Courses:
Spring 2008:

Hist 103.006, 103.010
Hist 373.001
Hist 473.090 Pan africanism/OAU

Summer I:
HIST 101.001
HIST 102.001

Courses:
Introduction to African Studies
North Africa, The Magrib since 1800
West Africa since 1800
Lowcountry, SC and Georgia West Africa Connectons

Contact:
M. Alpha Bah, Professor of History
Office: Maybank 324
Hours: by appt.
Phone: 953-8272

FOCUS on FACULTY
Email: bahm@cofc.edu

Retiring summer 2008

M. ALPHA BAH (Africa, West and North Africa, Islam in Africa) received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1983. He came to the College of Charleston in the summer of 1986 from Villanova University where he was a Fulbright Scholar in residence for one year. He has taught at Howard University and the University of Liberia. Among his publications are “The Nineteenth Century Partition of Kissiland and the Contemporary Possibilities for Reunification” in Liberian Studies Journal XII, Journal of Muslim Majority/Minority (1991); and “Legitimate Trade, Diplomacy, and the Slave Trade,” in Africana Studies (1993). He is the author of Fulbe Presence in Sierra Leone: A Case History of Twentieth-Century Migration and Settlement Among the Kissi of Koindu (Peter Lange 1998). He is currently working on a history of Charleston-West African connections entitled West Africa-SC/GA Lowcountry Connections: Three Black Charlestonians in Freetown and Monrovia.

Fulbe Presence in Sierra Leone is an important piece of scholarship that documents the richness and diversity of African history. This study not only documents the cost of artificially drawn borders in human terms, but it also provides a case study in the discrimination of a people by other groups or the government, for one reason or another. The author takes his readers through the complex processes leading to the defining of the borders of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The role of the Fulbe in the establishment of Koindu as a modern market town is fascinating. Fulbe traders also contributed to the improvement of the social life and the conversion of Kissis to Islam. Despite the role of the Fulbe in Koindu they are still considered “strangers” in Sierra Leone.