African realities, especially in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, which will engage the interest of the host faculty.

Zaja, acting chair of the Department of Kiswahili at the College of Education and External Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, is based at Mount Holyoke and will work on a project titled "Translation in a Postcolonial Context: The Case of [Senegalese] writer Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter." He is hosted by MHC French professor Samba Gadjigo. Mwakalobo, who teaches development studies at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, will take as his subject "Implications of HIV/AIDS on Rural Livelihoods in Tanzania: The Case of Highly Infected Areas in the Southern Highlands." University of Massachusetts economics professor Léonce Ndikumana is his campus host. Osha, a philosophy professor at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, will write on the topic "And Where is She? A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial African Thought." Smith College philosophy professor Albert Mosely is his campus host.

Based at Mount Holyoke: James Omboga Zaja
At the College of Education and External Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, James Omboga Zaja teaches courses ranging from Kiswahili Usage and Textual Analysis, Communication Skills in Kiswahili, and Early History of Kiswahili to Pre- Twentieth-Century Kiswahili Literature, Introduction to Translation, and Kiswahili Translated Literary Texts. Zaja earned undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Nairobi, where he studied Kiswahili, linguistics, syntax and applied language use, literature and history, literature in English, and political science. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Kenyatta University.

While at MHC, Zaja will study literary translation in a postcolonial context. "I am interested in translation issues because translation as a discipline opens a lot of opportunities for interdisciplinary studies," he says. "However, ever since I started researching and teaching translation, I realized that the way translation was taught lacked serious theoretical rigor; it is still taught narrowly, strictly as an act of transferring and transposing linguistic material from one language to another. Rarely do the issues of knowledge, power, and inequalities that translation engenders get foregrounded. Yet, there is hardly any area of African studies (anthropology, literature, history, sociology, political science) that has not been made possible by translation. It is a fact that researchers in these disciplines have had to rely almost entirely on the services of translators, who have always done more than transfer materials from one language to another."

Zaja theorizes that if African scholarship in literary translation in Kiswahili continues to be conducted in terms of merely transferring linguistic materials, it may not be possible to appreciate the creation of new knowledge in new humanities disciplines such as women's and gender studies. It may also not be possible, he says, to appreciate that translation is "a powerful means of creating knowledge and negotiating representation."

Mariama Ba raises such issues in her novel, So Long a Letter, which has been translated into Kiswahili as Barua Ndefu Kama Hii. This text, Zaja says, "reshape[s] in a number of ways how we look at Kiswahili literature. First, it promises to enrich and contribute to the development of a women's literary corpus that has been both marginal and marginalized. Secondly, it creates a new knowledge that aspires to contest not only the predominant male privileged forms of knowledge, but also the means of understanding them." Zaja believes that the results of his research will inform the study of literature, women's and gender studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, translation studies, and textual studies, among other disciplines.

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