How it all started

In the fall of 2001, I was teaching English at Lycée Béhanzin in Dalaba, Guinea, West Africa. We had been reading Richard Wright's Black Boy and making comparisons to Camara Laye's The Dark Child. One day a student approached me after class and told me that he wished that his ancestors had been enslaved in the United States. His comment triggered both emotion and action from me. I told him that the media images he sees, largely via hip-hop culture painted an incomplete and largely inaccurate picture of the majority of Black people in the United States. Throughout the Diaspora there is little recognition of the many ways in which white Supremacy has dismantled Black movement toward empowerment as a collective. I brought up the disproportionately high Black prison population, inequity in education, and the racism that permeated every American institution. His statement also woke me up to the privilege that I, a Black and Filipina woman who spoke French, had by being born in the United States. Moved deeply by the spirit of Sankofa, looking into the past to prepare for the future, I felt it necessary to explain the history of Black people in the United States. I consulted with my host mother, Madame Mariama Diouldé Bah, who had traveled to Europe. She had visited museums in Belgium that exoticized African culture and said nothing of the horrendous atrocities committed against African people. I asked her if it would be possible to turn my room into a museum to display some of the Black history pictures I brought for my students. She told me that it was a good idea but that she would prefer if we built our own museum on the land next to her family's home. From that point on, our two families worked together to create Le Musée Williams-Bah.