Paul McAllister
My name is Paul McAllister, and I’m the co managing editor for Picturing Black History. Picturing Black history is a collaborative effort between Ohio State’s Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective and Getty Images, which seeks to uncover untold stories and rarely seen images of the black experience providing new context around culturally significant moments by bringing them into light an interview. With me today is Fauziyatu Moro, the author of the essay, A Lyrical Revolution, Fauzi, it’s very good to be speaking with you today.

Fauziyatu Moro
Yeah, I’m happy to be here Paul.

Paul McAllister
So please tell us a little bit about yourself as researcher, your professional affiliation and trajectory in your research interest.

Fauziyatu Moro
Yeah, so um, I’m Fauzi, that’s short for Fauziyatu. And I was born in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Had my undergraduate and master’s training at the University of Ghana, I’ve been studying history for quite some time. And I am currently enrolled in the Ph. D. program here at the University of Wisconsin Madison, studying African history. My area of focus is mainly west Africa, I do research on migration, mobility, migrant experiences, popular culture, and some transnationalism. Here and there as well. And my previous research have focused mainly on migrants, migrants, laborers, especially in in Ghana, I have looked at cocoa farmers who moved from the northern part of Ghana to the south. I’ve also looked at charcoal producers who moved from the northern part to the south, tracing their lived experiences in urban centers, so to speak. And yeah, I forgot to add that I’m also an urban historian. And that’s how it ties to my interest in popular culture, and whatnot. And my current research looks at that my proposed research for my dissertation, looks at a group of migrants who settled in Accra, the 1930s. Now, these migrants came from various parts of West Africa, and mainly for trade, but then they set up this, this enclave for themselves in Accra, and they had a distinct house identity, even though they all came from different West African countries, and even some parts of eastern central Africa. And they were predominantly Muslims. And I’m trying to map out their leisure activities. Because I want to believe that they contributed tremendously to the cosmopolitan nature of, of Accra, through the leisure life. So yeah, yeah, that’s

Paul McAllister
Really interesting. Is Accra primarily Christian city, or what’s the dynamics there?

Fauziyatu Moro
Accra is very cosmopolitan, you would find just about any religion, so to speak over there. But in Ghana, it’s predominantly Christianity, Islam, and then some traces of various African traditional faiths. And there’s a Buddhist temple in Accra. So yeah, it’s very varied.

Paul McAllister
As a historian, what do you see as the kind of the purpose of studying history?

Fauziyatu Moro
Since I struggled to answer this question, because I feel oh, people know, yeah, we studied, we study history to understand the future, much better. But I think it’s important to break down what what this process is, it’s easy to say this is what we’re doing. But what does it entail? And and I think part of is its is coming to the awareness that as much as possible, the past is connected to the future, but everything is contingent on what we do in the present, we tend to lose sight of the present, because I think when we’re studying the past, which is why I think that the idea of presentism is flawed, because understanding of the past is shaped by whatever is happening in the moment. One of my favorite songs, Bob Marley’s Rat Race, he makes this connection between the past and the present when he says that do not forget about your origins, but do not also forget about your destiny. And to do that, you need to put certain things and mechanisms in place. And it differs from one person to another, what these mechanism and what these contingencies would be in the present. So yes, I think history would be irrelevant in the sense that of course, we may not have those groundbreaking changes happening in the now. But then everything we put in place in the now would affect the future. So if if we’re going into the study, if anyone is you told me this is mainly for students who are taking history classes. Yeah, I want to believe the Yeah, for some of them when they come in. The idea is to get their idea, get the insights of what happened, but it is important that you always connected back to everything that is happening now. Now, and then think about ways that you can, you can use the knowledge of the now to mitigate circumstances that will come up in the future. Now I want to give an example. Please do. So it’s very relative because I grew up in a migrant household in Accra. My both my maternal and paternal grandparents moved to the south to work. And it is a very communal space, the kind of household that I grew up in my maternal grandmother’s household. And I had this aunt of mine, who had a very distinct name, her name was Donkɔ, and Donkɔ literally translates as slave. And I never really understood why I would have a relation who goes by such a name. That was because I didn’t know the history of my people so well. So for the longest time, well decentralized states in the northern part of Ghana, were raided so to speak by centralized states, like the Akan Santa kingdom. For instance, and the name Donkɔ has its etymology in akan language Santichi, that is why it means sleep. Most part of my people were captured, I was appalled by the fact that I had a relation who bears the name of the slave. But having having acquired this, this knowledge, the backdrop to this, I gain a better appreciation of why she still bears that name. But then I also understood that it wasn’t an opportunity for contention. This is something that happened in the past. But it had me interested in what happened after all of these raidings. Now, presently, you have so many people from Northern Ghana, supposedly slaves, who have been incorporated into the Asante political system, these are things I own, and in the process of still finding out what, how and why we still have slaves or people, not slaves, but people who bear the names of slaves, things have changed over time. So it brings me to the idea of change and continuity. If we understand the past, we can be able to trace its relics in the present to be able to descend the changes that have happened or the continuities as well. So for students who are learning, it’s, it’s more than just imbibing everything that you have in your textbooks and your modules, it is about making connections to the present join parallels, and seeing how it may it may prove relevant in the future.

