African diaspora to India focus of Feb. 26 lecture

Fitzroy Baptiste

12:03 p.m., Feb. 18, 2004--Fitzroy Baptiste, professor of African and Asian studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies, will discuss “Lifting the Dark Veil on the African Diaspora to India: 323 B.C.-1850 C.E,” at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 26, in 222 Gore Hall.

The talk, free and open to the public, is part of the Black American Studies spring lecture series and the Center for Black Culture Visiting Scholar lecture series. A reception will follow.

Baptiste will discuss the little-studied African diaspora in India, which predated the better-known trans-Atlantic slave trade, and he also will discuss the establishment and persistence of an African minority with a recognizable African cultural orientation in Indian society.

“It is important to establish that before the more familiar trans-Atlantic slave trade, there was another external African slave trade from the East African coast,” Howard Johnson, acting director of Black American Studies at UD, said. “The African diaspora to India reflects one aspect of Dr. Carter Woodson’s interest in the history of African peoples throughout the world. Woodson initiated Negro History Week, which later became Black History Month.”

The author of “War, Cooperation and Conflict: The European Possessions in the Caribbean, 1939-45,” (1988), Baptiste has written extensively on a wide variety of subjects, and his work also has appeared in many publications, including The Caribbean Yearbook of International Relations, New Society and The World Today.

Named by the government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to serve as one of two directors of a Centre for Ethnic Studies, Baptiste also was named as Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies. A Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Oberlin College, Ohio, Baptiste also was a Fulbright Research Scholar To Tufts University, Medford and Howard University, and received the Social Sciences Research Council Award in 1966 for a research fellowship at the Department of Government of Victoria University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

From 1979 to 2001, Baptiste served as senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Saint Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, where he began as an assistant lecturer in 1968.

A graduate of the University College of the West Indies University of London, where he earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in history, Baptiste also received a master’s degree in government from Victoria University and a doctorate in major 20th-century U.S.-Caribbean international relations from the University of the West Indies.

For more information, call 831-2991.

Article by Jerry Rhodes

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