In the Spotlight

"Africa Embraces Obama": An Exhibit for the Inauguration

When David Easterbrook was traveling in Africa in 2007, virtually everyone he met was talking about Barack Obama's newly launched presidential bid. "The excitement was palpable," Easterbrook recalls. And since Easterbrook is the curator of the largest library of Africana anywhere in the world, he decided that whether Obama should win or lose, he couldn't miss the chance to document the historic event—from Africa's point of view. So even before Obama's nomination was official, Easterbrook began putting the word out to an international network of scholars, students, and other African contacts about what he was looking for.

Now, with President-Elect Obama's inauguration fast approaching, Northwestern University Library is displaying an assortment of the remarkable objects Easterbrook has received. The exhibit "Africa Embraces Obama" features more than a dozen CDs and DVDs that celebrate Obama in musical genres from praise-song to rap, including one called "Obama Be Thy Name" and another called "Jaluo in the House," ("Jaluo" referring to the Kenyan ethnic group from which Obama descends, and "the House" being of course, the White one). There are baseball caps and buttons, bumper stickers and rearview mirror ornaments, magazines and newspapers, and scores of T-shirts, including a neon orange Tanzanian shirt with Obama's face on the front and the slogan "Change You Can Believe In" in Swahili on the back.

Some of Easterbrook's personal favorites:

• A hand-carved wooden Obama mask with traditional symbolic African elements. Northwestern anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe ran across the wood-carver's stall in Gambia, and not only sent Easterbrook the mask, but included a 15-minute interview she conducted with the artist.
• A bottle of "Special Edition" beer labeled "President Lager." (The label is pasted on upside-down, as though a little too much celebrating was already in progress.)
• A T-shirt proclaiming "O₃" that pictures Obama's face along with those of Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga and Kenyan football superstar Dennis Oliech.
• A framed portrait of Obama's face, painted on wood, purchased by English professor Evan Mwangi from a street vendor in Nairobi, which Easterbrook says evokes the importance of portraiture in everyday African life.

What comes across clearly is the exuberance and exhilaration with which African nations have embraced Obama's election. "It sends a message of hopefulness about the possibility for change," Easterbrook says, "a possibility many Africans want to see realized in their own countries."

Some of the items were originally displayed in connection with the election in November. After BBC radio interviewed Easterbrook about that exhibit, additional contributions came in from listeners who heard the interview in Africa. The exhibit has now been updated and expanded, with new items arriving daily.

While libraries don't typically collect pop culture artifacts, Easterbrook says they're an integral part of what Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies has always done. "Of course we document African history and culture at the scholarly level," he says, "but future scholars will want to see what was going on in Africa at the popular level." The library holds extensive ephemera from the 1950s and 1960s relating to African independence movements, and its collection documenting the life and work of Nelson Mandela is so extensive that the Nelson Mandela Foundation requested some of its materials when planning Mandela's international 90th birthday celebration last summer.

Two locations within the Main Library building at 1970 Campus Drive in Evanston are displaying items from the Obama collection: the Reference Room on the main floor, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies on the fifth floor of the East Tower. They will remain on view through the end of February.

Image Credit: Front page of the South Africa Mail & Guardian, November 7-13 edition, 2008.