In the Spotlight

Exhibit Honors Fifty Years of African Independence

Fifty years ago, on March 6, 1957, the British colony then known as the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first modern African nation to achieve its independence from colonial European powers. Between that date and the day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of majority-ruled South Africa, no fewer than 47 African nations emerged from various forms of colonial rule.

Northwestern University Library’s new exhibit "Fifty Years of African Independence" not only celebrates this remarkable half-century of African self-definition, but also commemorates the role that Melville J. Herskovits, founder of the University’s ground-breaking African Studies program and world-renowned Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, played in the process. The exhibit is free and open to the public during regular hours, on the first floor of the Main Library, 1970 Campus Drive, from February 27 to April 26, 2007.

Herskovits and his wife Frances attended the official independence ceremonies in Ghana in 1957, for example, and the exhibit includes programs from those ceremonies, as well as publications from some of the early independence conferences, and original copies of the constitutions and acts of independence of Botswana and Zambia.

“It was because Herskovits was recognized as one of the most knowledgeable experts in the United States on Africa that he was asked to become an advisor to the Allied war effort in the 1940s,” says Herskovits Library curator David Easterbrook, “and this experience in part shaped his belief that independence would come to African colonies far more quickly than the colonial powers ever imagined. And one of the reasons he established the African Studies program at Northwestern in 1948 was so that there would be a pool of Americans knowledgeable enough about African cultures to conduct diplomatic relations with the new republics.”

Northwestern’s was the first African Studies program at a major U.S. research institution, and in its early days, Easterbrook says, trained many of the foreign service officers who were sent to U.S. embassies in Africa in the early 1960s.

Because Herskovits also established Northwestern’s Africana library with the goal of collecting comprehensively, the University now preserves a vast archive of materials related to celebrations of African independence, as they occurred in both the cities and the rural villages. Besides documentation of the independence process, the exhibit features forms of communications media commonly used in Africa, including photographs, postcards, and commemorative cloths of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first head of state, and Winston Churchill, who was still regarded warmly in some of the former British colonies. Comic books, a familiar form for mass-market biography, feature the lives of South African hero Nelson Mandela and Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a leading figure in Cote d’Ivoire’s independence movement, and its first president.

For more information about the exhibit or the holdings of the Herskovits Library of African Studies, call 847.467.3984.