by Florence Mugambi, Librarian, Herskovits Library of African Studies
The Herskovits Library’s Claude Barnett Research Collection offers a window on 1950s–60s African affairs as reported by various international news services. African American journalist Claude Albert Barnett (1889–1967), who was founding director of the Associated Negro Press (ANP) news service on Chicago’s South Side, assembled the collection, which comprises 41 boxes of news clippings, photographs, press releases, and newsletters. Topics covered include African students in the United States and the Soviet Union, France’s satellite-tracking stations in South Africa and Congo, and France’s nuclear tests in Africa.
In addition, there is extensive coverage of independence movements in Ghana and Kenya, the assassination attempts on Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, the land issue in Kenya, severance of diplomatic ties between Somalia and Britain due to the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, Katanga regional politics, and African education. Among the press releases is an exclusive 1963 interview with 20 African students who left Bulgaria after the banning of their students’ union. The students complained of persecution and violent assault, and one declared, “I shall never in my life visit Bulgaria or any communist country again.” Another press release, from the American National Red Cross News Service, dated 1960, reported on five University of Pennsylvania physicians recruited to spend a month each as members of an International Red Cross team treating 10,000 Moroccans who were paralyzed after eating food prepared with cooking oil mixed with oil used to flush jet planes engines.
Nortey Engman, who played the leading role in Ghana’s first feature film “The Boy Kumasenu” displays the ivory Film Oscar and the Mogadishu Trophy presented to him by Mr. A Michelleti (right), Honorary Italian Consulate in Ghana.
Additionally, the collection includes photographs, primarily from Ghana but also from Nigeria and Liberia, with many identified by press captions. Among them are photos of Nortey Engman (shown at left), who played the lead role in Ghana’s first feature film, The Boy Kumasenu (1952). The film brought together a nonprofessional all-African cast and was nominated for a British Academy Film Award in 1953. The film is about a boy, Kumasenu, who moves from a rural village to the modern city of Accra, encouraged by his cousin Agboh’s exaggerated tales of the wonders of city life. Hungry, he steals bread and is caught by police. He is rescued by a doctor and his wife who find him work. Agboh attempts to get Kumasenu to rob the doctor, but Kumasenu thwarts his cousin’s plans. In attendance at its premiere (in a 2000-seater Opera indoor cinema in Accra) was Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister of the Gold Coast together with high ranking government officials and foreign visitors. In international festivals, the film shone. It was chosen by the British Film Academy as one of the eight best British and six best American Films in 1952. It was shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1952 and at the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals in 1953.
The Herskovits Library received the Claude Barnett Research Collection from the Chicago Historical Society in January 1980. Its contents had been separated from the Claude Albert Barnett Papers, 1919–1967, held by the Chicago Historical Society. The bulk of Barnett’s papers and other ANP dispatches are located at the Chicago Historical Society and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.