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MA: So I wanted to talk a little bit more about Ethnic Studies, and what you see as the future of Ethnic Studies, and what you would like to see as the future of Ethnic Studies.

JH: Well, it's kind of hard for me to think what the future might be. It's, you know, I can't predict what's going on in the country anymore, and with the world. Human beings are supposed to be intelligent, and we keep killing each other. And as I say, oil was a problem in Nigeria when I was there in the '60s, and it's still, Nigeria is corrupt. It was corrupt then. When I went there, I taught there for two years. Oh, after I finished about six years as the Dean of Ethnic Studies, I was, you know, getting continually frustrated. A friend of mine had been in my department at Anthropology, and taught two years in Northern Nigeria. And he says, "Well, you want to come here and replace me?" And I says, "Heck, yes." And so I went to Northern Nigeria, at Ahmadu Bello University, and I taught there for two years. And I tried to teach the students about what we were doing in Ethnic Studies, and about self-determination and all that. And I tried to tell them not to, you know, copy, emulate British colonialism. And I don't think they listened to me very much because all during this time, the elite saw how they could gather in the money by controlling power and everything like that. And it's been that way ever since.

And after two years of teaching there, I returned to San Francisco State. And I didn't want to start teaching right away after all that experience, so that I had a sabbatical leave stored up. I had requested a sabbatical leave right before the strike. And since they went on strike, they wouldn't act on any of that. And I heard that I got it, but then after the strike they asked me to be chair of Asian American Studies and then the Dean of Ethnic Studies, so that I never took the sabbatical. And I wrote back from Nigeria saying, "I want it now." And I took it, and I backpacked the long way home, through East Africa, Kenya, and then my brother (Ed) in between Gordon and myself was a foreign service officer, and he's working in Ethiopia at the time. So I visited him, and it was the tenth year anniversary of the Marxist revolution in Ethiopia, and so that they were having a big celebration. There were posters two stories high of Marx and Engels. So I went to spend a month in India, just bumming around, very interesting. And, you know, I was affected by the poverty there. Everywhere you went, people were begging for money. But I got to the various sites like the Taj Mahal and places like that, you know. Taj Mahal in moonlight is what people would always say, so I managed to get there. Then went up to Nepal and to Burma, Thailand. And while in Thailand, I went right up to the edge of China into the Golden Triangle where all the opium comes from, heroin, and then into Indonesia. From Indonesia, Singapore, and then into the Philippines, and then into Micronesia. And I went to Truk, where the Japanese fleet was sunk. You know, Truk was part of Japanese territory at one time, between World War I and World War II. And then to Hawaii, and then I ended up in Mexico where Lane was doing his field research, and back home. It took about six months. And it was really a wonderful trip for somebody trained in anthropology.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.