Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Roger Arliner Young (1914-1955) was the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in zoology, after years of juggling research and teaching with the burden of caring for her invalid mother. Her story is one of grit and perseverance.
Roger Arliner Young grew up in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. In 1916, she entered Howard University. In 1921, she took her first science course, under Ernest Everett Just, a prominent black biologist and head of the zoology department at Howard. Although her grades were poor, Just saw some promise and started mentoring Young. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923.
Her relationship with Just improved her skills, and he continued working with her. According to his biographer, Just probably chose a woman protégé because he thought men more likely to pursue lucrative careers in medicine than to remain in academe.* Just helped Young find funding to attend graduate school.
In 1924 she entered the University of Chicago part-time. Her grades improved dramatically. She was asked to join Sigma Xi, an unusual honor for a master's student. She also began publishing her research. Her first article, "On the Excretory Apparatus in Paramecium," appeared in Science in September 1924. She obtained her master's degree in 1926.
Just invited Young to work with him during the summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, starting in 1927. Young assisted him with research on the fertilization process in marine organisms. She also worked on the processes of hydration and dehydration in living cells. Her expertise grew, and Just called her a "real genius in zoology."
Early in 1929, Young stood in for Just as head of the Howard zoology department while Just worked on a grant project in Europe. It was the first of many trips to Europe for Just and the first of many stand-in appointments for Young. In the fall of that year, Young returned to Chicago to start a Ph.D. under the direction of Frank Lillie, the embryologist who had been Just's mentor at Woods Hole. But she failed her qualifying exams in January 1930.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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After falling short in an election for a top House Democratic leadership position, progressive champion Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), will still have a spot at the leadership table.
Lee, who ran for the role of Democratic Caucus Chair last week and lost narrowly to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), will essentially have a new position created for her. Her role will be the third co-chair of the Steering and Policy Committee, an important body that votes on which members get to sit on certain committees. As a co-chair, Lee will have the power to influence who will shape House Democrats’ agenda and investigations.
Lee told Vox in an interview Tuesday that her new responsibilities will be “to make sure all voices, all perspectives are part of the committee process.”
Lee also owes her new authority to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become the next Speaker of the House. Pelosi announced she would create a third co-chair position for Lee on Friday, in addition to current co-chairs, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Pelosi did so after an outcry from some progressive members of the House that a woman of color hadn’t made it into Democratic leadership, especially after a huge 2018 midterms win was powered in part by the candidacies and efforts of women of color.
“Congresswoman Lee has been a preeminent voice in ending the scourge of HIV/AIDS around the world and fighting poverty in America, and a powerful advocate for peace,” Pelosi said in a statement Friday. “As a leading African American woman with a place at the decision table, the appointment of Congresswoman Lee is even more meaningful as we mark the birthday of her friend: the trailblazing Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.”
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Kentridge is a white South African artist known for a body of work—drawing, painting, animation, and performance—that engages with the colonial and postcolonial history of both his country and the wider continent. The new production’s name comes from a Ghanaian proverb: “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck.” It is a work of historical investigation and reclamation, focused on the African carriers and porters—two million of them—who lugged around the possessions of British, French, and German forces during World War One.
As with the best of Kentridge’s work, The Head and the Load is a kaleidoscopic affair. There are numerous collaborators: The music was composed by Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi and played by the Brooklyn ensemble The Knights, while the long list of extraordinary performers include Ann Masina, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, and N’Faly Kouyaté. The production itself is a collage of many media, embodying our patchwork understanding of history itself.
We hear the famous letter from the Reverend John Chilembwe, who wrote a stinging open letter against the recruitment of Nyasa men into World War I, asking, “Will there be any good prospects for the natives after ... the war?” We hear snippets of military drills, Morse code, dogs barking, Frantz Fanon translated into siSwati. The words are both literary (e.g. Aimé Césaire) and historical, such as the lines taken from the fatal Berlin conference of 1884, in which European powers divided the continent between themselves. The music, too, is a mixture, both an homage to traditional African music and the European avant-garde European (Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith).
Like Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015, the performances take place against a backdrop of dynamic projections. White explosions made with an eraser burst across a landscape drawn in charcoal. A dancer’s animated shadow follows him as he races across a battlefield, then falls when he does. Performers carry “drawings” that turn into moving shadow puppets.
The projections also contain specific historical references. We see a map of Madagascar, dated 1905. We see calculations about “wastage”—the percentage of carriers who might die on the road, for example—made on the white-owned “Kleinfontein Company Limited” letterhead. Those calculations are important, since Kentridge’s chief historical metaphor is the ambiguous truth offered by math. The two million porters and carriers existed in almost unthinkable numbers, so Kentridge’s performers break it down: three carriers per soldier. Nine for an officer. Twelve carriers for a machine gun. These statistics are significant, representing the lived experience of unsung heroes. They are also meaningless, mere data on a page.
