User:Beepsie

"This is Beepsie, who works mainly in Central Africa, but also some in the Diaspora. You mentioned your father's people were Mbundu, and since you mention African Ancestry I'm assuming this is a Y-chromosome reading that had an exact match with someone who is an Mbundu. You maybe saw the PBS Special "African American Lives" which I and my wife served on as consultants and then appeared on screen in the last episode with Skip Gates. We were also briefly on "Finding Ophrah's Roots". We're about to publish a book on the early period, pre 1660, of Mbundu and Kongo regions, Central African, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundations of America. You might find it useful when it appears in July."

I certainly will. Thnx for the heads up and keep up with the good work. Yeah, my Y chromo matched Mbundu. Scott Free 13:41, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Pre Colonial African History

I have spent most of my career studying and writing about pre-colonial Africa, and although the Kingdom of Kongo is a big part of this, I have done quite a bit of work on other countries as well.

I have found it disheartening to see that academic interest in this subject has declined so badly in the past years. When I first went to graduate school, at UCLA in 1971 nearly everyone was working on a pre-colonial topic. One could not walk across campus without meeting someone who had come up with an exciting new discovery and we talked among ourselves a lot about it.

I was called away from school for a stint in the military and when I returned in 1975 I found that the mood had changed a lot. There were many fewer people interested in pre-colonial Africa, and moreover interest in Africa in general had gone down. There were no more impromptu seminars at the eating places or standing by the library. In fact, I found that being an Africanist was becoming lonely.

The situation took a considerable turn for the worse in following years. Since I finished my PhD in 1979 very few new voices joined the pre-colonial group. The number of PhDs defended declined and nowadays, years go by with no one doing a degree in the pre-colonial Atlantic Africa that I have specialized in. Indeed, were it not for the growth of Atlantic History and the increasing inclusion of Africa in the study of the history of the Americas, pre-colonial Africa would have fallne off the map and the relatively few of us left would be consigned to the corners of the discipline, like the Sumerologists whose work is known to everyone who has to teach world history, but is done by a handful of people worldwide.

One encouraging thing for me has been the growth of Wikipedia which, I think, can allow professional Africanists like myself to reach a larger, more varied and I think interested audience. With the rise of geneological research using DNA, more and more people of the Diaspora are finding their African roots, and I feel that our contributions to Wikipedia may help people understand these new found and more specific roots. I also imagine that others who live in places without access to university libraries, where most Africanist work, especially pre-colonial Africa, are housed can at least get up to date and correct information, potentially at the front end of the discipline. This thought has caused me to focus more on Wikipedia and less on the print encyclopedias which sometimes ask me for contributions.Beepsie (talk) 13:33, 25 December 2007 (UTC)