Democratic Republic of the Congo

Voices of African Immigrants in Kentucky

Migration, Identity, and Transnationality

By Francis Musoni, Iddah Otieno, Angene Wilson, and Jack Wilson

University Press of Kentucky

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

The heart of this book is based on oral history interviews with nearly 50 Africa-born immigrants in Kentucky — of which there are now more than 22,000. From a former ambassador from The Gambia to a pharmacist from South Africa, from a restaurant owner from Guinea to a certified nursing assistant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, every immigrant has a unique and complex story of their life experiences and the decisions that led them to emigrate to the United States. The geography of stories reaches from Algeria to Zimbabwe, Somalia to Liberia, grouped together with stories of origins, opportunity, struggles, and success, and connecting two continents.

Within scholarship on migration and identity, this book “offers a refreshing step away from existing research on major urban centers that host large populations of African immigrants,” notes a review in the Journal of Southern History. “It is especially relevant to the study of ‘new African diasporas,’ which focuses on African diaspora communities who have arrived directly from Africa in recent decades and whose sense of history, race, and identity is understandably different from the many other African diaspora communities in the United States.” And at a time when migration continues to roil U.S. politics, the book also offers new insights into transnational identity. With that in mind, the final chapter takes as an epigraph an Igbo proverb from Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God: “The world is like a Mask dancing. You do not see it well if you stand in one place.”

The project brought together Angene Wilson and Jack Wilson with historian Francis Musoni, who was born and raised in Zimbabwe and teaches the University of Kentucky; and Iddah Otieno, a professor of English and African Studies who teaches at Bluegrass Community and Technical College and is originally from Kenya. 

This review appears in the special 2022 Books Edition of WorldView magazine. Story updated May 2, 2022.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView.

The Art of War in an Age of Peace

U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint

By Michael E. O’Hanlon

Yale University Press

Reviewed by Steven Boyd Saum

Published last year, Michael E. O’Hanlon’s most recent volume of strategy recommendations for U.S. global engagement has a title that’s been overtaken by events: In this “age of peace,” Russia has launched the largest invasion of another country since World War II. The gist of O’Hanlon’s counsel is “resolute restraint” with “an equal emphasis on both words.” That means avoiding overextension without retrenchment; either would make the world less stable and more dangerous. How does that counsel square with the current U.S. grand strategy? Essentially, there hasn’t been a consensus on one since the end of the Cold War, O’Hanlon argues. That’s the problem.

“Restraint should characterize the nation’s decisions on the use of force, including whether to go to war and whether to escalate once involved in combat,” he writes. Resoluteness, in addition to defining commitments to the security interests of allies, “should also characterize the country’s commitment to a global rules-based order that promotes interdependence among nations while strongly opposing interstate conflict or the pursuit of territorial aggrandizement by other powers. We can be more patient, and accept incremental progress, on building a more liberal order (featuring more democracies and greater universal respect for human rights). The liberal or progressive agenda can and should be pursued but largely through diplomatic and other soft-power instruments of statecraft.”

But as 2022 has made clear, the Putin regime explicitly intends to upend that rules-based order.

The U.S. has a responsibility to provide leadership, O’Hanlon notes, “guided by moral principles, strong institutions in Washington and throughout the country, a supportive citizenry, and good judgment on the part of leaders.” Yet he acknowledges that governments — including that of the United States — “can still make major mistakes ... in situations characterized by sycophantic aides, groupthink, or narcissistic leaders.”

Michael O’Hanlon adds “a second dimension of 4+1 threats,” which are “nuclear, biological and pandemic, digital, climactic, and internal-societal dangers ... The last on the list is America’s own social and economic and political cohesion.”

O’Hanlon is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1982–84. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Lawrence D. Freedman suggests this book “could serve as a guide for U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security team as they prepare for the challenges of the next few years.” Those challenges, as O’Hanlon outlines, include the “4+1” list the Pentagon has identified: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and transnational violent extremism. O’Hanlon adds “a second dimension of 4+1 threats,” which are “nuclear, biological and pandemic, digital, climactic, and internal-societal dangers ... The last on the list is America’s own social and economic and political cohesion.”

