Welcome!

The Daughters of the African Atlantic Fund Corporation is so glad that you are visiting our site.

During our second public year, Professor Mercy Amba Oduyoye was guest speaker for our AAR fundraising brunch. Dr. Oduyoye is founding director of the Talitha Qumi Center of Trinity Theological Seminary in Legon, Ghana and African woman theologian extraordinaire; Ambassador Suzan Johnson Cook, former U.S. emissary at-large for Religious Freedom and current Congressional candidate from New York’s 13th congressional district, and Dr. Peter Paris, Princeton Theological Seminary, professor emeritis, who held the Elmer G. Homrighausen Chair of Christian Social Ethics since 1985, and who recently vacated the post of Visiting Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University graciously led our appeal.

When The Daughters organized in 2013, it set before itself a broad agenda of connecting the academic community in which most of the founders were situated with the vision that women descended from Africa might live into a future of safety, creativity, freedom, and boldness without penalty. Deliberation over the organization’s name and settling on the importance of “African Atlantic” reflects our understanding that realities impacting the bodies and minds of Africa’s global daughters has everything to do with the intersection of gender, the invented category race, and the mercantile passages of people between the African continent and elsewhere, by way of the Atlantic Ocean.

Whether it is the never resolved kidnapping of school girls from Chibok town in Borno State, Nigeria; or the abusive handling of a teenager (Shakara) at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina; or the tenure, promotion, and salary games in our various institutions; or verbally attacking the First Lady for mentioning “racial disparities”; or the reality of human trafficking and disproportionate representation of black girls in this tragedy, the reality is that intersecting issues impact the bodies and minds of Africa’s daughters.

At the same time, we are well aware of the awfully privileged position we hold as persons whose lived realities allow us to choose whether we will give our time and energy to creating and developing an organization such as this one. Our vision, while broad enough to include ourselves, arises from recognizing the discursive relationship of scholarship and learning to realities we sometimes write about, sometimes think about, and sometimes ignore.

We invite you to join The Daughters’ envisioning of partnerships that connect our critical and creative thinking to organizations providing micro-grants and micro-loans that enable self-sufficiency; scholarships that make acquiring an education a reality; relief support that makes leaving abusive homes possible; conferences that allow conversation and learning across our geographies. Thanks to the support of our growing community, this year (2016) The Daughters will award its first scholarships.

Thank you all for joining and supporting us. Welcome.