If you have frequented the Cosmopolitan Club Coffee Nights along East John Street lately, you will have noticed that Africa has invaded the quiet Thursday Nights, and the Cosmo House is alive with the sounds, gastronomic delights, aromas, and cultural offerings of Africa. Not to pay credence to the all too common and mistaken perception of Africa as a single country with a monolithic culture and geography, the African coffee nights have been as varied as the five or so African countries that have hosted coffee nights this past academic year.
On offer at these Africa nights has been a rich but small sampling of African music, food, culture, and information on a wide range of issues. African music offerings (CDs) have ranged from the heavy beat and deep choral base of South African music, of the likes of the Grammy-winning a capella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, to the more traditional beat of Malawi in southeast Africa with a tinge of reggae, to samplings of East African Rhumba from Uganda, the continent-wide popular kwassa kwassa beat from Francophone West Africa as represented by Burkina Faso, and finally the rich, exotically folky Arabic sounds from Egypt.
Hosts from these countries have also shared traditional dishes from their countries with the international campus community: rice-based dishes from Burkina Faso, the corn-based staple of southern and Eastern Africa (called nsima in Malawi, nshima in Zambia, and ugali in East Africa, to name but a few) as presented by Malawi, along with out-of-this-world tasty greens cooked with peanut butter, the delicious snack called mandazi (a southeast African version of the doughnut), and rich black tea from the southern highlands of Malawi. With Egyptian dishes, palates rather partial to spicy North African food were not left out.
And, yes, let us not forget the richly colorful and beautiful African dress that many hosts were kind enough to don and share with the campus community (see pictures)! The sound of children running around the Cosmo house, though occasionally drawing some attention away from the main events, without doubt added to the excitement, richness, and completeness of the African Coffee Nights.
As in many cultures, sharing food together stimulates and forms the nucleus of warm conversation and a sense of communion among peoples of the same and different families and ethnic backgrounds. So it was at Cosmo House. The small sampling of the rich socio-cultural diversity of Africa stimulated a disproportionately rich sharing of knowledge about these countries, be it through simple oral or multi-media presentations that would make tourism promoters envious.
These coffee nights have been well attended, often standing-room-only. The brief presentations stoked among the international audience a profound curiosity about what it was like to live in those countries, and what it would be like to visit there. Ensuing conversions and discussions tackled such issues as simple geography (the wall-size map of the world in the Cosmo living room helps), the economy, politics and the people, languages, culture, music, sport, natural resources and tourism, disease, and hopes and dreams of people in these countries. Members of the audience who have visited these countries, many of whom make it a point to attend, enriched these nights with their own experiences as outsiders.
The presentations and discussions also tackled more sensitive issues of governance, equality, gender, and race, as epitomized by the final African coffee night hosted by South Africa on April 27, 2005. The racial composition of the hosts and presenters alone (black, white, mixed, Indian) was a microcosm of the real situation in South Africa, where the honeymoon and excitement of the defeat of apartheid has been replaced by the dull thud of reality in which economic segregation still keeps people of the different races apart. The Cosmo audience heard and discussed the momentous successes that have been achieved so far, and the challenges and hopes that remain in making a more integrated South Africa, just as peoples all over the world are attempting to achieve the same for their parts of the world.
The African Students Organization (ASO) at the University of Illinois is proud to have coordinated the participation of four of the five African countries at the Cosmopolitan Club. This is very much in line with the goals of ASO—to provide a home-away-from-home for African students both socially and academically, promote awareness of African issues, serve as a forum for debate, and advance worthy causes among those interested in studying, or originating from, Africa. Integrating ourselves more into campus life and the wider community is one way we have chosen to increase awareness about Africa.
Hence the Cosmopolitan Coffee Nights offered us an excellent opportunity to increase the visibility of Africa beyond the overly negative images that dominate popular TV and other media. Since ASO started coordinating these coffee night, attendance and participation (hosting) of African students and their families, and people interested in Africa, has increased. Through the Cosmopolitan Club and its Director Andrea Shields, ASO also coordinated the participation of several African countries in this year's annual International Dinner at the YMCA.
It is our wish, and we have already begun, to increase our outreach to the wider community. To this end we are working together with the Center for African studies and other contacts with the wider community established through Andrea Shields, to give talks and presentations on Africa in local schools. ASO looks forward to hosting African cultural events and dinners alone and through the Cosmopolitan Club, and other campus and outside units and organizations. We also seek to advance scholarship on Africa and among African students and other Africanists, in ways that seek to solve real problems on the continent.
To this end we on 16 April, 2005 organized the ASO Second Annual Forum on campus, a one-day academic conference at which some 10 papers were presented on a wide range of issues on this year's theme: Governance, Leadership and Development in Africa. This was well attended, tackled an important issue for Africa's future, and generated a high quality of scholarship and discussion. Students and faculty, including a professor from Illinois Wesleyan University, presented papers. We look forward to next year's forum, on a different theme. For more details on ASO, please visit our Web site at:
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ro/www/AfricanStudentsOrganization/home.html
Finally, on behalf of ASO, I wish to thank all those African students and faculty who have hosted coffee nights at the Cosmopolitan Club, and all those who have shared them with us. I urge more Africans and people from other countries to host their countries at the coffee hours, share their countries with the campus community, enrich the diversity of these social nights and the international face of the Cosmopolitan Club even more, and above all, have yourself a party. If you have not attended these coffee nights yet, you are missing out. And did you know? They are free.
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< Leo Zulu and his beautiful young daughter Melissa at a Coffee Hour | Moussa Koné holds the child of Richard and Favour Djukpin at the International Dinner > |
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< Ester and Francoise preparing to serve at the March 6 International Dinner | Eating nsima > |  |
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