That last one is the wild card in dealing with everything else on both lists. And perhaps it holds the key to whether peace can again define this new era we’re entering. Months before Putin amassed 130,00-plus troops on the borders of Ukraine, O’Hanlon assessed, “The world is becoming more dangerous again today.” Indeed, O’Hanlon has more than a little to say about Russia, and where a policy of resolute restraint might guide actions taken by the United States, NATO, and the European Union. “A strategy of deterrence by punishment can still work,” he argued, notiing, “So far at least, there are no brazen invasions of huge landmasses.”

But now there have been exactly such a brazen invasion — one that has wrought destruction unlike anything Europe has seen since the Second World War. And we have already seen atrocities that give lie to the mantra “never again.” 

In the opening pages of his book, O’Hanlon cites President Kennedy’s estimation that “there could be 20 nuclear-weapons states by the mid-1960s and perhaps as many as 25 by the 1970s.” But, Hanlon notes, “Two decades into the 21st century, there are only nine countries in possession of the bomb.” One of them is of course Russia, which makes great power conflict particularly fraught. One of them used to be Ukraine — which gave up its nuclear arsenal in the mid-1990s in exchange for security and territorial assurances by the U.S. and Russia. That’s one reason, O’Hanlon and many others note, we owe a debt of gratitude — and responsibility — to Ukraine.
 

A shorter version of this review appears in the special 2022 Books Edition of WorldView magazine. This story was updated April 30, 2022.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView.

Honors from the University of California, the Republic of Mali, Dartmouth College, and Bucknell University

By NPCA Staff

Maureen Orth | Colombia 1964–66

Maureen Orth received a 2021 Campanile Excellence in Achievement Award from the Cal Alumni Association, in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley Foundation, for pushing boundaries whenever possible. She is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and founder of the Marina Orth Foundation, which supports education in Colombia.

Melvin Foote | Ethiopia 1973–75

Melvin Foote received special recognition from the president of Mali this year: He is to be honored with the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mali — the Knight of the Order of Mali, for a foreign national. Foote is the founder and CEO of the Constituency for Africa. As Mali’s ambassador to the U.S. wrote to Foote: “Your significant and long-standing contributions of time, energy, and leadership to promote relations between the Republic of Mali and the United States of America have been recognized and appreciated.”

Peter Kilmarx | Democratic Republic of the Congo 1984–86

Peter Kilmarx was recognized with the 2021 Daniel Webster Award for Distinguished Public Service by the Dartmouth Club of Washington, D.C., for his work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Public Health Service, and Peace Corps. Kilmarx serves as deputy director at Fogarty
International Center at the National Institutes of Health. 

Ruth Kauffman | Sierra Leone 1985–87

Ruth Kauffman received Bucknell University’s 2020 Service to Humanity Award in recognition of her 30-year career in international women’s health and midwifery. She has served in eight countries through Doctors Without Borders. In 2016, she partnered with colleagues to open a cross-border birth center providing services to women in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. “Ensuring that women in diverse communities have equitable access to safe, natural birth is essential to improving reproductive health worldwide,” she says. 

On the nature of a virus. On community. And on systems — how they function and how they break.

By Steven Boyd Saum

Illustration by Maria Carluccio 

The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic hit a sobering milestone in the United States last spring when we marked the death of 100,000 Americans. By September, that number had doubled. The year 2020 concluded with some 350,000 dead in the United States alone, and 1.82 million lives lost worldwide.

The pandemic has driven home some crucial lessons — if we pay attention. Not lessons we wanted to learn. But many of them are hard truths we need in order to face a changed world. Lessons about the nature of a virus, yes, but also about community: how we give of ourselves in times of need, how we listen or how we fail to hear. Lessons about systems: how they function and how they break.

In the stories we have put together here are a few lessons for the time of coronavirus from across the Peace Corps community. From an epidemiologist in Los Angeles, whose research has kept her connected with the Democratic Republic of the Congo for years: recognition that the oft-praised but far less supported Third Goal of the Peace Corps — which speaks of bringing understanding of the world back home to the United States — is not touchy-feely stuff by a long shot. It’s a matter of life and death.

Bringing understanding of the world back home to the United States is not touchy-feely stuff by a long shot. It’s a matter of life and death.