Paul McAllister
I like that. I like that a lot. Because, as you stated, a lot of students come in with the idea that the past is kind of the past and static, and it is what it is. Yeah. But learning to kind of question interpretations of the past and analyze where the past kind of grows into the present. And seeing how the choices that people have made before don’t necessarily have to be your choices, or you have your own agency and kind of choosing the past and creating your future and kind of being able to look back at the past and recontextualize it through that lens is the very powerful once you understand those types of things. So thank you for bringing that out. So why do you believe it’s important to explore kind of lesser known moments in black history? And I think you just highlighted a good one, just the the history of kind of names and how people got them and how, yeah, it’s such a not a small thing in Gleason the impact of an individual but in the grand scheme of things. It’s such a small quiet thing. H ow did someone why was somebody named, what they were named? And how that kind of connects back to a larger history, larger themes? Like why do you believe it’s important to study these kinds of small moments?

Fauziyatu Moro
I’m going to very biased here given that I study small moments, right? Yeah. Many people move in on undocumented people, for instance, who are moving to, to my country and stuff like that, and these you would not ordinarily find in the archives, they are very silent, right. But then I see them as opportunities to understand the bigger questions, the bigger the bigger narrative and the bigger pictures as well. One other thing has to do with the fact that it’s easy to write the big man stories, so much has been written so much so that if you decide to take them on, you have all of the resources there for you. But then again, we we’re pushing for nuance, societies are more than just these big men. At the end of the day, they constitute um a very minut percentage. You have people want to talk about my country, for instance, I know the first thing when you say Ghana, first thing that comes to mind is Kwame Nkrumah. Yes, Kwame Nkrumah was revolutionary. Yes, he had all of these connections with DuBois. You can you can map out transnational connections just by just by bringing up Kwame Nkrumah’s name, but you can also do the same just by going into a small community. An unknown community and talking to someone and listening to them tell you stories. Yes, I spoke to a 80 year old woman whose memory whose memory is fraying, but she’s an exciting woman to be very honest. And in our conversation, she she starts telling me about how her parents moved from the Kepler into one garage to the moon from the Asia area, and moved to Accra, Ghana, and her dad fought in the war. And dad was enlisted and fought in the Second World War. And she, she tells me all of these things, but then again, no one knows that this woman exists. And no one knows this. This she is telling me a kind of History of the World War. Yeah, that is not the standard history that you will find in the textbooks. So I think I think that these lesser known moments are also integral for understanding the nuances in the product pictures, right? She gives me a very personal perspective. Yes, her dad, Dad was taken away, so to speak. So she never actually saw her dad for the for the longest time. This is this is a very subjective way of approaching a story about the World War, but it is relevant in itself. We’re looking at all of the families who were impacted some way somehow, we’re moving away from the grand narrative about how the Second World War had a huge economic impact on society, and we’re looking at the very minute stories. We acknowledge that the biggest stories are important. But sometimes, these smaller stories have some nuances that we never actually would even think about, to begin with. So yeah,

Paul McAllister
I love that particular example, because I am military history is my kind of what I study my specialty. And so I have been in classes, I’m in classes now, where we talk a lot about the home front and the experience of soldiers. And so much of those stories are based on a kind of like Anglophone perspective, the United States, Great Britain, and maybe you get France and Germany, also incorporated in that. And when you talk about the experiences of soldiers, I think a lot of the times those of what were then colonial nations and India and parts of Africa, there, you don’t get stories of the home front, and what it meant for those people to have to send their husbands and sons and family members away to fight these, these conflicts that weren’t theirs in a lot of instances. And I think that kind of exploration is much needed and is like very rich and tells a fuller picture of kind of the stories of these, these big hinge points, if you want to call them that in world history. So what inspired you to kind of join Picturing Black History as an author,

