29-04-2025
‘Sowing History': Art exhibit about the slave trade in the northern U.S., Canada on display at UMass
AMHERST — Kumbuka is a happy 11-year-old from East Africa.
One day, strangers pick him up and take him far, far away from his home. He doesn't understand why.
On his journey across oceans, Kumbuka befriends Moise, a magical rat who speaks multiple languages.
This, of course, is a fictional story. But it illustrates the real histories of the millions of African children who were forced into slavery.
It's also a story of 'bravery, friendship and never forgetting who you were,' reads Emmanuel Nkuranga, the author of the tale and a Ugandan art history and architecture master's student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Nkuranga's book is one of 18 illustrated children's books on display at the university for the next seven weeks as part of an art exhibit called 'Sowing History."
His book features artwork he drew, which was inspired by images from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The boy from his story, Kumbuka, and his friend rat, Moise, are lit by the blue night sky and a yellow moon. Moise, Nkuranga said, means 'moon' in Swahili.
The books were a project in Charmaine A. Nelson's 'Visual Culture of Slavery' class at UMass and were written to help educators in the northern region of the U.S. and Canada teach young learners about history that is often neglected.
'When people think of slavery, they think of the 'plantation South' or the Caribbean,' Nelson said. 'We had to tackle the dearth in this void.'
Nelson said that there is a deficit in children's books that talk about slavery in the northern U.S. and Canada, where she grew up.
Through her initiative called Slavery North, Nelson is working to help the public understand the social and cultural effects of trans-Atlantic slavery and its legacies, including how that history manifests in anti-Black racism today.
'The idea that slavery never even happened in the north is a misconception,' she said.
Georgia Brabec, a first-year masters student in art history and architecture and another student of Nelson's, talked about her project: 'Charlotte and The North Star,' a story about a young Black girl who is enslaved at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, where Brabec is from.
Hers is also a fictional story, she said, but it's based on real events.
During the French and Indian War, soldiers from around the U.S. went to Minnesota, and oftentimes they would bring enslaved people with them, Brabec said.
'Even though it was technically a place where slavery had been abolished, the U.S. Army basically turned a blind eye and allowed for people to live in bondage, in that territory,' she said, especially children because they were the most 'affordable unpaid labor.'
Brabec said her story, which she illustrated with her own drawings and watercolors, was a 'reckoning with the place that I'm from,' explaining that she would drive past the fort on the way to her grandparents' home as a child.
While some of the stories are fiction, others are nonfiction.
River Riddle, a senior undergraduate student at UMass studying comparative literature, said her story was based on the Amistad Rebellion.
The rebellion, which took place in 1839, was one of the only times when African slaves were returned back to their home country, Sierra Leone, rather than being displaced in the Americas.
'The fact that they were returned to their place of origin is extraordinary,' she said.
Unlike the other two children's stories, which feature heavy topics about children being enslaved in the U.S. and Canada told in ways that are digestible for young readers, Riddle said her story had an angle of 'hopefulness,' which made her story easier from the get-go.
'That's what a child needs in order to be able to kind of get through a narrative like this,' she explained, 'whereas us adults, we can sit in the finality of death and understand that.'
Riddle's book is filled with colorful art from ArtStor, a library archive of art, and was chosen specifically because she was putting together a children's book.
'Sowing History' is on display at UMass Amherst until June 6 at 472 N. Pleasant St.
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Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
