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Around 9 a.m. Saturday morning, April 24, seven teenagers stumble bleary-eyed into Kimya Moyo’s house. As they ingest the pop and chips they’ve brought or the bagels, fruit and water she offers, they stir like cubs waking, nudging each other, beginning to rumble.
This is Sankofa, the educational enrichment program Moyo founded in 1993 to teach critical thinking through African and African-American history.
They open class with the Sankofa Libation Ceremony. Then everyone stands to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro National Anthem. They speak — some from memory, some reading out of a folder — the Council of Independent Black Institutions Pledge:
We are an Afrikan people struggling for national liberation. We are preparing leaders and workers to bring about positive change for our people. We stress the development of our bodies, minds, souls and consciousness. Our commitment is to self-determination, self-defense and self-respect for our people.
They conclude the opening ceremony with a five-minute meditation.
This isn’t easy. Students squirm, crunch potato chips, dimple plastic water bottles and stifle giggles.
When meditation goes beyond five minutes, one girl points at the clock. She’s shushed. Twenty-one seconds later, Moyo relents.
“You should be able to go to 10,” she says evenly. “That’s the challenge.”
The challenge is also encapsulated in Sankofa’s mission statement: The development of critical thinking (Kupima Uzuri Wazo) strategies, interpersonal communication skills and persevering attitudes in African-American students beginning in 8th grade, to prepare them for the societal demands of the 21st century.
“Kupima Uzuri Wazo is a Ki-Swahili phrase which means to measure, weight and test through beautiful thought,” Sankofa literature says. That literature also offers up a simpler catchphrase: “Return and Retrieve It!”
Which means, look into the past to prepare for the future.
“I just always knew that critical thinking was something that we needed to do, and our students needed to learn their history,” Moyo says.
To do that, Sankofa students grades 8-12 and volunteer teachers meet from 9 a.m. to noon most Saturdays between September and May. The first Saturday of the month they have history lessons. Then there’s movie Saturday.
“Whatever they want to see, Lord have mercy,” Moyo says. So long as they return and discuss what they’ve seen, “to understand critical thinking and base the movie on values.”
Another Saturday a student brings in a recording of her or his favorite TV show or a song with the lyrics typed out. This way they learn to analyze using the principles of Nguzo Saba, the value system teaching critical thinking.
The Nguzo Saba are unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, better known to Americans as the seven principles of the seven days of Kwanzaa.
Then Sankofa students share good news. One student’s brother finally graduated from barber school and will start a business with her other brother.
“Good,” Moyo says. “Entrepreneurship.”
“I got my English up three letter grades” to a B, says another student.
“I got a D in social studies, now I got a 101,” says a third student.
“I got my highest grades in geometry and biology,” says a fourth.
“You go, girl, with that math,” says Moyo, who taught math at the School for Creative and Performing Arts until 2001, when she took a position as math curriculum manager for Cincinnati Public Schools.
A fifth student talks about the poem she read to her high school classmates.
“And they were all white, and it was about how everything we had we gave them, and they took,” she says. “And they were stunned.”
“Part of your responsibility is to go back and share,” Moyo says.
She turns the group’s attention to a young man leaning in a doorway. Akil Wilder is the only fourth-year student this year.
“You haven’t been here in a couple weeks,” she observes.
“I just been chillin,’ ” he says.
She digs deeper. What he called chillin’ is visiting a college; he took the ACT the week before.
“The kids develop their own little peer group, which is exciting because that gives them another reason to want to come,” Moyo says. “Sort of like their support group. It becomes OK to have the kinds of conversations we have in Sankofa without feeling like they’re nerds.”
A student asks about a stool in her carefully, colorfully decorated Afrocentric home.
“The stools are a very important part of African culture,” she says, and elaborates. “When you go to Ghana, don’t give anything to an elder with your left hand.”
Students who continue through the fourth year will find such advice practical when they travel to Ghana. Second-year students visit Detroit and Canada’s underground railroad sites. Third years visit the Sea Islands in South Carolina, a “dumping ground” for Middle Passage slavery ships.
The program “gives kids exposure to some things they never had, especially in terms of travel,” Moyo says. “It makes them more conscious of world events and their role as African Americans in the world. I think it’s added something to the kids’ ability and willingness to ask questions and speak out and to be vocal.”
Since their former meeting space in Walnut Hills is under renovation, Sankofa meets in Moyo’s home. Which requires a lot of money.
Nobody in Sankofa, including Moyo, gets paid anything. Tuition, which starts at $300 for the first year and rises concurrent with the distance of that year’s travel, pays for just that travel, as well as things like the end-of-year award ceremony. The Youth Spirit Award, which Akil won last year, is named after Moyo’s 16-year-old daughter Kevani Moyo, who died in a 1999 car accident.
To volunteer or contribute to Sankofa, call 513-961-3526.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2004.