From Kenya to North America: One Woman's Journey

It was during my early years in high school (in Kenya), that I was first exposed to the idea that far away in the Americas lived people who were black. I was greatly fascinated by this idea. Until then, history was just another mundane class that focused on Europeans colonizing Africa and large parts of the rest of the world. Because the syllabus did not include the stories of the real makers of African History—the Africans themselves—as a young African student I found the learning experience to be fairly alienating. Part of the materials covered in class included David Livingstone’s three missionary journeys. No effort was made to bring to the student’s awareness that the caravans of the so-called “slaves” that Livingstone stumbled on in the interior of Africa were Africans like ourselves.