Background on Sheila S. Walker
PROLOGUE
The Sheila S. Walker Collection highlights how the life experiences of an African American cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker focusing on the Global African Diaspora and on relationships between the Diaspora and Africa and among African Diasporan societies, allude to, exemplify, and elucidate significant issues of her era. It provides archival materials of various sorts that characterize dynamics of the period both nationally and internationally.
The Collection reveals information that does not fit the usual narrative, such as that Operation Crossroads Africa, founded by an African American minister, inspired the creation of the United States Peace Corps, a government institution helmed by a relative of the then president of the nation. Also, U.S. northern, urban African Americans continued to participate in mutual aid societies that were so important historically, and sometimes presently, in much of the African Diaspora in the Americas.
This period, which included the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle to make significant progress by African Americans and other oppressed groups, involved challenging entrenched ideologies in the name of truth, breaking through staunch barriers to claim freedom, forging new paths through old obstacles, and opening ways for others to follow by fighting to become so many onlies and firsts. We went to graduate school to study with learned scholars, but found ourselves studying against upholders of colonial perspectives designed to disempower us.
We created Black Student Associations and Black groups within our disciplines for intellectual and existential self-defense, organized study groups to learn what no professors in our academic institutions could teach us, demanded African and African American classes that administrators often provided with incompetent professors, and learned that we had to educate ourselves.
Background
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1944, cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Sheila S. Walker spent her childhood in Kearny, then East Orange, New Jersey. Her father taught her to read, write, and count before she began elementary school, and her mother took her to the Kearny public library children’s room to borrow the books she wanted.
Two contrasting elementary school experiences were revelatory. In Garfield School in Kearny, Walker, from one of the town’s two small African American communities, was the only African American child in her first-grade class. The teacher assigned her to the last seat of the slow reading group, perhaps because her name was Walker rather than Aaron. Students moved up by reading a word missed by the previous student. Walker spent the year in the first seat of the better reading group.
When she was in second grade her family moved a few miles away to East Orange, NJ, a more racially integrated town with more opportunities for African Americans. As the new girl in her class at Washington School, Walker won her first spelling bee. After that the teacher selected her, one of three African American children in the class, which came as a pleasant surprise, to be the Queen of Birthdayland in the play the class performed for the school.
Asked to choose, rather than being assigned to, one of the three reading groups named for the baseball teams in the region—NY Giants, NY Yankees, and Brooklyn Dodgers—she, even at age six and like other African Americans, automatically chose the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers’ hiring of Jackie Robinson made them the first racially integrated baseball team in the nation. They were also her class’ best readers. She maintained her academic excellence through primary school.
Living near a branch of the East Orange Public Library, Walker was surprised and happy to find that the children’s librarian was an African American woman. The librarian was probably equally pleased to find this curious little girl who loved to read about other lives and other places. She immediately suggested that Walker read books about famous African Americans like scientist George Washington Carver, women like aviatrix Amelia Earhart, and significant people of other ethnicities such as Sacagawea, the Native American woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition to the West Coast of the United States.
When Walker was eight, her parents divorced amicably and she lived, unusually for the era, with her father and paternal grandparents. When she began years later to write popular articles for mass market magazines, a theme she wrote about was her socialization by her father: "Growing Up As Daddy's Girl," for Essence Magazine, June, 1976, and "Living the Songs Daddy Sang--Letter from Martinique, Summer 1984," for Genetic Dancers, First Quarter, 1985. She received letters of gratitude from readers also socialized by their fathers, who thanked her for writing a story similar to their own lives.
Walker also maintained a lifelong loving relationship with her mother, Susan Robinson Walker. Her mother worked as a receptionist for various companies once they began to hire African American women, eventually working at the East Orange Board of Education. For Walker’s community, her mother was the model of a glamorous liberated woman—before such an image of a liberated woman appeared in the larger society.
Her mother became Walker’s favorite international travel companion. She told her daughter that in school she had wondered why, in geography classes, she had to learn about places where she was convinced she would never go—but where she was thrilled to find herself thanks to her daughter. Walker took her to Jamaica, France, India, Trinidad, Martinique, the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, Marie Galante that is part of Guadelupe, St. Lucia, Senegal, Turkey, Belize and Italy.
