As part of the 2024 Convocation activities, Dr. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong (ANTS MDiv 14) will offer the Simpson Hewett-Lecture: “United Church of Christ, Race Relations, and Political Liberation in Southern Africa.”
The Lecture will be held on Tuesday, October 8 at 4pm.
Dr. Akyeampong, who received his MDiv from Andover Newton Theological School, is Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies.
Professoe Akyeampong writes, “In the 1980s, the United Church of Christ (UCC) Synod passed several resolutions and pronouncements on the apartheid system in South Africa, advocating divestment of all financial resources from all corporations doing business with South Africa and for corporate responsibility regarding South Africa. Broad statements on racial and economic justice from that decade reflected the denomination’s investment in social justice. I became curious about what in the institutional DNA or church code of the denomination explained these values or tradition.
The Simpson-Hewett Lecture affords me the opportunity to explore these questions regarding
southern Africa, where the Congregational Church played an important historical role in the
education of Black Africans. I center the work of UCC missionaries Ray and Dora Phillips, who
lived in South Africa during the crucial mid-20 th century, when the infrastructure of the apartheid
system was being consolidated. By establishing institutions like the African Institute of Race
Relations, the Bantu Men’s Social Center, and the Jan Hofmeyr School for Social Work, Ray
Phillips’ influence and vision of racial relations and African empowerment would shape several
southern African leaders who came to play leading roles in liberation movements, including
Winnie Mandela and Zimbabwe’s Joshua Nkomo. This was explicitly acknowledged when the
South African Government in 2019 posthumously awarded the Phillips’s the highest honor in the
country, The Order of the Baobab.”
From his bio:
Professor Akyeampong joined the History faculty at Harvard upon receiving his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received his master’s degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1989, where he concentrated on English labor history, and his bachelor’s degree in History and Religions from the University of Ghana at Legon in 1984.
Professor Akyeampong has been awarded several research fellowships, and from 1993 to 1994, he was the Zora Neale Hurston Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University. He was named a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2002, and was nominated to be a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Ghana. At Harvard, Professor Akyeampong is a faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of the executive committee of the Hutchins Center. As a former chair of the Committee on African Studies, he has been instrumental, along with Professor Gates, in creating the Department of African and African American Studies. He currently serves as the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Center for African Studies.
