When did you know you wanted to be a historian?
That’s a great question! I knew I wanted to be a historian in the early 1990s while studying abroad as an undergraduate in Ghana. I was so intrigued by how differently race and blackness seemed to operate there, and I wanted to know why. I left with a set of questions that captured my attention in such a profound way—questions that continue to animate my research agenda three decades later. I turned to history to start answering them, and this seeded my career as a historian. But it wasn’t immediately evident to me, back then, that I could be a historian. In fact, I would say that it wasn’t until my first book came out that I finally felt like I could comfortably settle into a sense of myself as a historian, and no longer felt like an imposter.
What was your process for writing your (award-winning) first book, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana?
Like many historians, my first book evolved out of my dissertation. I had initially thought it was going to be about multiracial people in Ghana and how their positions in coastal society changed across the centuries that spanned the transatlantic slave trade, colonial rule, and independence. About halfway through my first year of dissertation research I realized that the archives had a lot to say about interracial sexual relationships but almost nothing to say about their progeny. I took that as a provocation and reconceptualized my project as a history of the color line in colonial Ghana and its diaspora from the vantage point of the Africans and Europeans alike who sought to impose the color line and those who transgressed it.
I grew a lot as a historian and a writer in the years after graduate school. As a quiet confidence in my ability to make historical arguments grew, I felt more at ease experimenting with scale in ways that allowed me to pay close attention to individual historical actors and bring their stories to life on the page, while also tackling big historiographical questions about race, sexuality, and colonialism.
Of the many courses on African history you’ve taught, which have been your favorites?
Two courses come to mind for different reasons. The course I enjoy teaching the most is “Africa: A Reggae Anthology,” which draws on the genre of reggae music as a primary source for understanding how Africa, its people, cultures, history, and contemporary circumstances are imagined, analyzed, and represented by African descended people in the diaspora. From the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement, Rastafarianism, and African revolutionary struggles, the themes running through reggae music reveal it to be a formidable popular culture conduit through which the diaspora has engaged its African roots. Spending a semester exploring the connections between two of the most powerful forces in my life—reggae music and Africa—is an absolute privilege and pleasure.
The course that I am the most passionate about teaching is one that I’ll be offering in Winter 2026. “Assassination: A History of 20th Century Africa” developed out of my interest in trying to understand why assassination became such a commonplace phenomenon during and after the era of decolonization. What made the assassination of a figure like Patrice Lumumba both plausible and possible in the context of African decolonization? If it seems predictable to us today, it wasn’t obvious in the early 1960s that assassination would become so ubiquitous. Grappling with the legacy of these assassinations offers students a sobering introduction to Africa’s recent history, while also challenging them to ask important methodological questions about what gets filtered in and out of historical view when looking through such a particular lens. It’s a unique approach to the continent’s history and one that I hope provokes conversations among my students.
In addition to writing and research, you’re also working on an oral history project on the Cuban presence in Cold War era Africa. What is different about this approach to history?
By documenting the sprawling Cuban presence in Angola through the voices of the Cuban men and women who served there between 1975 and 1991, this project takes a bottom-up social history approach to a topic that has often been understood through a top-down political and military history approach. Cubans’ firsthand experiences and perspectives help us to see the ideological, logistical, and emotional complexity that characterized their unique role in shaping Angola’s post-independence history, in particular, and southern Africa’s march towards freedom more broadly. In addition to recording the oral histories, I am also building an archive of Cuban solidarity posters and related ephemera. These materials offer a unique visual dimension to this history and illuminate how Cuba pioneered aesthetics of solidarity through bold graphic design.
Are there any particular misconceptions Americans have about Africa and/or the African diaspora that you wish more people understood?
Yes, there are lots. Rather than demystifying them here, I’ll just say this: my African history classroom is a place where people come to learn, and that entails questioning what it is you think you know. Sometimes it also entails unlearning some of it. That’s part of the process. My assumption is that if you are presented with credible information that upends a misconception about Africa that you will revise your thinking. My classroom is also a place where we dig into why misleading tropes and stereotypes about Africa have been such an enduring feature of (primarily) western discourse about the continent. Misconceptions about Africa don’t come from thin air, and I find when students can identify how and why they have been misinformed they are empowered to take a more active role in educating themselves.
Your upcoming book, (Im)Pressing Blackness: Race in Print Across Ghana’s Long Twentieth Century, looks at Ghanaians innovative use of print culture. What drew you to this topic?
Ghana has long loomed large in the diasporic imagination as a bastion of Black liberation. During the mid-twentieth century it was known as the Black Star of Africa and its iconic independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was a leading figure in the Pan-African movement. Nkrumah’s racial consciousness has often been attributed to the years he spent in America and later in England. Yet as I read through African-owned newspapers published in the 1860s and 1870s, in what was then known as the Gold Coast, I was struck by how thoroughly racialized the language of political dissent already was. Rather than a teleological trajectory from racial innocence in Africa to radical Black consciousness in America, these newspapers suggested to me that Nkrumah’s sojourn to the United States was premised on a homegrown racial consciousness fostered in part by African-owned newspapers that continued to deploy the language of race and blackness to resist colonialism and to reject its racist presuppositions. (Im)Pressing Blackness puts these newspapers at the center of the story it tells about the development of a West African ontology of blackness during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
What has been your favorite aspect of living in Ann Arbor so far?
Hands down, watching basketball! My son, Taj, plays basketball and I love watching him play on his Skyline High School and Common Bond teams. I also really enjoy going to Crisler with him to watch U-M men’s and women’s basketball teams compete. If anyone in the athletic division is reading this, we’d be great candidates for complementary tickets! The other thing that I love about living in Ann Arbor is that I have truly wonderful colleagues and neighbors. Ann Arbor is beginning to feel like home.
This interview was originally published in the 2025 print magazine, History Matters.