Walker’s father, James O. Walker, initially worked as a longshoreman and mechanic at Port Newark, where his father, James B.Walker, was the business agent for an African American local of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), labor unions being segregated. Her grandfather fought for the right to work for a decent wage for African Americans. He was also a member, often president, of the All Brothers Club, a mutual aid society similar to others that existed historically and that still exist in many places in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas. During the period of slavery throughout the Americas, a major goal of some such groups was to buy their members out of slavery and make them free people.
Walker’s father, after being obliged to be in the segregated navy during World War II, managed to transition from being a longshoreman to attend the Chiropractic Institute of New York and become a Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine using the financial support of the GI Bill. He was surprised to have that opportunity given that the GI Bill, like other such U.S. government institutions, was designed to be unavailable to African Americans who wanted to pursue further education and improve their lives. He eventually worked at a labor union clinic that his father was proud to have helped to create.
Walker’s interest in cultural anthropology began at about age four. Her parents and grandparents often took her to visit her great aunt, who lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown. There she was intrigued by the novel sights and sounds, by Chinese New Year dragons, and by a language with writing in which she unsuccessfully sought letters and words she was learning in primary school. She was curious about these interestingly different people, wanted to know more about them, and wondered who else were her neighbors on the planet.
After her parents’ divorce, Walker’s father married Yvonne Whitlock from Washington, DC, a Howard University graduate with a Masters Degree, and a member of the most highly schooled African American population in the country. She worked for the American Society for African Culture (AMSAC) in New York City, was Walker’s first model of a professional woman working in the international sphere of African/African American relations, and became a major influence in Walker’s life.
AMSAC’s purpose was to create links between Africans and African Americans in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres, and to counter negative media images of Africa based on Tarzan-style fantasies. It was through AMSAC, for example, that singer and political activist Harry Belafonte supported South African singer Miriam Makeba in making a career in the United States. AMSAC hosted many professional and cultural events including sophisticated receptions that Yvonne organized at exclusive NY hotels for African heads of state. As a result, Africa and Africans began to become positive realities in Walker’s life, preparing her to spend time on the continent and to integrate a consciousness of Africa and its connections with the Americas into her worldview and professional activities.
At Vernon L. Davey Junior High School Walker received the highest academic achievement award, the W. Nelson Knapp Scholarship Award. She also broke the school’s high jump record without learning how high she might have jumped had her feat not ended the competition. At East Orange High School she was involved in many civic and academic activities outside and inside school, was selected to attend a leadership training camp, and received numerous recognitions. Receiving the highest academic award, the W. Nelson Knapp Scholarship Award, she was also the valedictorian in the predominantly white class. Articles about her accomplishments appeared in the school paper, The News, as well as in the East Orange Record.
Walker was selected out of hundreds of candidates to become an officer of the New Jersey Association of High School Councils (NJAHSC), and was East Orange High School’s first African American representative to the New Jersey Girls State citizenship institute hosted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Women’s Auxiliary. Noticing a small “c” by her name when checking into the house at Douglass College where some of the Girls’ State group would stay, she was more amused than surprised when she arrived at the only room in the attic to meet her roommate, the other “colored” girl who had also wondered about the small “c” by her name. This was Walker’s first conscious experience of N.J. segregation—from the Women’s Auxiliary of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who, apparently manifesting their version of citizenship, saluted the flag several times a day.
As indicated in the yearbook, classmates selected her as most of the “Mosts” [most likely to succeed, etc.]
Walker was the only African American in the class of 1966 at the elite, white, “Seven Sister” Bryn Mawr College. At the time such colleges were recruiting a few good “Negro students, a category into which Walker fell as a result of being the Valedictorian of her public high school. Many other students were from fancy private schools where the educational style prepared them for that of Bryn Mawr, a style that Walker had to learn on her own. She earned her B.A. cum laude in Political Science, expecting to satisfy her desire to see the world by joining the U.S. foreign service. Her initial meeting with foreign service officers, who didn’t seem particularly interested in the people and culture in the countries where they served, led her to become a cultural anthropologist as a better way to get to know the human cultural mosaic of the planet.
