Dartmouth Events

This online talk by Ebony Coletu explores a hidden lineage of pan-African organizing in Ghana, one cut short by murder and accustations of fraud in the United States. 

In 1926, Laura Adorkor Koffey emerged as a pan-African leader from the Gold Coast, organizing for diasporic return in America. Widely considered a movement mother (called "Mother Kofi"), she was murdered by political opponents during a public lecture two years later. Suspects were drawn from the Garvey movement, who had launched a national campaign to discredit Koffey. 

Koffey's murder would have degraded the Garvey movement if her mission and identity were treated as evidence of a legitimate African invitation, one of seven that emerged from the Gold Coast between 1898 and 1928. Those invitations evolved from the experience of Brazilian return to Accra and early pan-African experiements that aimed to reinvent Africans' relationship to the global diaspora. 

This lecture can be attended via zoom. 

Ebony Coletu is Assistant Professor of African American Studies, English, and African Studies at PennState University. 

This talk is sponsored by African and African American Studies.