photos of famous (and not so well known yet) Africanists

new photos here!

Part II:

Here are photos I have taken at various times and places of well known (and other) scholars in African studies.  Their appearance on this page in no way implies their endorsement of anything I say.  Or vice versa, come to think of it.

Michael Huffman is another foreign scholar working in Japan He's a primatologist. Primatology is an important field in Japanese African studies, so he and I usually run into each other at African Studies Association meetings. This is him at the May 1999 meeting in Kyoto. Here's his homepage.

Here's another Japanese Africanist, Professor Shinsuke Sakumichi from Hirosaki University. He's a social psychologist who does most of his research in Kenya.

Professor Ritsuko Miyamoto is my wife. Sorry, guys, I'm not putting up any bikini shots. Here are she and I at Akita's only Ethiopian restaurant, Blue Nile.

Professor Yukitoshi Sunano is a specialist in Senegalese languages. This picture is of him relaxing after a recent AFLANG meeting.

Professor Kiyoshi Shimizu (center, holding the envelope) is a world-famous specialist in African languages, who worked in Nigeria and taught in Austria.

Professor Shuji Matsushita (holding the bowl) is a world-famous specialist in Hausa and its nearest relative, Gwandara. At the last AFLANG meeting he prepared Mexican food, and we all had a feast after the meeting. Aren't you glad you study African languages? Don't you wish everybody did?

Here's the AFLANG Hausa gang. This particular AFLANG meeting was a rare occasion to have most of the Hausa language specialists in Japan together in one room. Here's a second shot. From left to right we are: Hirokazu "Suleiman" Nakamura, Kiyoshi "Bak'in Ruwa" Shimizu, Katsuhiko "Gonar Gishiri" Shiota, Ritsuko "Halima" Miyamoto, John "Danjuma" Philips, and Shuji Matsushita. Just by coincidence, many of us have done work on the Sokoto dialect.

Professor R. S. O'Fahey is one of the leading experts on the Sudan in particular and Islamic Africa in general. He is now at Northwestern University and was one of the organizers of the ISITA Colloquium in May, 2002.

No, I'm not as famous as most of these other guys.  But what the hey, it's my website, isn't it?  Here's a picture of me reading a lecture about the history of the Hausa language at Bayero University Kano in 1985.  The talk was featured on the evening news, and was later published in Nigeria.  And yes, that's how I dress formally in Africa.  I tried wearing a suit once, but it only made me understand why so few Africans do.

Now that I've written this I'm embarrassed that I don't have pictures of other friends. 

Q: Yeah! How come there's no picture of your Ph.D. advisor, Professor Obichere? (click here for the answer)

When I can I'll be adding more photos here, of Africanists from around the world, and especially Japan. Since I'm at the National Museum of Ethnology now, I hope to have a page of all the Africanists there on my next update.

Keep coming back.

yours,