Looking back, Walker realized that she was probably the first “touch of color” on Bryn Mawr’s swimming team, which she was invited to join although she had not tried out. Learning to swim at the Colored YWCA in Orange, NJ had not prepared her to swim competitively. Not wanting to be a disgrace to the race, she learned a new stroke, the butterfly, that the Colored Y had not taught, practiced assiduously, and performed decently at regional swim meets to which she added the only hint of melanin.
During her freshman year, Walker attended her first professional conference as the only adolescent present. Organized by AMSAC at the African American Howard University, the theme was “Southern Africa in Transition.” There she learned about African nationalism and freedom struggles, and about the concept of Pan-Africanism. She also met her first African diplomats.
Inspired by the AMSAC conference, a year later Walker spent the transformational summer after her sophomore year with the Experiment in International Living exchange program in Foumban, capital of the culturally rich Bamum Kingdom in Cameroon in Central Africa. She lived with a family with a pan-Africanist perspective, and proud of their culture that they were delighted to share with her. With this family, she also learned about the African Diaspora in the Americas, and learned that she was part of it. Spending her junior year in France studying at the Sorbonne and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, she also discovered the African Diaspora in Europe.
After graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1966, Walker worked as an escort-interpreter for several summers while in graduate school, traveling throughout the U.S. interpreting for groups of francophone Africans invited by the African Youth Leadership Program (AYLP) of Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA). Her preparation to be an escort-interpreter was based on her experiences in francophone Africa and the command of French that she acquired during her Junior Year Abroad. Her role was both to interpret the language, and to help visitors understand elements of U.S. culture.
Operation Crossroads Africa is a non-profit organization, more dynamic in the past than now, that, based on summer work camps in Africa involving U.S. and African adolescent volunteers, built and builds links between Africa and the United States. After working as an escort-interpreter with Africans coming to the United States, Walker led a summer work camp in a village in western Ivory Coast. Operation Crossroads Africa was the precursor to and model for the United States Peace Corps. Its founder, African American Reverend James Robinson, pastor of The Church of the Master in Harlem, was an advisor to the first Peace Corps director, Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of then President John F. Kennedy, and a member of the initial Board of Directors.
Walker also became interested in genealogy and participated in author Alex Haley’s Black Genealogy Project that was part of his Roots book and TV mini-series. Her role was to teach Gullah Geechee field researchers in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands to collect oral histories and construct family trees. When she told her mother she was teaching people to do family trees, her mother said she should learn about her own. They went to a family reunion of her mother’s paternal family in western Georgia where Walker used the technique she had taught to get to know people present and figure out how they were related to each other and to her. She later compiled that information into a visual family tree.
When she opened the first of several boxes of her submissions to the Black Feminist Archive, the first thing she took out of the first box was that family tree. Fortunately, the opening of the boxes so Walker could discuss their contents was filmed, including the unfolding of the family tree. She was surprised to find that the paper she had used was the back of pages from her PhD dissertation!
That tree of her mother’s father’s family represented the memory of living people of different generations attending the reunion. Whereas she did not follow up with archival research, the tree still provides a useful vehicle for further research. The reunion experience inspired her to write an article, “Climbing the Family Tree,” for Essence Magazine, Aug 1976.
Walker also did genealogical research with her father’s maternal family, whom she knew from visiting them in New York State with her parents and grandparents when she was a child. She was told that her great grandmother, who died at 96 when she was six, was a Native American. She knew her as Nanny (grandmother or great-grandmother) White, her married name. She later interviewed her last great aunt and learned the key to finding more about the family. Her great aunt told her that her mother’s father’s name was Noah Congo, and she later learned, from the national archives, that her great grandmother’s birth name was Amelia Congo.
When Walker went to the archives, she forgot the “1870 rule” that reminded African American ancestor-seekers not to bother looking at census reports before the 1870 census. Until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the ending of enslavement in 1965, African Americans were considered by their enslavers to be property, not humans, so were not listed in census reports that counted only those considered “people.” She looked at census reports from 1830 to 1860, as well as thereafter, finding Noah Congo and lots of other Congos easily. Why, she wondered, was a task that was supposed to be so arduous so easy? The Congos in the state of Delaware were “free people of color,” and she found one Congo in the first federal census of 1790, whom she calculates to have been her great great great great grandfather.
