Simon Gikandi and Achille Tenkiang ’17, along with 14 other Princeton students walked the hot streets of Accra, Ghana. They saw Brazilian style architecture—created when Ghanians who had been enslaved in Brazil returned to Accra in the nineteenth century—and fishermen mending their nets along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, as they have for centuries. They ventured into a crowded open-air market with mountains of tomatoes, and eventually reached the modern edifice of the central Bank of Ghana. They had traveled time as well as distance.
Simon Gikandi, Princeton's Robert Schirmer Professor of English, wanted students to experience Africa up close: "not from outside, but from inside." He took them to places where they could wander through the streets, talk to residents, and question their own assumptions.
In Gikandi's six-week global seminar, "African Cities: Their Pasts and Futures," students read about African cities from different perspectives—literary, sociological, historical—studied Twi, the local language, and immersed themselves in the sites and sounds of Accra.
Achille Tenkiang—who was born in Cameroon, moved to New Jersey when he was three, and grew up in Delaware—had visited his home country only once before, in eighth grade. The global seminar was his chance to rediscover the continent that his parents had left years ago. He was struck by the contrasts he encountered, such as streets that had modern office buildings on one side and shacks on the other.
“Often in the West we are presented with this image of Africa as either a rising continent, or a struggling one,” said Tenkiang. As he walked through the city, he could see there was more to Africa than these two extremes. “We need to delve deeper to understand,” he says.
Peeling Back Layers
During the global seminar, students complete projects based on something that intrigues them. Achille was curious about African youth—how they perceive the role they might play in Africa’s future. What he learned inspired him: “A lot of the youth in these nations are ready to enact change—that was a powerful takeaway for me,” said Achille, a member of Princeton’s African Students Association and Umqombothi, an African a cappella group.
Gikandi and the class also visited Kumasi, a pre-colonial city, and Cape Coast, infamous for its slave castles where many Africans were kept in dungeons before being put on ships to the new world.
There, Achille came face to face with the confusion he felt about Africans betraying other Africans during the slave trade. A lecture by an expert provided a valuable perspective: there was no collective African identity at the time, so people weren’t united around a sense of being African. “Visiting the slave castles definitely helped me understand more clearly how it happened," he said.
The seminar changed his academic trajectory. His focus shifted from engineering to an independent major in African studies and development. He returned to Africa the following summer to conduct research in Senegal and Cameroon on subversive art forms in the city and how those manifest in youth political movements.
“As I walked through the streets of Accra, I was able to relate what I had learned in class to my interactions with the city,” said Achille. “The combination of learning from books and experience was incredible.”
To learn more about supporting global seminars at Princeton, contact Niki Emanuel, associate director of leadership gifts, at ndemanuel@princeton.edu or 609-258-3314.
