Al Howard was a wonderful, giving colleague who devoted his life to Africa both in terms of academic work but also in terms of political activism. It was Al who recruited me from City College in the early nineties and introduced me to the extraordinary ‘wealth’ of Africanists at Rutgers. Al was also a leader in the establishment of Rutgers as an internationally respected center for research and teaching on Africa.
In 1997, he was a leading organizer of the African Studies Coordinating Committee – our first African studies university organization that followed our realization that over 50 scholars and staff at Rutgers were specialists on Africa. He was also involved in the transformation of the Committee to the current Rutgers Center for African Studies. In 1996, Al worked to craft a successful a bid to host the venerable African Studies Association (ASA), the largest international organization of specialists on Africa. This was a considerable accomplishment because we were the ‘new kids on the block’ in African Studies and were competing with major universities like Michigan State, Indiana University, Stanford University, etc who had long established U.S. government Title VI National Resource Centers. Al was always involved in securing many of the grants we received from the U. S. Department of Education, International Studies programs. Unfortunately, these programs, in the U.S. Department of Education are being closed, thus ending decades of international studies in higher education. However, the Rutgers administration has generously supported the ASA enabling it to remain in Rutgers for over 20 years. Now Rutgers Center for African Studies (CAS) has over 100 faculty and staff.
Al was profoundly committed to ensuring that K-12 New Jersey teachers were trained in the teaching of Africa in their curriculum. He organized and led a U.S. government supported seminar that took 20 New Jersey teachers to study on the slave routes of West Africa in Ghana, and the Republic of Benin under the Fulbright-Hayes Program. This experience – completely funded by the U.S. Department of Education – enabled these teachers to visit important sites in the slave trade and gave them a budget to buy relevant supplies. During his period at Rutgers, Al was one of the prime supporters of teachers’ workshops for all events sponsored by the Center of African Studies establishing these workshops as a major part of all programming. We worked closely with the New Jersey Amistad Commission, the key state organization for promoting the study of Africa and its diaspora.
He also led our project Global Timbuktu – Meanings and Narratives of Resistance in Africa and the Americas, that honored Timbuctoo, New York and New Jersey’s village of Timbuktu, established in 1825 in Burlington, New Jersey by freed slaves. With grants from the Ford Foundation, New Jersey Council of the Humanities, and the University we brought scholars from Timbuktu, Mali and ran a virtual project in which New Jersey students communicated with Malian students in Bamako about their joint history.
Al was one of the key participants in all of these initiatives.
Al also worked closely with me on my own scholarship, always offering to read my work and to observe my classes. His own work on Sierra Leone was exemplary and benefitted from his cultivation of close scholarly and personal relations with African scholars in and of Sierra Leone and the continent as a whole. He was very generous in his support of these scholars and often extended assistance to their institutions as well as to them as scholars.
He was very well known as a colleague of integrity, political activism, and generosity, supporting the anti-apartheid movement at Rutgers, a struggle that earned international acclaim for the university.
He was very, very kind and often extended his support to junior and senior faculty.
The Center for African Studies joins with the Department of History, Rutgers New Brunswick in expressing our condolences to his wife, Ann and his daughters. We understand that there will be a memorial service in the fall to commemorate his life.
He leaves a big hole in African Studies at Rutgers. May we continue, in his legacy, to bring African studies and Al’s memory to greater and greater heights.
Carolyn A. Brown
Emerita Professor History
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
