24 May 2022
Bahrain National Museum lecture Series Program Organizes, A lecture shedding light on the African presence in the Arabian Gulf
The Bahrain National Museum will host, on 25 May 2022, at 6:30 pm, a lecture entitled “The African Diaspora in the Arabian Gulf” by Dr. John Thabiti Willis, an Associate Professor of African History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA.
The lecture deals with the history of the African diaspora in the Arab Gulf region, a history that has not been written yet. Indeed, for thousands of years, people, ideas, and commodities have moved along a cultural and commercial contact zone linking Africa and the Gulf. The region witnessed a permanent movement of people, ideas and goods along the area of communication linking the continent of Africa with the region.
Worth to mention that Dr. John Thabiti Willis is a scholar of the social and cultural history of Africa in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. His 2018 book, Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town, Otta, 1774-1928, demonstrates how institutions that used ritual masquerade both reflected and shaped changing political and economic relations during the rise and fall of West African empires, Atlantic slavery, the spread of Islam, and the establishment of Christian missions and British colonialism. This book earned honors for the best book prize in Yoruba Studies in 2020 and was a runner up for the best book prize in African Studies.
For the last decade, Dr. Willis has been exploring the contributions of Africa to the history and heritage of pearling in the Gulf. His new project uses oral histories collected through ethnography and geographic information system methodologies to analyze the biographies of people who once worked in pearling. This project had received generous support from the Mellon Foundation.