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The Ethiopian prime minister’s opponents fear that he’s an African Erdogan. His rhetoric and policies suggest he’s more of a liberal democrat. Foreign Policy: Abiy Ahmed Is Not a Populist
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Earlier this year, when Abiy Ahmed was seeking the leadership of Ethiopia’s ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), he encountered stiff resistance.
At the time, much of his home region of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest and most populous regional state, was experiencing a wave of a protests and strikes that brought the economy to a near standstill. In February, then-Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned, and a state of emergency was declared by the federal government. Abiy, as the recently appointed chairman of the Oromo wing of the EPRDF, a multiethnic coalition, put his name forward. He was young and popular with the demonstrators, and he echoed many of their demands, including for the release of political prisoners. But a section of the EPRDF establishment—centered in its ethnic Tigrayan wing, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—dismissed him and his Oromo colleague Lemma Megersa as reckless populists and fought tooth and nail to obstruct his candidacy. They failed.
Since then, Ethiopian politics has been turned on its head. elected chairman of the EPRDF, in spite of internal opposition, and became the country’s new prime minister. He is enormously popular today" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tiempos, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;">In late March, Abiy was elected chairman of the EPRDF, in spite of internal opposition, and became the country’s new prime minister. He is enormously popular today and has won acclaim internationally for his rapid liberalization of the country’s politics; for his promises to organize, in 2020, Ethiopia’s first free and fair election; and for his moves to open up the economy. But inside Ethiopia, away from the euphoria of what is known as “Abiymania,” criticisms abound. One of the most common—and at times most compelling—is that Abiy is a populist in the mold of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. It’s
The argument runs like this: Abiy, despite being a member of the ERPDF, has mostly sidelined the party and appealed directly to the public over the heads of his colleagues. They say that he has monopolized power and decision-making at the expense of deliberation and consultation, and that he has cultivated a messianic image through set-piece spectacles—such as a mass rally in the capital, Addis Ababa, in June—with the help of fawning state broadcasters.
In a series of conversations, public figures on opposite ends of Ethiopia’s political spectrum—such as the academic and journalist Abiye Teklemariam and the influential Oromo activist Jawar Mohammed—have described Abiy to me as a “liberal populist.” Journalist Michela Wrong, a longtime observer of Ethiopian politics, has written that the prime minister resembles the likes of Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, populists who “use jingoistic appeals to nationalism to truncate or, in some cases, supplant domestic political debate and institutional processes.” Alemayehu Weldemariam, a U.S.-based Ethiopian lawyer and public intellectual, has called Abiy “an opportunistic populist jockeying for power on a democratizing platform.”
But the definition of populism is notoriously vague. The English term is tossed around these days as an insult without much specificity. In Amharic, Ethiopia’s most widely spoken language, the word has no direct equivalent. Across the world, there are left-wing populists and right-wing populists, neoliberal populists and nationalist populists. There is Trump in the United States and there was Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Africa, the most successful populist was arguably Zambia’s former President Michael Sata, who railed against Chinese immigrants and coupled ethnic mobilization in the countryside with posing as a champion of the poor in the cities. Even in this motley landscape, Abiy doesn’t fit in.
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As a child growing up in Ohio, Biola Alabi vividly remembers one visit to a friend’s house for dinner. Biola wasn’t hungry, so she didn’t eat much, and her friend’s mother piped up: “You didn’t finish your food; aren’t people in your country starving?” It wasn’t precisely the moment when the usual Nigerian-American career dream — doctor, lawyer, engineer — faded for the future media mogul, but it planted the seed. “That is why I was drawn to Nigeria, because I wanted to change that story,” she says.
Today, Alabi is transforming the broadcasting and film industry in Africa with a focus on locally produced content — not imported Western fare. She launched seven Africa Magic channels, including some in indigenous languages, which now are the “backbone of African content,” says Femi Odugbemi, a Nigerian documentary filmmaker, director and producer. She even came up with the “African Oscars,” as the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards are known.
The 45-year-old mogul’s “global perspective” was honed during a childhood split between Cincinnati and Lagos, Nigeria, with her parents leaving their homeland for good when the political situation deteriorated. (She’s also lived in Seoul, South Korea, for an internship.) As a freshman at the University of Cincinnati, Alabi planned to become a doctor. But during one of her classes, she realized media could be a transformative tool, and she started to consider another path.
