Funké Aladejebi speaking during her History Matters talk
By Funké Aladejebi
On March 27th Funké Aladejebi, a PhD candidate at York University, told the compelling story of how black organizations in Toronto used education to combat racism by making connections to “Africa” and adapting the language of Black Power to a Canadian experience. Her talk was part of the 2013 History Matters series.
You can click here to listen to a podcast of the talk.
In what follows, Funké reflects on what inspired her dissertation topic on African Canadian Women Educators in Ontario, 1940s–1980s, which investigates the ways in which African Canadian women confronted and navigated socially constructed boundaries of racial alienation and inequality.
The last talk of the series takes place at the Lillian H. Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library on April 25th from 6:30-8pm. Historical sociologist Dr. Pamela Sugiman (Ryerson University) will present a lecture titled “And Life Goes On: Japanese Canadians, Memory, and Life after Internment.” Click here for more information on this and other talks in the series. Note: Pamela Sugiman’s talk has been postponed until further notice.
As a young woman attending university in Canada, I knew very little about African Canadian history outside of the mainstream discourses about the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman’s perilous journey to Canada, better known as ‘Canaan Land’. As a result of this narrow focus of black history in Canada, I knew even less about the ways in which blacks negotiated ideas of identity across varied regions of the country. Thus, when I read the works of famous black writers such as James Baldwin, Amari Barkara, and Maya Angelou, I understood them to be distinct Black American writers because, after all, that is where racial discontent and the black presence mattered most, right?
I could not be more wrong about this misconception; in fact, it was not until I entered graduate school that I became aware of the richness and depth of African Canadian history. When I began my dissertation research on African Canadian female educators in twentieth-century Canada, I became fascinated by the complex, contradictory and multiple ways in which African descended peoples negotiated blackness in Canada. So when I read that black militant leader Rocky Jones declared to Toronto Daily Star reporters in 1971 that Canada’s black revolution was underway, I had never considered that black militant rhetoric was a feature in Canadian history or that it had a distinctly Canadian perspective. Continue reading
