Munashe Furusa, Visiting Scholar From Zimbabwe
Preparing at his LaCorte Hall desk for his next lecture, Munashe Furusa is thousands of miles from his family and his friends. He packed only what he needed: He brought Africa with him.
From the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Zimbabwe, Furusa has been a visiting scholar at CSU Dominguez Hills since the spring semester, continuing into the fall. Housed in the Department of Africana Studies, he is teaching courses in African world literature and culture and oral literature in the African world.
He is here to teach African culture and literature to African Americans. After all, Furusa explained, Africans frequently do not understand who they are because their views are formed by teachers who were themselves often West European - not African.
"I'm looking at oral traditions and how African writers viewed the African world…how they talk about their experiences, and how they talk about their traditions," says the visiting professor.
He came to Dominguez Hills, Furusa says, because he "wanted to find out what the African American experience is…. It was very important to me to try to understand the way African Americans lead their lives, the way they look at themselves, the way they define themselves."
What has he discovered in this short period of time?
"What I have realized is that the African Americans… are not very different at all (from African people): They are going through an educational system that is teaching them very little about themselves. Talking to them, you find they have no knowledge, or very little knowledge, of the African experience."
It is because of the structure of the schools, Furusa says. African schoolchildren are often taught "the culture of the colonizers." In Zimbabwe, for example, African students grow up learning the history, culture, and geography through the experiences of Europeans who conquered the land. African children, he continued, have studied "Shakespearean literature, or American writers, but they have studied very little of Africa."
From the time they are in kindergarten, they are taught to view their culture through the eyes of those who conquered them. And, it is through those eyes that they learn to view the world as well as themselves.
"I think what people should realize is that every people has produced a culture and we should respect that," Furusa says. "Every people has a history that defines them, and that should be respected.
"It is important to let people know that there is nothing wrong with their culture, so that they don't hate themselves, they don't hate anything associated with themselves. They interact with the world, with other cultures, with other people from a point of dignity. That is very crucial."
He will gauge his success as an instructor at Dominguez Hills by his ability to help students learn and appreciate African literature, Furusa says. Nothing more, nothing less.
"What I hope to achieve is to make people understand literature because, when you are talking about African literature, you are talking about the people themselves," he says. "I am not here to change people. I am here to give them information, which they may use or may not use."
Furusa will serve also as curriculum consultant on African languages, literature and communication system to the Center for Global Diasporas in Southern California, made possible by a Ford Foundation grant to the College of Arts and Sciences.
He is a member of the National Council for Black Studies, African Studies Association, and other organizations whose focus is the development of African and ethnic communities.
During his visiting professorship, Furusa will serve as a member of the editorial board of the International Journal for Africana Studies.
— T.W.
