Pan Africanism and the New Diaspora

There are three prongs to my existential pilgrimage. First, I was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, in a predominantly African traditional religious milieu, went to an Episcopal elementary school, and subsequently to Islamic High School for five years. This was a rigorous boarding school where Western natural sciences, European history/literature were taught alongside languages like Latin, Arabic, and French for three years. Second, the last twenty years have been an incessant dialog with people of other traditions and faiths. Nigeria is a country of over three hundred ethnic groups, so the intercultural discourse on my part is not limited to theory: it was and is a lived out experience. Third, my personal and intellectual pilgrimage to the United States has widened my research interests over the past many years. While I was largely immersed in the social history of the African diaspora as a student, the last ten years my interests have revolved on religion, globalization, ethnicity, immigration, religion on college campuses, African philosophy and Western discourse in social/critical theory, and Islam and the West. As Nelson Mandela once asserted: "the struggle continues."