From a registered nurse in Washington, D.C., who found her calling in public health while serving as a Volunteer in Guatemala — and in spring 2020 moved away from her family, including a pre-school-aged daughter, to shield loved ones from possible infection while she tried to save the lives of patients infected with the virus: Know what this means.

From a returned Volunteer who can see the hills of Tijuana from her house and manages a free medical clinic: a lesson in taking part in the trials of the Pfizer vaccine. 

And across the country, lessons in gratitude and what endures: How the work we do, in solidarity and seeking understanding, echoes across continents and decades. In this case, how service by some 2,000 Volunteers in South Korea in support of education and healthcare years ago translates into the long work of building peace and friendship — and in 2020 brought of hundreds of COVID-19 Survivor Boxes to those Volunteers, to honor and thank them for empowering people in a time of hardship. 

To a cohort of returned Volunteers — some of whom were evacuated from service around the world in March because of the pandemic — now working as contact tracers in Seattle and King County, Washington: messages of admiration and encouragement from Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Peter Kilmarx of the National Institutes of Health.

Steven Boyd Saum is the editor of WorldView magazine.

Pandemic Lessons: Epidemiologist Anne Rimoin on the importance of listening to community. And how a public health problem anywhere can be a public health problem everywhere.

From a conversation with WorldView editor Steven Boyd Saum

Photo by Peter Israel

In epidemiology, you have to look at things holistically. And in the midst of this pandemic, as an epidemiologist whose whole career trajectory was shaped by my experience with the Peace Corps, I find myself asking: What does Peace Corps have to do with how we respond to COVID — and how we need to do more? Peace Corps is all about working in a community; my work, whether related to COVID or not, is really about having your ear to the ground in the community and understanding the community’s perceptions — and understanding how important local community is in terms of being able to effectively run public health interventions. 

A case in point: We’ve learned over and over again with Ebola outbreaks that you have to pay attention to local community leaders and understand their perspective. Having empathy and creating relationships to reach that understanding, and targeting communication to what’s really happening — that’s critical. 

The window that Peace Corps Volunteers have into that — that we have to bring our experiences in working in communities globally back home locally — is so important now. It is going to be critical in terms of being able to get to the other side of this pandemic, whether we’re talking about vaccine hesitancy, wearing masks, social distancing, or basic public health measures. In public health, everything that I do, I lead with listening to community.

This is a matter of life and death. Bringing the world back home has never been more important.

This pandemic has shone a light on how we are no different than anywhere else.

We always think that this is the “Third Goal,” the last thing out there in the Peace Corps experience. But our country has never been more vulnerable. This pandemic has shone a light on how we are no different than anywhere else. And that an infection anywhere can be an infection everywhere; a public health problem anywhere is a public health problem everywhere. 

The whole idea of “global is local, and local is global” has never been more important. We have not been paying attention to the community here in the same way that we do overseas.

Information and misinformation

Whenever you have lack of information and lack of communication, you open the door for disinformation, misinformation, and misconceptions. We’ve seen this happen over and over again in the United States. 

I served with the Peace Corps in Benin in the 1990s, in the village of Bopa. As a Guinea worm eradication volunteer, my job was disease surveillance and health communication. The lessons I learned there are important today: You must be able to have direct and open conversation and communication with community leaders. Those leaders are not just the politicians; they are people who are key to the community. In a place like Benin, they could be traditional healers. Here, they’re religious leaders, sports figures, celebrities — where people get their information. 

When I was in Benin, there was a Guinea worm song contest: Every village had a contest to come up with the best song about how to avoid getting Guinea worm — which you do by filtering your water and some basic public health steps. That sounds quaint, but it’s really a perfect example of great public health communication stemming from grassroots communities and finding creative ways to get the message out. Beninois culture really embraces music, so it was a genius idea that every community got involved in.

The human experience

We in the United States have always felt like we were different. We’ve held ourselves as being so much more sophisticated and that these things don’t apply to us here. But they really do. And isn’t that one of the big lessons of Peace Corps? The hubris that we feel as Americans might be tempered a little; we might be a little more open to learning about other cultures — and what we can learn from them to do better here.

