Africa Week kick-off social. There will be a demonstration of modern dances from Africa and the diaspora. African food will be served! 

THEME: Modernization of Tradition in Africa. The discussion will be centered on African traditions in African culture, current practice of tradition and the role of tradition in the future.

Details forthcoming.

Q&A session with H.E. Ambassador Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao - Ambassador of African Union Mission to the United States THEME: African Women in Leadership and prospects for the younger generation

Since its inception in 2016, the African Graduate Student Association (AGSA) at Michigan State Universiy has put together an Annual Reserch Conference. The primary purpose is to share ideas arising from research, conducted by graduate students working on African issues and deliberate on ways to create and strengthen networks among researchers, decision-makers, and civil society. The 4th annual conference will converge African graduate and undergraduate students, faculty/staff members, development organizations, and opinion leaders from across the mid-West and generally, from the United States.

This event is supported in part by a Year of Global Africa mini-grant.

Taste of Africa is an event open to the public, hosted by Kongamano.  At the end of Africa Week, Kongamano hosts a dinner in which African food is catered and basic African dishes are taught and cooked on-site. Dinner, African performances, and a Raffle for Snares to Ware will take place.

Details Forthcoming.

Tracing our forgotten Africa is a week-long celebration of the future Africa we want to see and homages to the Continent we know and love. The week long events of culture, panels, and film will take place April 8-12, 2019. Our hope is that together we can connect, collaborate and brainstorm the many ways we can push Africa to the forefront.

This event is supported in part by a Year of Global Africa mini-grant.

About the Talk:

In the early 1950s, young people in Kinshasa, Belgian Congo, became infatuated with the figure of Buffalo Bill, with his feats and exploits, and with his flamboyant looks as images of the famed plainsman unreeled on the screens of their makeshift movie parlors. The man that Theodore Roosevelt so vaunted and rhapsodized as "the most renowned of those men, steel-thewed and iron nerved, whose daring opened the West to settlement and civilization" became the paragon of masculinity and the embodiment of manhood for many young people in Kinshasa. Buffalo Bill, or rather his romanticization through the lenses of Hollywood, enabled those young viewers to forge new standards of masculinity in a colonial environment that denied them manhood and, instead, essentialized the Congolese man as a "grand enfant" (big child) and, worse, as a macaque (monkey). Accordingly, they called themselves Bills and adopted the swagger, the scripts, and the silences of their eponymous hero. They formed gangs of Bills, infused their quest for masculinity with deeds of derring-do and esoteric street slang, and relied on martial arts, kintulu (bodybuilding), as well as on kamô (magical rituals) to get the upper hand in fights over monikers, turfs, and girls. Tropical Cowboys is not just a meditation on manhood, nor is it only a study of the tropicalization of the American West. It takes first and foremost a rather unorthodox view of popular cultures, exploring the grayish areas, those hard-to-reach places, the in-between zones where culture meets crime, dream meets drama, and resistance becomes a double-edge sword that liberates as much as it oppresses, and where young people walk a tightrope between making and breaking and construct manhood according to a pendulum process in which the male body is at once preserved and annihilated.

About the Speaker:

Ch. Didier Gondola is Professor of African History and Africana Studies at IUPUI. He earned a Ph.D. in African History from the Université Paris 7. His publications include numerous books, articles and chapters on popular cultures (music, fashion, gambling, and memory), gender and postcolonial issues in Central Africa and the African diaspora in France. In 2008-09, he was selected as a US Department of State Fulbright scholar and carried out both research and teaching activities at the Université de Kinshasa, Congo. He developed his manuscript on the Tropical Cowboys (IU Press, 2016) in 2011-12 as a senior fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies, in France.  He has just returned from a yearlong research leave at the Collegium of Lyon, France, and worked on a collaborative project that focuses on the emergence of HIVs in colonial Africa. The project brings together a team of virologists, epidemiologists, demographers, historians, and anthropologists based in the US, Europe and Africa.  In addition, he is preparing a biography of André Matswa Grenard, a political activist and charismatic visionary who campaigned for emancipation in France and the French Congo during the 1920s and 1930s.