| World Connections: Footsteps of Slavery By Greta Petry (October 29, 2007)
Courtney Ann Hubbard went to Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana with high purpose -- to retrace the footsteps of slavery. "Every waking minute of the trip had an impact on me," said Hubbard, a graduate student in Liberal Studies who traveled with fellow UAlbany students and faculty this past summer. UAlbany faculty Marcia Sutherland and Kwadwo Sarfoh offered the trip though UAlbany's nationally-ranked Department of Africana Studies, and opened it to students from a wide cross-section of disciplines. Sutherland said that several students considered the trip the most valuable experience of their lives because it debunked the general negative view of Africa. Hubbard returned to the U.S. with a new awareness of the stereotypical way in which Africa is depicted on TV as uniformly poverty-stricken and despairing. "Knowledge acquisition was highly transformative for them," Sutherland noted. Renée Lucier DeCelle of the Office of International Education played a major role in terms of registering student participants for classes this summer and also joined them on the trip.
The group studied in Senegal and at the University of Ghana's Legun campus. In Senegal they went to Goree Island, one of the primary sites where slavers held Africans captive before packing them on ships for the dreaded Middle Passage to the Americas. "In Elmina, there was a room called the 'room of no return' where our ancestors were to leave for the Western world and never return to Africa again," Hubbard said. Hubbard advises freshmen who'd like to make the trip next summer "to be open to new experiences and to appreciate the culture they embark on and understand that they are needed as agents for change on the continent. This was not an opportunity for me, it was an obligation." |
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