Going to Delaware Walker met many Congo cousins, including Bishop Herman Congo, pastor of the AUMP, African Union Methodist Protestant, church, in Glasgow, DE. The denomination was founded in 1813 in Wilmington, DE by Peter Spencer, a freedman, as the Union Church of Africans. It followed the African Methodist Episcopal Church that was founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia in 1793, the first African American “separatist” church that separated from the segregationist practices of white churches to create their own “independent” worship style. Spencer founded 31 churches, most with schools attached, and became known as the “father of the independent Black church movement." In contrast to the AUMP, the AME church developed into one of the major African American denominations.
The AUMP Church in Glasgow has a graveyard full of headstones of Congo ancestors. On one occasion when Walker attended a church service, a group of singers that included a Congo cousin began to sing a song at the fellowship hall named for another Congo cousin across from the church. The choice of the song, among so many, obliged her to film the scene. The song was, “Hush. Somebody’s Calling my Name!”
Why was she there? A name! Congo. She made a short documentary with the song as background for images of the gravestones and photos of Congo ancestors acquired from her great aunt.
While learning about her Congo family in Delaware and New York, Walker was also learning about the larger issue of Congo people in both Central Africa and the Atlantic world. The Kongo or Bakongo Kingdom (the K is used for the kingdom and its people, with the C used in the Americas and for the two current republics of Congo in Africa) was the most significant polity in Central Africa and exported millions of people to be enslaved in the Americas. A major result is the obvious continuity of Kongo/Congo culture in the Americas, including in the royal pageantry that remains present in Panama and Brazil and that has been re-enacted in Uruguay. Walker contends (with no objection so far) that Congo is the African term most used throughout the Americas.
When the Republic of Angola wanted Mbanza Kongo, capital of the Kingdom of Kongo (located in Zaire Province in what is now northern Angola), to become part of the UNESCO list of World Historical Patrimony, the Angolan committee invited Walker to provide proof of the continuity of Kongo/Congo culture beyond its original point of African origin, which is one of UNESCO's criteria. She showed her video footage of representations of Kongo royal pageantry in the Americas, which was met with approval. But it was when she showed her footage of her Congo family in Delaware that the audience burst into surprised and enthusiastic applause.
In 2019 Walker was invited to make a presentation about the presence and meaning of Congo in Africa and the Americas at the Congo/Morgan Family Reunion and Dinner/Dance in Delaware, the Morgan family having intermarried with the Congos. Her presentation was “From the African Kongo Kingdom to the Congo/Morgan Family Reunion.”
As a beginning PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Walker was disconcerted to find herself studying against, rather than with, as she had anticipated, white male professors who tried to convince her that her African American culture did not exist, that enslaved Africans had contributed nothing to the creation of the Americas, and that she “should be a singer or dancer” because she was “too happy to be an anthropologist.” She did not yet know, but would learn, that Anthropology had been characterized as a “child of imperialism” and “handmaiden of colonialism.”
In that environment, two of her class papers portended future orientations. A paper for a linguistics class for which the white male professor, a specialist in an indigenous Mexican language, corrected her African American English, led to her first popular article on African American linguistics for Black World Magazine. The professor “corrected” her “nitty-gritty” to “gritty-nitty”—which unfailingly inspires amused incredulity from African Americans.
That article led her to write many more popular articles reflecting anthropological perspectives about elements of African and African Diasporan culture for Essence, Ebony, Emerge, and other mass market magazines in the U.S. and beyond, including for Paradise, the Air Niugini flight magazine from the South Pacific.
Criticized first by her professors and later by her academic colleagues for committing the academic sin of “popularizing” such information, for sharing it with tens of thousands of people beyond the confines of the university, she received lots of positive feedback from readers, so continued writing popular articles throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One young woman told her she had read her article about the Africanity of Bahia, Brazil in Essence. As a result, she learned Portuguese and went to study there. She said she was so pleased to finally meet Walker to tell her about that experience in response to her popular article. Others also wrote to tell her how her articles had changed their lives.