Fauziyatu Moro
I got the email in January. That was the invitation to join in January. And shortly before that, my very first attempt at public history, right had had started because I had a blog post those that went live on the Accra archive website, there was an urban project I was doing where I was mapping the changes in the use of a particular building was the Accra town hall it’s evolution from a town hall where people used to go for various entertainment pursuits, concert parties, evolved into the parliament house and then subsequently became the Center for Human Rights and administrative justice I was just making these changes. And when when it went live, I mean, so many people were glad that it was up there, canola news. So many people say they didn’t know, this was what this building symbolized in Ghana’s history. And I was impressed by how many people had access to this information. Now, if I had written a journal article, for instance, I don’t think that it would have had that much reach the people who would be reading it or people who would have interest in it, most of the time you go to read an article because you have an interest in it. But with such projects, like what Picturing Black history is doing, and this is the one that I did, it goes out there it is to the general public, anyone who research then develops interest. So clearly, we’re mapping entry, we’re creating the interest. We’re not putting it out there for people why just put it out there for people who would then have the interest to want to even pursue this knowledge further. So when the email came, I thought, okay, yes, yes, yes, this is perfect timing. And also because it involves images, like I told you, most of the people I work on, you wouldn’t find them in the archives, you wouldn’t. And a lot of the times, I have to rely on their own archives, their own personal archives, and the majority of it is pictures. I’ve been looking at pictures for the longest time, and they have been fascinating. In the case of my field research. The people that I interviewed give me the backdrop to these images. But then to see these random images, I thought this was impressive. Now I have to bring life to these images. These people none of them are alive to tell me, of course, there are descriptions, but none of them are alive to give me the details that I need. I thought that it was a fascinating thing. And it was just in line with my own personal interest with public history. And I thought, yeah, I would very much like to be a part of this, and I went for it.

Paul McAllister
With that, let’s kind of transition into the kind of the specifics of your piece, A Lyrical Revolution. Tell us about your research and writing process. How did you come to this specific topic?

Fauziyatu Moro
Initially, I thought it would feel out of place, given that I’m coming with not out of place because yeah African history is Black History. Yeah. Then when I went to the website, I saw that a lot of it is American history. And I was thinking, What can I contribute? I don’t want to pretend and see that I know, African American history as much as I know African history, that would be a lie. And so I knew there was really no material. But then I was thinking it is a continuum. Blackness is a continuum from the continent towards diasporas. How has this continuum been expressed? How have we seen its manifest, and one of the ways that it has manifested was through music. Now, this didn’t come because I sat down and started thinking about I had previously, during my undergraduate studies, I had previously written an essay in class, that looked at Fela and a highlight musician from Ghana code and Nanam Pedu And I was just drawing parallels between the types of music that they made, because both of them were protests. They were protesting the system. They were protesting the government with their music, but there was so much difference in the way that they went about it. Fela was more overt and radical, but Nanam Pedu was was very subtle using folktales and fables, just to conceal obscure the message he’s trying to put across just to the military junta would not come at him. So yeah, the word connections even within the continent, where you have similarities in resistance. So I was thinking, how did this move beyond the continent I knew I wanted to do Fela I knew I needed to do Bob Marley and Miriam Makeba I knew I knew sorry, I knew Miriam Makeba so well. But then I, her connection with Harry Belafonte was something that I didn’t know so well. So this research plunged me into that. And I discovered that oh, no, there has been a lot. The wind down between these two people. And Nina Simone was not on my list, until the reggae rendition of an album by Jamaican artists women artists dropped. And I was thinking, oh, if these artists have made the effort to make a Reggae rendition of this, then there’s something more to it. So I started going in on Nina Simone as well. I have covered, all of these things about her that I didn’t know before. Previously, I only knew one or two songs, by Nina Simone. I didn’t know the breadth of her activism, I honestly didn’t. Yeah, so this research put me on the path to learning more, not just about the continent that I came from, but also its diaspora. So in the end, I went back and said, these are the people I think I’m going to work with, because I see some connection in here, I see how I can make an argument for black transnationalism, and African connections, black connections all across the globe. And then we started work. Because I was dealing with musicians, I needed the images to tell a story that was more than just the music as well. So one description that actually stood out for me, even though I knew that I was it was Bob Marley’s in the process of writing this essay, I was also listening to their songs all over again. I mean, there was an imbalance here because I listened to Bob Marley more than I listened to anyone else on the list, I knew Bob Marley’s style, I knew what he does. I knew that his movements are not just movements, it’s part of the history. It’s part of a conversation that he’s trying to put out there. And so when I saw that picture of his even though his face is obscured, and you can’t really see it, I thought that it was powerful in itself, it would have been easier to just pick an image of Bob Marley where you would see his face, but in this case, it was a profile. And I wasn’t focusing on the profile, I was focusing on what was happening when the image was taken. And clearly he was in motion. And so you have the picture on the list and not some other picture of of Bob Marley and…

