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The Review of Faith & International Affairs

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CROSS-CULTURAL SERVICE AS A SOURCE FOR INTELLECTUAL BRIDGE-BUILDING

Katie G. Cannon Available online: 20 Feb 2012

To cite this article: Katie G. Cannon (2012): CROSS-CULTURAL SERVICE AS A SOURCE FOR INTELLECTUAL BRIDGE-BUILDING, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 10:1, 53-55 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2012.648383

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CROSS-CULTURAL SERVICE AS A SOURCE FOR INTELLECTUAL BRIDGE-BUILDING

By Katie G. Cannon
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n 1970, as a Youth Advisory Delegate for the United Presbyterian Churchs Fund for the Self-Development of People, I underwent an epistemic transformation. My summer employment had ended, so the Reverend Doctor James Herman Robinson (19071972)1 invited me for tea in the main cafeteria at the Interchurch Center in New York City. As soon as we sat down, the conversation turned to Africa. Within 11 months from the time we sipped our cups of tea, Dr. Robinson offered me the opportunity to make my rst international trek, traveling to Senegal, Ghana, Liberia, and Cote dIvoire. I was forever changed by that journey to the Motherland in 1971. At that time, I was on a mission. There was an unquenchable thirst in me to travel to Africa in memory of my ancestors who had been forcibly driven from their homelandmy foremothers and forefathers who made the transatlantic journey in shackles and chains. Following the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I read avariciously everything I could nd by and about black people. When I was a coed at Barber-Scotia College in the late 1960s, my mother assessed this mission as nothing less than my becoming an ultra-black revolutionary. Although my longing to travel to Africa was not only based on my surveying the emotional wounds of the black community following the senseless murder of Americas greatest civil rights leader, with seriousness of purpose I questioned

who was responsible for this crimethis conspired ambush of one of the greatest religious intellectuals of the 20th century and this coldblood killing of so many dreams. Reading the complex ideas of survival, protest, and solidarity in The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson, and Before the Mayower by Lerone Bennett, Jr., I began fashioning answers and deepening my knowledge about Pan-Africanism. The more I studied books such as these, the more I uncovered deeply embedded systemic practices of oppression, marginalization, and exclusion based on race, sex, and class by dominant powerbrokers. This, in turn, strengthened my desire to travel to Africa. Happily, when I arrived for orientation at Rutgers University in June of 1971, Dr. Robinson shared the wonderful news that our delegation of work camp volunteers was the largest group of African American Crossroaders since the program began in 1958. Even though the number of black participants increased noticeably each year, the majority of Crossroads volunteers had been white students from colleges, universities, and preparatory schools. Having reached an all-time high in numbers of volunteers from the African diaspora, it is little wonder that
The Rev. Dr. Katie G. Cannon is the Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, VA. She was an Operation Crossroads Africa volunteer to Liberia in 1971.

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cross-cultural service as a source for intellectual bridge-building

when our chartered plane touched down in Dakar, Senegal, our multiracial work teams burst into screams of joy and tears of jubilation. As living testaments to the upswing of our syncretic African Americanness, we readily offered prayers of thanksgiving for the women and men in our ancestral lineage whose desire to return home remained alive within us. At the time, I could not imagine how my summer in Africa would serve as the seed of consciousness for what would become my vocational identitya Presbyterian clergywoman who travels the world teaching womanist theological-ethics. From Dakar, we ew to Accra, where we spent a week at the University of Ghana at Legon. I found myself most fascinated not by the abundance of fabulous, creative artworks in the Mokola Marketalthough the ebony carved sculptures and kente textiles were breathtakingly gorgeousbut by Akwaaba, the Ghanaian greeting of welcome, communicating the peoples warm and gracious hospitality. Akwaaba, a type of right-relating worldview, continues to permeate my vocational endeavors as a standard of praxis. As a Crossroader assigned to Pleebo, Liberia, my work group left the other volunteers at the university and ew from Accra to Monrovia. From there, our group leader hired a driver to transport us via a truck-bus through the magnicent countryside leading to Cape Palmas. Located at the extreme southwest corner of the northern half of the African continent, Cape Palmas is one of the traditional hometowns of resettled free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the 19th century. We continued to experience big-hearted hospitality as we moved into the homes of our host families. At daybreak on Monday morning, my team of volunteers arrived at our construction project in the community of Pleebo, where we were to build a library with no tools but with plenty of youthful energy and a conviction to embody the Operation Crossroads Africa motto: Make a difference for others; see the difference in yourself. We took comfort in the sobering knowledge that as part of Crossroads international cultural exchange we were not the

