IU School of Liberal Arts

Gondola Awarded Fulbright, Will Study African Youth “Cowboy” Subculture of the 1950s

News Categories: African American and African Diaspora Studies | Faculty and Staff | History | International | Research

A Liberal Arts professor will spend the next academic year building an oral history of the 1950s African youth who, influenced by western movies, created a subculture that reflected Hollywood’s version of the old American west.

As a Fulbright Scholar in Kinshasa, the capital and largest urban area of the African nation of Congo, Professor Didier Gondola will conduct interviews with former members of the youth gangs known as the "Bills," and hopes to determine links to modern day Kinshasa culture.

The Fulbright Scholarship, which includes a stipend, a travel allowance, and monthly allowances for the professor and his dependents, will allow the IUPUI professor to advance his research into the group he calls "Tropical Cowboys."

"This is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I am deeply grateful for all the support the School (of Liberal Arts) has provided and will continue to provide me," Gondola, who was born in the Congo, said.

Gondola, associate professor of history in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, teaches the social history of Central and West Africa, slavery and slave trade, ancient Africa and West African kingdoms, colonization and colonial changes, popular cultures and gender issues in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

His on-going research into the "Tropical Cowboys" looks at the politics of colonial Congo through the example of the Bills who recreated the dress - kerchiefs, jeans and cowboy hats - and mores found in movie portrayals of Buffalo Bill and other American cowboys in their efforts to gain a political and social foothold in colonial Kinshasa.

"The Bills organized several youth gangs across Kinshasa’s townships that not only remapped the urban geography but also created ritualized cultures of masculinity that owed much to Hollywood’s rendition of the far west lore," Didier says.

"These young people made use of several transcripts, including marijuana consumption, slang, resistance to parental as well as political authority, and various other forms of urban violence as they resolved to challenge the imposition of colonial social and political norms."

Given that the Bills have left few, if any, records of their culture and activities and given the dearth of studies devoted to this movement, Gondola says he plans to enlist the graduate students at Kinshasa University to help him conduct oral interviews with former Bills, now in their 60s and 70s.

"I also hope to map out the extent to which the Bills’ culture of the 1950s has had lasting effect on cultural patterns that youth in Kinshasa (as well as in the Diaspora) continue to exhibit," the professor said.

Gondola also plans to assist the University of Kinshasa’s history department in reorganizing its curricula and programs, and offer graduate seminars on his research.

The Fulbright Scholarship will provide tuition reimbursement for Gondola’s two sons who will travel with their father and will both attend the American School of Kinshasa as 10^th graders. The sons currently attend the International School of Indiana.

"My two sons are looking forward to stepping on African soil for the first time," the professor says. "They understand very well that they have been afforded a great opportunity to look at the world with different lenses and get the ‘big picture.’"

Gondola is the author of the widely read The History of the Congo.  In 2006, the professor received the New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant awarded by the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Research.

The Fulbright program, considered the U.S. government’s flagship program for international education exchange, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. A pre-departure orientation for U.S. Fulbright Scholars and Students going to Sub-Saharan Africa will take place June 9 to 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C.

Published on: April 24, 2008