High hopes for Africana Studies Certificate

Social change starts with a single spark, but who ignites it?

The answer: dedicated students.

“In the fall of 2019, the College of Letters and Science (CLS) began a concerted effort to develop and offer a new course in the area of Africana Studies,” said MSU’s Senior Diversity and Inclusion Officer Ariel Donohue.

The CLS hosted a regional scholar and African American Studies leader to advise on the effort and hired adjunct professor Jelani Mahiri to develop and teach LS194D: Introduction to Africana Studies, she said.

Currently, a proposal to establish an undergraduate certificate in Africana Studies is moving through the approval process. A certificate is an academic distinction that usually requires a smaller number of credits when compared to a minor or major.

According to the certificate coordinator and Director of Liberal Studies Professor Bridget Kevane, the process was initiated in 2020 when LS194D: Introduction to Africana Studies was first offered.

The proposal was a student-led initiative, pushed forward primarily by the Black Student Union, who conferred with faculty, staff, and other stakeholders on campus to solidify the plans. According to Kevane, it will take approximately one year for the proposal to be either approved or rejected.

The timeline as laid out by the CLS sets the goal for an Africana Studies certificate to be an option for students by the 2023/2024 academic year.

“The proposal will be vetted by multiple checkpoints, including the Dean, Faculty Senate, the Board of Regents, curriculum committees, the Provost’s office and more,” Kevane said.

The proposal to establish an undergraduate certificate in Africana Studies is part of MSU’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Plan, in a greater effort to increase diversity and further social change, which frequently starts with university students.

“I mean, if you think back to the civil rights movement, a lot of social change was enacted by students,” Kevane said. “I think of organizations like La Raza and the Chicano movement, the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, these were organizations that really emerged and were led by a college-age population.”

However, Kevane noted that “social change, whether at the university or the national level, moves slowly. I think it starts with awareness, with historical knowledge of inequities, it starts with [students] writing about issues or topics that you believe are important and investigating and asking questions and then doing something about it at the local, state, or national level.”

Education— accurate education— is key. Bukola Saliu, former President of the African Student’s Association and a graduate student in Industrial Management and Systems Engineering, said that “in terms of African history, coming from a place where we gained our independence from colonization, having to go through school where they’re teaching us history that is pretty much their interpretation of our history, which is very very flawed, when you learn on your own, you realize that a lot of it is being skewed.”

Saliu grew up in Nigeria and came to the realization that our education of African history at MSU was not as well-rounded as we would like it to be.

“A lot of [African] history was passed down from word of mouth, and so a lot of it was lost especially when colonization came. And so [colonizers] were able to go in and skew the history to favor them,” Saliu said.

Information can be easily lost or misinterpreted, but when a full education on a certain subject is offered, students can better relate and connect with others.

“We also know that programs of study that promote diversity develop empathy, and widen knowledge for students who are becoming active citizens within our society,” Kevane said.

By not offering a program in Africana Studies, “we miss the opportunity to think further about systemic injustices that fall along racial lines, and hopefully recognize how they are entangled with injustices related to gender, class and sexuality,” said Mahiri. “And not just think further about them, but also consider new ways to address them.”

Africans and African-Americans have a shared history but different cultures, and it’s important to differentiate the two. “One of the reasons why we put on African Night and events like that is for people to see who we are as Africans and not what a [colonizer] is showing you, like a poverty-stricken area,” Saliu said. “We are so vibrant and full of culture.”

Montana’s growing population also allows us to question the nature of the state’s demographics, and who we think “belongs” here. “If Montana as a state is 93% white-identified, it is worth discussing how this came to be given our diverse population in the U.S.,” Mahiri said. “While it may seem obvious, assumptions about who "belongs" or normally lives in this region of the U.S. are worth questioning.”

“I’ve been in Bozeman for about a decade and there’s a lot of ignorance here,” Saliu said. “I would say it has improved, but there is still a lot of ignorance and it’s important to teach people, accurately, the history of the black slaves or African culture or African-American culture as a whole.”

“Where did they come from, before they were slaves? They were human beings, and they’re still human beings— so they have a culture and a history, so what is the history?”

To learn more about the proposal to establish an undergraduate certificate in Africana Studies and MSU’s BIPOC Plan, visit https://www.montana.edu/diversity/bipoc/index.html.