What Ella Baker has taught me about research

I recently finished reading Barbara Ransby’s wonderful biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Among her many political activities from the 1930s to 1970s, Baker may be best known for her work mentoring younger SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) militants in the early 1960s. In discussing Baker’s political ideology, Ransby points out the anti-vanguardist attitude that Baker emphasized. She recognized that poor black people in small towns and rural areas in the South had sophisticated political understandings of their situations and needs, and had a lot to teach the educated Northern activists of SNCC. Therefore, SNCC insisted that its members listen to its constituents. Rather than coming down South to lead, they came down South to learn and in many respects to follow local activists. As a result, their movement was a uniquely effective branch of the civil rights movement and one foundation for the Black Power movement. Its legacy is substantial.

Reading about Ella Baker in DR Congo, I began to reflect on my research here. My research agenda when I arrived was not fixed like a “To-Do” list. In the US, when I travel to archives, sometimes I am able to identify the holdings using online finding guides and by corresponding with research librarians in advance. However I have done a large portion of my work in archives of Historically Black College and Universities, which often do not have the same kinds of aids that better-funded research institutions do. As a result, I have found myself going someplace to look at one thing, but through a discussion with a librarian discovering something even more valuable that what I had originally come to see. This was even more common 20 years ago before computer technology impacted the archives. It is a matter of being open and receptive to the things that I find. In this sense, I am learning to allow my research to be shaped by the people I meet.

Here in DR Congo, I am pursuing my research in a similar fashion. In doing interviews with people--the Bakuba King or local artists or missionaries, I try to pay close attention to what they are saying. This is even more important than getting my list of questions answered. One of the reasons I am here is to learn. And the Fulbright program to its great credit (and unlike some of the Belgian cooperative projects I blogged about last week) is explicit that they sent me here so that when I return to the US I may apply and incorporate what I am learning into my teaching. They are getting what they paid for (and perhaps more than they bargained for) since I will probably be teaching a class about the Congo in Spring 2007. (Since it is a bi-directional program, foreign nationals are expected to return to their home countries prepared to teach folks about the US.)

I am keeping Baker’s lesson in mind because in a couple of weeks I hope to visit the province of Kasai Occidental to spend some time at the US Presbyterian mission stations that William Sheppard founded in the late 19th century. Friends ask me what I will be researching. I know that there will be few if any paper archives. Many of the original buildings are no longer or only partially standing. I will look at the buildings and see what they can tell me. Sheppard left in 1910; I doubt there is anyone alive who met him. But I am pretty sure there are people who remember him all the same. So I plan to talk to these people and listen to what they have to say. I will hear their stories and follow their leads with confidence that they will lead my research in wonderful, if unexpected, directions. And that is what I hope to find in Kasai.