Paul McAllister
For our listeners, that’s that’s the kind of highlight picture the piece the first one you see when Bob Marley is singing, I guess, in concert or at a at a venue and his locks are kind of swinging around. It’s a very dynamic, powerful photo. Yeah, it’s a great choice to open the piece with.

Fauziyatu Moro
Yeah. And one other piece would be Fela’s image and I thank the editoral board because they actually pushed me to consider certain things that I wasn’t paying attention to and one of them had to do with Fela’s instrument in that image, where he had his wind instrument on his lap. And for some reason, I was thinking how could I have missed it? Given this if you take it to pick off the last song, if it’s 12 minutes long each minute is dedicated to just instrumentals where he’s just going up and playing his tunes without actually even singing. So with that one, I had to add this twist about his signature instrument, which is the wind instrument Fela is known for a sax fella is known for anything that pushes breath out of you, so to speak. And I was glad that you my attention to that.

Paul McAllister
Yes, that’s a great phrase.

Fauziyatu Moro
I guess. Well, this is a blend of so many things I’ve said so much. I don’t know if…

Paul McAllister
It’s very rich. I really appreciate it. And I’m sure our listeners will as well. Can you talk a little bit more about how these artists kind of interacted with each other, whether it be communicating through music in response to each other or actually collaborating.

Fauziyatu Moro
So you can actually find collaboration, direct collaboration, I mean, between Miriam and Belafonte, that is on record. But with the others, you can tell that I’m very certain the Fela collaborated with other black artists all across the black diaspora because he was in the UK as well before he came to the US. So there would have been some overlaps over there. But I didn’t point this out because then I wanted to focus on how activism influences music instead. So beyond collaborating with other musicians, he was collaborating with activists on the ground. So Sandra, Isidore was really instrumental to Fela’s life. And I point this out, because before Fela became Fela, Fela was a regular what it was a highlight, no, Nigerians would would, would come at me for this, but I think Fela was was was a highlight musician, so to speak, Fela didn’t have Afrobeats until he got back. And then said, I’m going to make Afrobeat. And this is because he had come into contact with all of these other people who actually showed him. Not that he didn’t know, he knew, but probably did not attribute so much weight, to the kind of oppression that black people were going through. And then being pointed in the direction being shown what it was, was enough to just change him. I’m actually very glad he met Sandra.

Paul McAllister
And who was and who was this?

Fauziyatu Moro
Sandra Isidore, it was part of the Black Panther movement, and Fela met her at an NAACP event in Los Angeles. And then they just from from the get go, she became his mentor, and they had this profound collaboration being engaged each other. She sort of tutored him through this radical mindset and approach to music, so to speak. Yeah. When the case of Bob Marley, now again, Bob Marley is a world of his own, either his story in the because, yes, I’m talking about black trans nationalism. But then we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Africa is a continent, with all its regions, partially because of the way that he’s been balkanized. It’s easy for us to lose touch, as people on the continent ourselves. And so I’m telling you, Bob Marley was a unifying figure on the continent. I grew up listening to my blaring out of windows and whatnot in the community. People listen to him, people get a whole new perspective. Why would Bob Marley have a song titled Zimbabwe, so to speak, that this is the kind of question you ask yourself, when you listen to your favorite artist, why the song Zimbabwe and then you find out that it is an independent song, a song in honor of its sovereignty, so to speak. And it brings up all kinds of questions as well. Why was this so important for him to highlight or showcase Zimbabwe’s independence, then we begin to develop all of these other interests what we know about Zimbabwe, so I thought that he was very, very integral to drawing our attention to other parts of the African continent. And one of the issues I raised in there was that the soul Zimbabwe was written in Ethiopia, and Rastas have a profound connection to Ethiopia. Because to them that is where black liberation would start. It was one of two dates on the continent or countries, if you will, there was no colonized in the sense of the word. So for most people, it symbolizes the idea of freedom from external forces, and Rastas actually saw it as a refuge for them. Also, because Haile Selassie was very deliberate in acknowledging the Rasta movement. For so long, they had be marginalized. And he made an effort to actually move to them, make contact with them, and show his support for them. So he has to have this Caribbean Bob Marley having connections interest in Ethiopia, and that influencing him so much so that he thinks that a black nation attaining independence is something we should know about something that should be, that should be memorialized in a song, songs are powerful. They are transient, they never go out. I don’t know any song that well, it depends on the genre of song. Overall, yeah, we have the things that stay with us, no matter the time, no matter the period. And I think he knew this, when he made that song. He knew that for years to come after Zimbabwe’s independence, we will still be listening to that song, we will still be asking questions. And I get this all the time we play Zimbabwe to a friend and the want to know the backstory to it, why is it called Zimbabwe? And then you begin to take them through all the history and it’s fascinating.