Another grad school class paper on spirituality that she wrote for African American historian of religions, Dr. Charles H. Long, provoked his enthusiastic encouragement, and led her to further her research, writings, and publications on African and African Diasporan spirituality. Walker did her doctoral field research in West Africa, 1970-72, studying the Harrist Church of Ivory Coast, and also traveled to much of the continent. She spent 1972-73 as a research assistant for Dr. Preston Williams, an African American professor in the Divinity School at Harvard University.
In addition to giving lectures about the form of African spirituality she had just researched, Walker invited the three African American graduate students in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology to join her in creating a critical Black Anthropology newsletter. News from the Natives was a response to the understanding that in Anthropology, African Americans were being treated as “natives,” as a group to be studied and defined by others. The newsletter artwork, by Walker’s future husband Terry Brown, was of a “native” playing a rhythm on a “talking drum” with the meaning being recorded to a tape recorder that at that time was reel to reel.
With the newsletter, the group insisted upon speaking for themselves and voicing their own interests and concerns. The newsletter, of which Walker edited several issues, eventually evolved into Transforming Anthropology, the referred scholarly journal initially published by the American Anthropological Association.
While in graduate school, Walker also taught an anthropology class at Elmhust College in the Chicago suburbs and participated in a theatrical production that was a collaboration between Elmhurst and Northwestern University. In “The Lion and the Jewel” by Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist Wole Soyinka, the first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986, Walker played the village belle opposite Kofi Awoonor, Ghanaian poet and writer, whose colonial name had been George Awoonor Williams, and who became Ghana’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 1990-1994.
Receiving her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 1976, Walker wrote her masters thesis, doctoral dissertation, and many publications based on her research about African and African American spirituality: Ceremonial Spirit Possession in Africa and Afro-America (1972); Christianity African Style (dissertation 1976); African Christianity: Patterns of Religious Continuity (co-edited 1979); and The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast (1983).
Recruited as an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley in 1973 to represent the then cutting-edge field of “Anthropology and Education,” Walker was pleased to apply perspectives from cultural anthropology to educational processes and institutions, and was invited to edit an issue of the academic journal in the field, The Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Her education-related research, participation in professional conferences, and publishing included themes relating to African American women and higher education, experiential education, and negative images of Africa systematically conveyed by the “educational media” used in U.S. schools.
While at UC Berkeley, Walker did field research with Islamic Fulbé women in Northern Cameroon in the context of what was then the new focus on “women and development,” and also wrote about how gender roles were reflected in architecture. She was invited by U.S. embassies to lecture in various countries in Africa and the Americas: Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Angola and Mozambique. She became involved in African development projects, especially with the African American development agency, Africare, in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Somalia, looking at issues such as the use of various forms of renewable energy. She did the first socio-economic study of a refugee environment in Somalia with the goal of proposing an irrigated agricultural project, always using anthropological approaches that considered the culture and opinions of the people impacted. With the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) she worked on female-focused development projects in Senegal, Botswana, and Mozambique. She also began what became on-going field research on the African Diaspora in the Americas, initially focusing on aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture, then broadening her focus to other societies of the hemisphere.
After an insulting and protracted “tenure battle” of three years, which should have lasted for one, Walker became a tenured associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley. She was the second African American woman tenured among more than 1500 faculty members—after only a little more than a century of the existence of the institution. She was the first African American woman tenured outside of the Department of Afro-American Studies in the history of the flagship institution of the presumably liberal University of California. She questioned the condescending “affirmative action” characterization of her promotion to tenure given her many professional activities and accomplishments that were so much more outstanding than those of so many of her white male colleagues.
Walker left the Graduate School of Education to join the Department of Afro-American Studies, where she could better pursue her interest in Africa and the Global African Diaspora. She began more field research, especially in Brazil, the major nation of the African Diaspora in the Americas. She spent 1987-1988 as one of two members of the first cohort of Scholars in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Her project was to organize her images from Bahia, Brazil, some of which became a photography exhibit at Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and later at the Auburn Avenue Library in Atlanta, GA. While at the Schomburg Center, Walker served as on-camera talent establishing the narrative thread in the documentary, “Brazil: Africa in the Americas.” The documentary was broadcast internationally and has been used in many college and university courses in the United States. While at the Schomburg Center Walker also taught an anthropology class at the City University of New York. Invited to continue teaching there, she chose to return to California.
