Africana Studies (BA) personal statement example

Personal statement example

The first palm-wine guitar pattern I tried to learn took me most of a half-term. My thumb kept falling into the steady bass of the folk songs I already knew, while the melody line wanted to sit slightly against it. I had found the style through a playlist that moved from Trinidadian calypso to Ghanaian highlife. I wanted to know why the two sounded related, so I went looking for an explanation. That question led me to most of the reading I have done in the past two years. It is also why I want to study Africana Studies rather than history or literature on their own.

The book that changed how I asked the question was Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. I found parts of it difficult, and I reread several chapters with notes. But its central idea gave me a way to think about my playlist: Black culture formed through movement and exchange across the Atlantic, not inside the boundaries of single nations. It helped me see that calypso and highlife were not simply copies of one another. Sailors, records, migration and colonial schooling all carried influences back and forth. I then read C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins, partly because James was Trinidadian like my grandfather. It was the first history book I had read that treated enslaved people in Saint-Domingue as political thinkers rather than as background to European events.

That reading fed into my History coursework. I chose to write on how historians have explained the success of the Haitian Revolution. I compared James's emphasis on Toussaint Louverture's leadership with accounts that give more weight to the revolt as a whole, and to disease among the French and British forces. Doing it taught me to separate what a source argues from what it shows. In English Literature, reading Things Fall Apart alongside Heart of Darkness raised the same problem. Each book tells you something about who was allowed to describe Africa, and from where.

The most ordinary part of my preparation has also been the most absorbing. For the past year I have spent Saturday afternoons helping my grandfather sort a shoebox of letters and photographs sent between Port of Spain, Birmingham and Toronto from the 1960s onwards. I scan them, and he tells me who is in each one while I type captions for our cousins. Some details surprised me. One uncle ended up working in Toronto rather than Britain because a friend had found him a job there. The postmarks show the family following work rather than a plan. It is a small archive, but it has made me careful about dates and names, and aware of how much depends on who is still alive to explain things.

Outside this I work Sunday shifts on the tills and the shop floor at a supermarket, which has made me reliable about time and calm with impatient customers. I have kept up Spanish, partly because I have become curious about Afro-Latin music and the history of Cuba. I would like to be able to read sources about it in the original language. I still practise guitar most evenings. I can now hold the palm-wine pattern steady, and I have started playing it with a friend who plays percussion.

At university I hope to study the African diaspora across several disciplines, because my questions so far have needed history, literature, music and economics all at once. I am particularly keen to learn more about African history before and beyond the colonial period. My reading has leaned towards the Caribbean, and I know that is a gap. I enjoy close reading and I am patient with difficult texts. I am also used to listening carefully to people whose memories are evidence. I would bring those habits to a degree I am ready to work hard at.