May 1, 1998: Headlines: COS - Liberia: Film: Documentaries: Colgate: Liberia RPCV Glenn Ivers produces "Song of the Refugee: A Message of Hope from Africa"
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May 1, 1998: Headlines: COS - Liberia: Film: Documentaries: Colgate: Liberia RPCV Glenn Ivers produces "Song of the Refugee: A Message of Hope from Africa"
Liberia RPCV Glenn Ivers produces "Song of the Refugee: A Message of Hope from Africa"
Liberia RPCV Glenn Ivers produces "Song of the Refugee: A Message of Hope from Africa"
Song of the Refugee: A Message of Hope from Africa
A film produced by Glenn Ivers ’73
by Mary H. Moran
For the past 12 years, I have taught a semster-long course on Liberia as part of Colgate’s General Education/Core program. For eight of those 12 years, as Liberia slid deeper and deeper into civil war, chaos and self-inflicted violence, I have worried about the effect of this course on my students; was I only reinforcing their subconscious racism and tendency to see Africans as violently "tribal?" In spite of my efforts to explicate how the Liberian state dissolved and the role of U.S. Cold War foreign policy in that process, I felt that students were leaving my course depressed and without having made a connection with Liberians and other Africans as fellow human beings. Now, recent events both in Liberia and elsewhere on the continent have made the course a much more hopeful experience for myself and my students. Now, also, I have Glenn Ivers’ film Song of the Refugee to use in my class.
The film, a part of the PBS series Culture Studies and Beyond, is a beautiful account of the return of one particular refugee, the internationally known Ugandan musician Samite Mulondo, to the homeland he left in 1982. On his way home, Samite visits other war-weary nations like Liberia and Rwanda, searching for evidence that human beings can indeed survive the horrors of genocide with their sense of hope intact. Glenn Ivers, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in the 1970s, has produced a moving and uplifting account that forcefully counters the conventional reporting on Africa as the world’s "basket case." In all three countries, people are shown rebuilding their communities, caring for each other, and looking to the future. Along with President Clinton’s recent tour of the continent, films like Song of the Refugee are important in forcing Americans to come to terms with the fact that Africans do not exist somewhere in a "tribal" past but share with us a contemporary world with an interconnected economy, widespread concerns about governmental power and myriad means of self-identification (including language, ethnicity and nationality). It is a lesson I hope my students in Core Liberia can carry with them into this interconnected global context.
Mary H. Moran is associate professor of anthropology
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Story Source: Colgate
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