In 1989 Walker was invited to join as a full professor the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia to help “internationalize the curriculum.” While there she participated as a member of the African organizing committee in the First Summit Meeting of African Heads of State and African American Leaders, held in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1991. She spent spring semester of 1992 giving several public lectures as the William Allen Neilson Visiting Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She also served as an adviser to and as on-camera talent for the documentary, “New World, New Forms,” comparing African American and Afro-Brazilian spiritual and secular dancing, which was a segment of the 8-part WNET “Dancing” series.
In 1992 Walker became a Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor (an endowed chair) in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Told by the administration that one of her responsibilities as Director of the Center was to organize an annual Civil Rights symposium, she immediately broadened the perspective and internationalized the symposium and the general worldview of the Center, which had previously focused narrowly on Texas and the United States. Convinced from her own life of the absolute educational necessity of international experiences, she immediately created an exchange program with the University of Ghana at Legon, sending UT students to Ghana and welcoming Ghanaians at the Center.
The high point of Walker’s decade of directing the Center was the international conference she organized on "The African Diaspora and the Modern World” in 1996, that was co-sponsored by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). She invited to participate more than sixty people from more than twenty countries in Africa, Europe and the continental and insular Americas. Unlike usual academic conferences, and again defying narrow academic strictures as in her popularizing of knowledge, Walker invited to participate not only noted scholars, but also community leaders and artists from African Diasporan communities not usually invited to speak for themselves. The conference was the only event in the United States commemorating the United Nations International Year for Tolerance because the United States had, at that time, withdrawn its membership from the international organization.
The conference had trilingual simultaneous interpretation in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, which was a first for the university in spite of its major Latin American Studies program. Conference presentations by both academic researchers and non-academic knowledge-bearers were preserved in her edited volume, African Roots / American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas (2001), and participants were featured in the documentary she produced, Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora (2001), which is subtitled in English, Spanish, and French. She and faculty colleagues also created at the university the nation’s first, and quite successful, doctoral program in the Anthropology of the African Diaspora. Our first doctorate was, most appropriately, awarded to an Afro-Brazilian.
Walker left the University of Texas in 2001 to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2002-2004, at Spelman College, an African American university for women, in Atlanta, GA. She received a grant from the United Negro College Fund Global Center to create a project to develop curriculum materials about Afro-Latin Americans. Believing that the project should be with Afro-Latins rather than about them, she invited an Afro-Venezuelan researcher to collaborate with her. Together they identified themes essential for understanding the African Diaspora in the Americas and invited Afrodescendent community leaders from the nine Spanish-speaking countries in South America to a meeting of what she termed the Grupo Barlovento, for the Afro-Venezuelan Barlovento region in which they held their first meeting in 2002.
Realizing that to create curriculum materials they first had to develop a collective and comparative knowledge base about their own realities, which until then had not existed, they began to, as Walker said, generar conocimiento desde adentro/generate knowledge from the inside. She next invited the group to Spelman College for a bi-lingual (with simultaneous interpretation) conference that she organized with students and faculty in the context of what she declared the “Spelman College Year of the African Diaspora 2003-2004.”
Walker then became Director of Spelman’s African Diaspora and the World Program from 2004-2005, after which she took a leave of absence to work independently as an internationally known researcher, lecturer, consultant, and documentary filmmaker. She found herself so busy researching and traveling in the Global African Diaspora, participating in intellectual and cultural activities internationally, writing, and making documentary films, that she did not have time to return to university teaching.