A few years after graduation, she was working on the classic children’s TV show Sesame Street, where one of her first projects was about how parents and children could talk about the 9/11 attacks. When she got involved in Sesame Street’s international projects and started traveling across Africa, Alabi felt the need to “be on the continent.” One time in Tanzania, “I saw how parents and children were engaging with our content, even though it wasn’t in Swahili. It was very powerful for me,” she says.
In 2008 she moved to Lagos for good and found that Africa didn’t have its own Sesame Street — most of its hits were imports. She aimed to tell unique local stories, rising to become managing director of M-Net Africa, one of the continent’s biggest broadcasting companies, where she helped launch the African Oscars. In 2015, she started Biola Alabi Media consultancy to connect storytellers with funding and distribution.
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Ethiopia's recent changes are due largely to an uprising by young men from the largest ethnic group, the Oromo. Their inspiration: Jawar Mohammed, who created a media network in exile in Minnesota. NPR: How An Exiled Activist In Minnesota Helped Spur Big Political Changes In Ethiopia
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In person, Jawar Mohammed is quieter, smaller than the big persona he has built online.
To see him, you arrive at what looks like an old embassy residence in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. It's hulking and white, multiple stories, surrounded by tall walls. You're frisked by plainclothes security officials and then guided through a series of empty rooms, one covered in Oriental rugs. Finally, you reach his small office, where he is sipping tea, monitoring his phones and keeping up with the latest political action on his laptop.
At 32, with a mischievous smile and a round, boyish face, he keeps the air of a startup CEO, but Jawar is without a doubt the most controversial man in Ethiopia. The previous government branded him a terrorist, because from exile in the U.S., he created a media network and used it to bludgeon that government — one of the most brutal regimes on the African continent.
The Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, the ruling party, was armed to the teeth and controlled the executive branch, Parliament and judiciary for almost three decades. An airtight intelligence operation meant there was little they didn't know, so any potential dissent was dealt with swiftly and violently. There is no comprehensive count, but human rights groups have for years decried vast abuses by the government.
"This was one of the most powerful regimes in Africa," Jawar tells NPR. "Supported by the West and China, Russia, together. Even a liberal like [Barack] Obama, who is committed to human rights and democracy, looked at them and said there is no way these guys are going to go." During a 2015 visit, and much to the dismay of Ethiopian civil society groups, President Obama was accommodating of the regime, even calling it "democratically elected."
But the regime had one big weakness: In a diverse country, it was mostly led by Tigrayans, a minority ethnic group that makes up less than 10 percent of the country's population. The Oromo — the largest ethnic group, representing more than a third of the population — had mostly been left out.
"[The Oromos] have been economically and politically, culturally marginalized for a long time, because the Oromos were always a threat to whoever was in power," Jawar says. "And to prevent Oromos from coming to power, to disempower them ... ridiculing them was very important, demoralizing them was very important."
Jawar, an Oromo, saw his opportunity. On his network, broadcasting from Minnesota to Ethiopia via satellite and social media, he decried injustice. He highlighted Oromo history and encouraged young Oromos to be proud of their culture.
"I called it the project of building collective self-esteem," he says.
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It is often said that climate change will hurt the world’s poorest people first. Nowhere is that potentially truer than in Somaliland, an unrecognized state in the Horn of Africa sandwiched between an expanding desert and the Red Sea. A prolonged drought has killed 70 percent of the area’s livestock in the past three years, devastating the region’s pastoral economy and forcing tens of thousands of families to flee their grazing land for urban camps, according to authorities.
“We used to have droughts before. We used to name the droughts, but they would be 10 or 15 years apart,” says Shukri Ismail Bandare, minister of environment and rural development. “Now it is so frequent that people cannot cope with it.”
Somaliland has endured regular cycles of drought for the past 20 years that have intensified since 2015 as consecutive rains have failed. The impact has been catastrophic for the nation of 3.5 million people, where livestock farming accounts for about 70 percent of economic activity. According to the U.N., 4.2 million people in Somaliland and neighboring Somalia will require food assistance next year.
“Four consecutive years of emergency hit Somaliland so hard and it’s all about climate change,” Bandare says. “You can touch it [climate change] in Somaliland — it is real, it is here.”
Somaliland is not alone. Across the Horn of Africa — a region that includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and parts of Sudan and Kenya — drought has become the new normal. According to U.S. scientists, the region dried faster in the 20th century than at any other time in the past 2,000 years.
Changes in temperature in the Indian Ocean over the past decade, similar to the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific, have directed winds eastward, pushing moist air that normally brings rains to east Africa away from the continent. As a result, some 13 million people across the region are suffering from food shortages, according to EU agencies.
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