By After immigrating to the United States, Dr. Emeritus Ssendi Ssensalo worked as a professor at California State University, Long Beach for 40 years.
“Where I was born…my education and how my experiences within this particular culture prepared me to navigate through a completely different culture and a completely different environment,” Ssensalo said.
The Africana Studies Department along with the African subcommittee of the International Education Committee, hosted the African Distinguished Speaker Series with Ssensalo on Wednesday.
“Basically he’s talking about life lessons that he’s learned along the way… [and] how he was able to use those things to become successful,” Africana Studies Department Coordinator Harvey Hunt said.
The discussion, titled “From Uganda to the United States of America, From Makerere to UCLA to CSULB,” detailed his account of leaving Uganda and becoming a professor at UCLA and later CSULB.
Ssensalo gave a speech detailing his life experiences including his tenure as a professor as well as giving life lessons, all from an African viewpoint.
The event featured students modeling African clothes, traditional as well as popular music and typical African cuisine.
Members of the IEC stressed the benefits of growth and cultural understanding as well as the importance of tolerance, diversity and acceptance of other cultures.
“Part of our charge as the subcommittee is to hold African related activities on campus,” Dr. Uche Ugwueze, the event coordinator, said. “It is necessary for our students to get to know more about Africa and other cultures…it will help students to be more positive towards diversity and have more awareness.”
With various programs geared towards sending students to Africa to participate in educational and academic courses, Ugwueze explained how a quality education is a multicultural education and how it will increase student knowledge about the world.
Ugwueze said that the event was especially important because it presented and highlighted the successes of many distinguished people of color as well as how their culture played a role in their achievements.
Leslie Jimenez, a doctoral student in the Education Leadership Program, said that a 2011 study of the U.S. indicated that only 9 percent of people of color hold or is pursuing the tenure track of. Of those, only 1 percent is African American.
“[Dr. Ssensalo’s] status as an emeritus professor is very difficult to pursue especially as a person of color because that’s the highest position an individual could ever obtain in academia,” said Leslie Jimenz, a Doctoral student in the Education Leadership Program.
Students and other attendees were please with the nature of the event as both culture and academia were discussed as being equally important to success.
“I really enjoyed that they were able to intermarry culture with academia,” Jimenez said. “And highlight how there is value in culture and there is value in always remembering where you came from and learning how to embrace those ways of knowing, within your culture, how to excel in your life with integrity.”
Ssensalo’s speech aimed to encourage students to change their lives for the better and recognize what they can or need to change in order to become more successful. He said he hoped that students and other attendees would be able to learn from his experiences.
“If somewhere [in my speech] they can find something that they can apply to their life…” Ssensalo said. “If they can find something there that says ‘because of that, because of what I heard him say, I need to change this in my life or I need to work on this in my life,’ then [their] life will not be this way.”
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Source List
Leslie Jimenez – lesliejimenez@my.unt.edu
Harvey hunt – (562) 985-4624
Dr. Ssensalo – (562) 985-4624
Uche Ugwueze – (562) 985-7843