Paul McAllister
It really is. Well, you can do a lot with 1000 words, which is the approximately length of the piece, but through this, this discussion through you talking about it, you can just see the kind of richness of the world and the ideas that these artists are interacting with rastafarianism, decolonization, a lot of African nations were kind of fighting and earning their independence during the heyday of Bob Marley and these other artists. And you can kind of see these connections and a really vibrant way I think your piece captures both through the your choice of images, but also how the way you kind of go about explaining them. And one of the things I was interested in asking is just a kind of brief question of terminology. And maybe this is the historian in me. You prefer to use the term black internationalism, some of our listeners might be familiar with kind of pan Africanism. This idea that all the people from the African continent, the diasporas all have shared roots, similar trajectories, that kind of movement. Why did you choose to use the term black internationalism and not pan Africanism? What is the difference that you see between the two? What was the distinction you were hoping to draw out there?

Fauziyatu Moro
Yeah, I think you see internationalism, I also use transnational. Yes. Sometimes I feel as brilliant as pan Africanism is as a concept, I feel that it restricts us to a particular period. Immediately, you say pan Africanism, your mind goes to Oh, the postwar period when black people started convening, and agitations were high. With this piece, you can clearly tell that some of these things were happening before this period. And some happened after this period. People like Fela came after this period, people like Miriam Makeba And Belafonte, they come before this period. So I wanted to break out of that, that strict, the kind of confinement that the word pan Africanism invokes I didn’t want to limit myself to it. And for an essay of this length, if I had used pan Africanism, I would have been pushed to explain what it means and how my essay adds to it sort of troubles in a way that it seems okay, there are pan Africanisms, because we’re moving between periods here. Right? I couldn’t do all of that in this essay. So I thought okay, to play it safe. Why not use transnationalism? But that is not to say that this is not Pan African it is it is pan Africanism to some extent, yeah. But then it’s bigger than pan Africanism as well. It is. Yeah. So that is why I get away from that term.

Paul McAllister
No, thank you for elaborating on that in the way that as you did, because I think for students in particular, it’s important to know that writers in all sorts of fields, but we’re talking about history, writers make deliberate choices based upon a variety of things at their disposal, whether or not it’s the sources they have, and they can access and whether or not in this case, it’s kind of the topic that’s being chosen, or more specifically, the word count that you’re allotted will influence the type of choices that you make in writing and how you choose to approach the subject in the way that you’re approaching it. I greatly enjoyed this piece. So I thought it was very rich. And I really appreciated that explanation. Thank you. I think our listeners who listen to this will get a lot of additional richness, kind of augmenting your piece. But you’ve talked about how you are kind of excited to do public history and particularly in more public history projects. Do you have any other kind of projects or ideas or articles that you want to kind of plug here to make people aware?

Fauziyatu Moro
No well apart from the Accra archive blog post. The title is The Sugar Babies in the Accra Town Hall. The Sugar Babies was a concert party troop, very small concert party, that no one actually knew existed. That is the title you should be able to find a way to punch that in to Google, The Sugar Babies in the Accra Townhall.

Paul McAllister
Okay, thank you very much for sharing that with us. And this has been an Artist Interview with Picturing Black History Fauzi Moro, and you can read her essay A Lyrical Revolution on our site. Thank you very much.

Fauziyatu Moro
Thank you so much Paul.