Africa and the Middle East Dennis Cordell

DENNIS CORDELL is Professor of History and Associate Vice Provost at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Adjunct Professor of Demography at the Université de Montréal. He became interested in the Sahel and Sahara in West and Central Africa while an undergraduate at Yale. He joined the Peace Corps when he graduated in 1968.

Following Peace Corps service, he returned to the U.S. for graduate work in African history at the University of Wisconsin. He also ran Peace Corps training programs in the U.S. Virgin Islands for volunteers destined for Chad. His doctoral research took him back to Chad and the neighboring Central African Republic (CAR), where he studied the last years of the trans-Saharan slave trade and associated raiding. This violent trade devastated large parts of Chad, the Central African Republic, and Sudan—a precursor to the upheavals we see today in Darfur, eastern Chad, and the northeastern CAR. The project resulted in his first book, Dar al-Kuti: The Last Years of the Trans Saharan Slave Trade (1985).

Shortly thereafter, he joined with the late Joel Gregory and others to launch research on African historical demography. This endeavor produced an essay collection jointly edited with Gregory, African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives (1987), numerous articles, and another co-authored book, Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa (1996). Since the late 1990s, Cordell has focused more on the histories of African migration in the twentieth century. He has studied the history of Malian migrants in France, and along with three colleagues, he is completing research and fieldwork on the integration of immigrants in Dallas/Fort Worth, a National Science Foundation project, which includes the Nigerian community.

For more background, please see his website (http://faculty.smu.edu/dcordell).

He can be contacted through this site:
dennis.cordell@PeaceCorpsAt50.org

The Peace Corps was a way to get back to Africa

I have been lucky. I found a love. As an undergraduate at Yale, interested in many things but passionate about none, I figured I was on my way to law school. Then, in my sophomore year, I applied for a summer work program in Africa organized by Operation Crossroads Africa. Crossroads sends American and Canadian college students to Africa to work on projects with African students. I ended up in Niger, on the edge of the Sahara—my first trip outside the United States. I was taken by (almost) everything about it and came home deliriously in love with the Sahel, the Sahara, and Africa.

So, I applied to Peace Corps two years later to get back to Africa. Come June, I went to Chad; or, rather, I went to rural Louisiana, the place where Peace Corps, in its infinite wisdom, had decided to set up a training center for French-speaking Africa. After all, don’t they speak French in Louisiana? Rural Louisiana was a crucible for interracial understanding in 1968: several crosses were burned on the lawn of our training center, a place where white and black folks got a little too close. And, being 1968, my draft board had wanted me to have a physical examination (required of all draft-eligible guys still in the States) before I left New Haven. I dutifully transferred the exam to Louisiana, but before the date arrived, I had left for Chad. It took the Presidential Review Board, encouraged by a letter from Sargent Shriver himself, to make the draft board defer and let me stay in Africa.

Training begun in Louisiana continued for a few more weeks in Chad, where the members of Chad 3 learned Chadian Arabic and how to drill wells and do public health education. I lived with a couple of other volunteers in a couple of different houses in the capital of Fort-Lamy, named for a French general and now renamed N’Djaména. For me, it was familiar, I told myself: same “adobe” architecture, same Sahel and Sahara. Hadn’t Niger seasoned me? Yet somewhere deep inside, I wondered seriously if I had met my match, wrestling with water, mud, and pipes while learning to drill wells. Indeed, I ultimately decided that I was much better at doing public health education in culturally relevant ways in both villages with wells and schools.

I didn’t know it would be the small gestures that would push me wholly, and whole, into the unfamiliar. Early on, the happy little neighbor girl showed up at my door with a welcome gift—a platter piled high with fried crickets. I did eat some. After all, she stayed to watch.

My life changed dramatically in Chad. I learned that I still loved Africa. In turn, Africa taught me about love in many ways. Living outside your own culture makes you aware just how it shapes you. It also opens up new paths. I’m still on many of them.