Course Description

This course is an introduction to Africans through African languages and cultures. The course explores how sub-Saharan Africans use language and cultural production to understand, organize, and transmit indigenous knowledge about the world to each other and to successive generations. Language serves as a road map to comprehending how social, political, and economic processes like kinship structures, the evolution of political offices, trade relations, and environmental knowledge develop. Cultural and intellectual products like novels, music, poems, essays, films, and photographs offer opportunities to think alongside African artists, authors, and thinkers as they uncover, communicate, and debate the major topics and issues facing African societies and people today.