Discovering the History of African Presence at Wellesley College
A peek inside my brain. My thought process leading to the write-up of two books in my final year at Wellesley College with help from the Wellesley College Archives Special Collections.
I came to meet the Wellesley African Students’ Association (WASA) my Senior Year as quite broken and on the verge of losing its member body. With supporting phone calls from members of the class of 2017 while I was abroad in Paris, France, I applied for, won, and decided to return to Wellesley College my senior year as WASA President, aiming to bring pride and recognition to the organization. Being that we live in the information age, I realized the organization was not up-to-date with the year it was currently trying to fit into. Solution? A website.
Self-taught HTML and a bit of experience using Google’s Blogger in the past, I worked on the WordPress website during my lunch breaks while working at the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation. It took a while, but with familiarity comes efficiency. There was one lingering problem a month in, however. The tab I had made for “History” was still blank. The site had not gone live yet so I was not quite bothered by its blank nature except for the fact that I knew nothing about the history of an organization I was about to lead. I sent emails out. Everyone also realized they knew nothing about WASA’s history. Panic. Panic? Quite frankly so. I contacted alumnae of the College who were involved with WASA while they were at Wellesley College. Everyone had something different to say. I realized there had to be much more to the story than meets the eye, so I reached out to Special Collections at Archives.
It was a hot summer day and I took a trip from the Phi Beta Epsilon Fraternity at MIT where I lived summer of 2015, to the Wellesley College Archives. I met excited faces who were willing to show me any document I had asked for including recommendations. I came across the very first Africans to step foot on the campus in 1960 as well as stories about South African students and their involvement in the College’s Divestment during Apartheid. I compiled what is now known as “WASA history” in its simplest form for the website in a timeline manner, and to every student’s delight in August 2015, showed members a summarized version of the history they had never known of.
As Fall 2015 commenced with the typical campus-wide emails, one in particular struck my interest. It was an email from the Africana Studies department looking for students who were interested in conducting Independent Research under the advisory of Prof. Steady. I was a declared Architecture major and Engineering minor (Olin College) so I was a bit worried that responding to the email would lead nowhere especially because the only experience I had with the Wellesley Africana Department was being Professor Patterson’s Research Assistant my entire Sophomore year. She had left her professorship at Wellesley in the summer of 2014 and gave me a few books which later, unknown to her, came in handy with this research endeavor as a parting present. To my surprise, Prof. Steady reached back to me expressing interest in supervising my research and to my relief told me not to worry about the fact that I was not an Africana major or minor. I took on the independent study for two semesters as my 5th subject each semester and meetings with Prof. Steady soon became a time of comforting reassurance of my work.
Word of my research project soon got out and a few people on campus were not too happy with it because it would change the narrative they liked to already purport. With reassurance from the Archives, I carried on with my research project while creating the official African and WASA Archives “box” so future students and researchers do not have to do all the work I did which took one year of looking through countless boxes to find what it is I knew was important.
In April 2016, I presented to the College my findings after two semesters of conducting this independent study research project with Professor Steady in the Africana Studies department and printed two books detailing my findings as well — “African Presence at Wellesley College and “African Student Organizations at Wellesley College: 25th Anniversary”. It has been quite an experience as it led me back to Ghana, the home of Wellesley College’s first African graduate, to conduct an in-person interview with her as well as receive letters from African alumnae of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s long-forgotten.
As a result of this uncovering, we, as of 2016, had the highest number of members in the history of the Wellesley African Students’ Association and an increased interest in the upkeep of the organization.