Walker’s commitment to the Grupo Barlovento continued after Spelman. With her support and extensive feedback, members of the group researched and wrote about their communities. She sought further funds for future activities and received a grant from the Inter-American Foundation to hold meetings in Ecuador in 2007 and Bolivia in 2009, at which the participants discussed their findings. Finally having publishable results, Walker edited Conocimiento desde adentro: Los afrosudamericanos hablan de sus pueblos y sus historias/Knowledge from the Inside: Afro-South Americans Speak of their Communities and their History, in Spanish with chapters written about their countries by the Afrodescendent leaders. First published in 2010 in La Paz, Bolivia by PIEB, the Programa de Investigación Estratégica en Bolivia, it was then republished in 2013 by the Universidad del Cauca, in Popoyan, Colombia, making it more accessible.
Walker’s introduction discussed the societies of the African Diaspora in the Americas in the context of their common and disparate African origins, using both themes that she and her collaborator had identified, and themes the authors discerned in their own societies. The book was translated into Portuguese as Conhecimento desde dentro: Os afro-sul-americanos falam de seus povos e suas histórias, and published by the Afro-Brazilian Kitabu Editora in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. Walker then launched the volume in Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, and Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, as well as in Brasilia and Sao Paulo. The book has had considerable success in Brazil, especially with Afro-Brazilian graduate students who have said that its theoretical orientation, as well as the information about their neighbors, has made possible their doing masters and doctoral theses and dissertations.
The volume is currently being up-dated in both languages because realities have evolved in the countries represented, partially due to activities of members of the Grupo Barlovento as a result of their growing consciousness and increasing sense of agency. We filmed the first meeting of the Grupo Barlovento in Venezuela and Walker edited the footage and made a video that is on her website https://afrodiasporaglobal.com. It gives a sense of the orientation of the group and the project. Several members of the group have created radio programs to share with their national publics new knowledge about their own societies.
Walker also served for several years as a mentor trainer for the U.S. State Department Western Hemisphere Section’s College Horizons program that focused on teaching English to African descendant adolescents in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Haiti, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. It was during this era that Walker’s focus on the African Diaspora became really global, beginning with her invitation to a conference on The African Diaspora in Asia in Goa, India, in January 2006. There she met people from the three major Siddi, Afro-Indian, communities and traveled to two of them. She also met people from Turkey and from African Diasporan communities on the Indian Ocean Mascarene Islands of Mauritius, Seychelles, and Reunion, to all of which she traveled subsequently for further research and to participate in cultural and intellectual events.
Walker and a colleague produced a documentary, Slave Routes: A Global Vision, the English-language version of which has voice-overs in French and Spanish, for the UNESCO Slave Route Project. When Walker showed the film to a group of African and Afrodescendent adolescents at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, NY, they questioned why they were not taught in their compulsory schooling the kind of information she had shared with them. They wanted to know why they were not taught that the African Diaspora was global, for example, not just in the Americas, and much more.
In 2016 Walker was invited by the United Nations Remember Slavery Programme to give the Keynote Address to the U.N. General Assembly for the Commemoration of the Victims of TransAtlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade. (Video of UN Keynote on her website https://afrodiasporaglobal.com/sheila-s-walker-speaker/ and on UN-TV.) She spoke of the necessity to tell an accurate story of these historic facts, and contrasted some of the recommendations of the Plan of Action for the U.N. International Decade for People of African Descent with the perspectives of the Brooklyn adolescents.
At the request of the United Nations Remember Slavery Programme, Walker subsequently produced a documentary, Familiar Faces/Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora, based on video footage from her field research experiences and in-depth travels in globally scattered African Diasporan communities. The documentary was shown as the Black History Month program for 2018 of the International Decade for People of African Descent and was sent by the Remember Slavery Programme for showing by United Nations Information Centers in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe—with subtitles in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Russian.
For her work, Walker received a number of awards, recognitions and honors including: an award from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame for the 1984 Film Symposium, a Mary McLeod Bethune Award from the National Council of Negro Women, 1983 “in recognition of achievements in the Bethune Tradition;" A World Music Award for outstanding achievement in world music, art, and dance from the Grupo Jesús, from the Dock of the Bay, 1986; a Certificate of induction into the Order of the Bamum Spider, from the Bamum Kingdom, Foumban, Cameroon; the Alonso de Illescas award for education from FOGNEP, Federación de Organizaciones y Grupos Negros de Pichincha, Quito, Ecuador.