The three goals of Peace Corps are essential. Training people in low-resource settings and helping promote better understanding of Americans — both of those are certainly important. But bringing home the understanding of what’s going on in the world is so critical going forward. “What do countries want and need? How can we be of assistance?” Answering those questions takes a lot of listening. As Americans, we’re really great at talking. We haven’t always been so great at listening. This last year of the pandemic just demonstrates how critical listening is.

Public health work in Lomela, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Anne Rimoin, left, is currently stateside, but an entire team of Congolese and UCLA field director Nicole Hoff are there full time. Photo courtesy Anne Rimoin

So is community. In the United States, people are not used to public health crises affecting their daily lives. In Africa, people are — and they understand the need to pull together as a community. That definitely has had an impact. Los Angeles County, where I am, is the most populous county in the United States. It’s extremely diverse; you have a lot of frontline workers and multigenerational households; and a lot of pandemic fatigue. Together, that has probably created the perfect storm, possibly in addition to a more contagious strain circulating. And it has created a situation where we have a public health emergency on our hands.

How the pieces fit together 

As a professor at UCLA, I have continued to run my research here in Los Angeles: working on asymptomatic infection, immunity, and occupational exposures for healthcare workers and first responders, as well as studies for veterinarians and veterinary clinics. Our team in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been continuing work as well, which is extremely important: with Ebola survivors from outbreaks in 1976 and 1995 to the recent outbreak, working with healthcare workers and trying to understand exposures. An entire team of Congolese and UCLA field director Nicole Hoff are there full time. So we’re continuing to collect samples and do studies in DRC — where COVID hasn’t hit as hard. That needs to be studied as well. And we’re continuing studies to understand population immunity to vaccine-preventable diseases.

At the Center for Global and Immigrant Health, which I direct, we’ve been continuing to support global health, locally and globally. That includes learning from people working overseas and what their experience with COVID has been. At the same time, we’re trying to reimagine what global health is going to look like in the future, how we’re going to get back to working in partnership overseas; many projects have been grounded. 

In public health, having the long game in mind — the essence of Peace Corps — is key.

Global public health work is changing profoundly. In the time since I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, a lot of capacity has developed on the ground, as well as the ability to build more capacity. This pandemic has shown how important that is. People in a country should be able to do the work themselves on the ground, so that it really becomes a collaborative partnership — not a situation of people from high-resource settings going to low-resource settings, doing the work, and leaving. Having the long game in mind — the essence of Peace Corps — is key. The pandemic will definitely have an impact in that global health will be reimagined: by growing grassroots capacity, thinking through a new way forward.

When I started as a Volunteer in Benin in the early 1990s, in terms of public health there was very little infrastructure. The internet and cellphones have completely changed the landscape in terms of public health communication. I was in a village where there was one phone that didn’t really work. It’s very difficult to do surveillance in those circumstances. There are now good schools of public health in Africa, and people who have been trained elsewhere and come back and are able to lead public health and scientific work.

In the months ahead, I’m hoping to see vaccines rolling out with equitable distribution globally, since that will be an important way forward. What’s also going to be important is monitoring variants of COVID that are cropping up, and how that may impact vaccine effectiveness and treatment effectiveness. Viral surveillance is going to be critical: being able to collect samples globally and sequence them to see if the virus is continuing to mutate — which it will.

Debt and investment

I feel a debt to Peace Corps; it changed my life and how I think about the world. The experience informs everything that I do. And while I know “the toughest job you’ll ever love” is no longer their tagline, it’s so true! It really was the hardest thing I ever did. Why? Because it’s dealing with culture: listening and understanding and trying to respond to the needs of a local community. That’s really hard.

At Middlebury College I was a history major, focused on Africa — though I didn’t know what I would do with it career-wise. As a musician, I was interested in the music industry; I actually interned at IRS Records and thought I would become a music entertainment lawyer. I was going to take the LSAT while I was in Peace Corps. Because I spoke French, I was offered a position in Benin with this perfect public health program. My dad was a respected medical geneticist and scientist. I didn’t think I would go in that direction; really, I was intimidated. But instead of going to law school, I ended up getting a master’s in public health. My dad used to say I avoided science like the plague — and became a scientist studying plagues. That was all because of my Peace Corps experience. 

In a very real sense, the investment in Peace Corps is an investment globally and an investment locally. It does change how Volunteers view and interact with the world. We need a lot more people who have that perspective.