Katie Cannon's Encounter with Africa

Abstract

Katie Cannon's Encounter With Africa Peter J. Paris (bio) The Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit invitation I received to speak about our beloved Katie Cannon proposed that I address the topic, "Cross-Cultural Service as a Source for Intellectual Bridge-Building: Katie Cannon as Pan-Africanist." The topic is most apt. In fact, the first part of the title recommended for my talk is the actual title of an essay Katie wrote for a special issue of Review of Faith and International Affairs (in which I also have an essay).1 More about that momentarily. Katie's cross-cultural experience began with her birth as the fourth child in a black family in Kannapolis, North Carolina, a racially segregated community surrounded by a hostile, white, racist society. The first essay in her indelible book, Katie's Canon, is entitled, "Surviving the Blight." In this piece, she opened her autobiographical reflections by mentioning her enslaved forbears, beginning with her great-grandparents who were born and raised in the cauldron of chattel slavery. She wrote that during thunderstorms, her mother would turn off the electricity, gather the children round her in the dark, and tell stories about the family's lineage of pain and suffering. Yet, within the environs of anguish, they learned how to create another world: a counterculture that comprised folklore, spirituals, and religious practices. Katie frequently reminded all of us that "those ancestors never lost sight of the vision of freedom and justice as they created a culture saturated with their own values and heavily laden with their dreams."2 In the 1950s, the Reverend James Robinson, an African American Presbyterian minister who founded the Church of the Master in Harlem, launched what he called "Operation Crossroads Africa" with the mission of sending interracial teams [End Page 121] of young American men and women to Africa for volunteer work and cultural interaction. Make a difference for others; See the difference in yourself, has been the organization's motto since its founding. As the only Canadian, I was privileged to join that enterprise on its first journey in 1958 and went to Ghana and Nigeria. Katie joined the group in 1971 after receiving a BA in education, magna cum laude, from Barber Scotia College. She later wrote the following: "Dr. Robinson offered me the opportunity to make my first international trek, traveling to Senegal, Ghana, Liberia, and Cote d'Ivoire. I was forever changed by that journey to the motherland in 1971."3 In later years, she and I often took pride in discovering that we had had that common experience of traveling to Africa for the first time with the Crossroads Africa program. While it is easy for African Americans to romanticize about such an experience, Katie described a rude awakening when her group arrived in Cote d'Ivoire on their return route and heard very critical comments from African students about the United States and the danger of its power to manipulate the newly emerging vulnerable African nations. Similarly, I had my own wake-up call when I first arrived in Ghana with uncritical appreciation for its first newly elected president, Kwame Nkrumah, widely known as the father of African independence from British colonialism. Much to my shock and amazement, I discovered Ghanaian students virtually united in their criticisms of his political philosophy and leadership style. A quarter of a century later, when I began thinking about the prospect of launching a Pan-African travel seminar for religion scholars selected from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil and North America, Katie was most eager to assist. Accordingly, she volunteered to accompany me on a visit to the Ford Foundation in search for a planning grant with which to conceptualize a five-year study project by sixteen scholars on the subject, Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives, which later resulted in a book written by the group and published by Duke University Press in 2009.4 Katie authored the first essay in that book, "An Ethical Mapping of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade." In it, she wrote, "I look at the religious, economic and moral issues concerning West Africa's participation in the buying...