Sankofa at Ashesi

Since returning from Ghana at the end of September, I've been working on a chapter for a book on educational achievement in Sub-Saharan Africa.  My chapter, if all goes as planned and hoped, will be on how Ashesi University incorporates African as well as Western motifs.  The Akan Sankofa bird, pictured here, turns back to the past to pick up selected traditions to use in the present.  I argue that Ashesi does the same thing, that although it uses elements from the liberal arts tradition of the U.S. that its founder, Dr. Patrick Awuah, picked up at Swarthmore College, it also embodies African ideas about social and religious commitments--though it is a secular institution, I should add.

Doing the research for this piece was a lot of fun, as it mostly entailed interviewing students and faculty at Ashesi, and they are an exceptional group of people who share a strong sense of mission, a commitment to transforming Africa through raising a new generation of innovative and ethical leaders.  I think my favorite quotation on what education is for comes from a young student who, like a lot of Ashesi students, spends much of her free time helping impoverished Ghanaians: "you have to give back, you have to give back, you have to give back."

At a time when so much of college life in the U.S. has devolved into narrow specializations and the cultivation of what Swarthmore's James Kurth terms "the imperial self," this sort of earnestness is refreshing and inspiring.