rst group of volunteers who lacked technical training as builders of houses, schools, health clinics, and roads. Recognizing our limitations, our Liberian co-workers recongured appropriate and effective construction strategies accessible for beginners so that we could work collaboratively. Four decades later, the womanist methodologies I use in creating courses of study reect the life lessons I brought home with me from the women and men who gured out what would work best to marshal the abilities of our assembled team of neophytes. Most of my students have not traveled beyond local geographical boundaries, so I allow the black womens literary tradition, living laboratory assignments, and the verbatim of critical conversations to function as analogues to Robinsons multicultural, interracial developments. Just as the project manager in Pleebo taught me and other unskilled volunteers how to dig a foundation, gather gravel, shovel sand, and tote buckets of water in order to mix and pour concrete for the librarys oor, my students are encouraged to use their minds to lay intellectual foundations that can bridge worlds. By this I mean that we exegete the texts of black women who are widely celebrated in the mainstream worlds of religion and literature, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, Toni Morrison, Bessie Head, Alice Walker, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Sonia Sanchez, Flora Nwapa, Maryse Conde, Paule Marshall, Ama Ata Aidoo, Maya Angelou, Buchi Emecheta, and Tsitsi Dangarengba. And in doing so, we make crucial connections between abstract discussions of theology and real places where people live, move, and thrive in the core of their being. This work offers us cognitive alternatives to conventional understandings about Africa and her diaspora, and it generates new possibilities that draw out meaningful ethics for justice-making in our existential contexts. The deliberate inculcation of Crossroads motto into my ministry of education means that seminarians and graduate students of religion must read and re-read required texts that transport them across unfamiliar space and time. Over several decades, I have begun to see with

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katie g. cannon

greater certainty that among the most interesting parallels between the contextual nature of womanist epistemology and international work camp relational analyses is the fact that we must cross new boundaries with gentle care as we move into another country, one which is not our native land. To better understand transnational, multiethnic encounters, I invite students to let go of preexisting perceptions of African people, so that they can take mental leaps toward drastically different socio-historical locations. The emancipatory possibility of this type of cross-cultural exchange moved deftly forward when the United States Ambassador to Liberia, Dr. Samuel Z. Westereld, Jr. (tenure extended from 1969 to 1972), invited our work-team to the funeral service of President William Vacunarat Shadrack Tubman, the 19th president of Liberia, who died on July 23, 1971. Most unforgettable was how the last rites for President Tubman brought together indigenous funeral traditions, Christian elements of burial, and the prescribed memorial lamentations by the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, Inc. It was mesmerizing to be among the thousands of mourners lining the streets of Monrovia when the motorcade of Emperor Haile Selassie (18921975) passed by and to witness the impressive pomp and circumstance of the imperial honor guards during the funeral procession. This pivotal experience continues to serve as a denitive reference point when I teach my seminar, Character, Culture, and Craft in African Traditional Religions. By mid-August, it was time for us to pack our belongings, hire a driver with a bus-truck to take us overland, and reunite in Abidjan with the other Operation Crossroads work teams. This nal week in Cote dIvoire laid the groundwork

for my embodied social ethics. During a 24-hour period, the US dollar had zero value. For an entire day, our currency was not welcomed at legal banks or with illegal moneychangers in Abidjan. Also, we were confronted in conversation about the crucial interplay between Western hegemonic regimes and our complicity, as US citizens, in the economic faltering of several African nationstates. Any notion of ending our African travels as some sort of romanticized homecoming dissipated completely when some of the young men of Abidjan called us white Americans. The more we as African Americans contested, the more they insisted that racial identity is not determined by skin pigmentation but by the complex matrix of power that determines the color of ones passport. All in all, the external work camp itinerary solidied my internal journey of self-discovery. In order for budding religious scholars to become conscious of how existing systems of race, sex, and class affect them, theological educators must wrestle with various ways African-centered literature requires us to constantly shift the territory of our normative gaze. When seminarians consider commonalities and differences between everyday life, there and here, then theological-ethical engagement is real. I learned in West Africa to see otherness as the common ground of ordinariness. To a similar end, my students journey through allegorized ction and nonction authored by writers of African ancestry, who invite them to engage in similar cross-cultural convergences. In essence, if we are serious about merging mission, memory, and ministry, then we must be willing to make mistakes, to sandpaper with our sojourners, and to stay open to blessed moments of epistemic transformation. v

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1. It is signicant to note that James H. Robinson was a Presbyterian minister who founded the Church of the Master in Harlem; Camp Rabbit Hollow for boys and Camp Forest Lakes for girls in Winchester, New Hampshire; and the Morningside Community Center in New York City. In 1957, Robinson applied the Camp Rabbit Hollow model to Africa, thus becoming the Founder/Executive Director of Operation Crossroads Africa, Inc. For a number of years, Robinson worked as a Consultant on African Affairs for the United Presbyterian Church, a member of the State Departments Advisory Council on African Affairs, and a member of the Peace Corps Advisory Committee. His courageous life of activism and leadership inspired him to serve as one of the charter board members of Sydenham, New Yorks rst interracial hospital. In truth, James H. Robinson was in the vanguard of progressive, contemporary thinkers on African-centricity before it was fashionable. See Robinson, Road Without Turning.

Reference
Robinson, James H. Road Without Turning: The Story of Reverend James H. Robinson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Co, 1950.

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