Page One

Even though she is not a professional tour guide or travel agent, West Oakland resident Rehema Gueye was not surprised when a Laney College student approached her earlier this year about arranging a student educational trip to West Africa. 

Because Laney students were involved, they decided to make a request that the trip be sponsored in part by funds from the Associated Students of Laney College (ASLC). 

What surprised both Gueye and Imani Williams—the ASLC treasurer who made the request to Gueye—was the confusion and controversy it generated within both Laney and the entire Peralta Community College District. 

Married to a Senegalese husband and fluent in Wolof, one of West Africa’s major languages, the 45-year-old Mississippi native is a highly visible regular in the Malonga Casquelord Center (formerly Alice Arts Center) African/African-American cultural circle, where African dance classes and performances intermix with an extensive social network and intermingling between the two groups. 

Gueye has been to West Africa eight times, usually to the countries of Senegal and Gambia on the extreme western tip, the ancestral home of many African-Americans. Mostly she travels in connection with her business as a seamstress of African clothing—bringing back fabric or finished goods—but she doubles it up with visits to an extensive network of in-laws and friends. 

Besides operating her seamstress business out a room at her West Oakland home, Gueye is a registered nurse, a service worker for troubled youth, and gives lectures at West Oakland’s McClymonds High School and other Oakland public schools on cultural awareness and traditional African dance. 

In 2003, for the first time, Gueye agreed to take along several friends—some of them fellow dancers at the Casquelord Center—who wanted to go to West Africa with someone who was familiar with the culture and knew the area. The visitors stayed and ate their meals with Senegalese and Gambian families. 

“I didn’t take them to the places where the tourists go, around the hotels and resorts,” Gueye explained. “I took them to be around regular people.” 

Gueye did take her friends to one of the regular and most emotional stops on Senegal’s tourist circuit. On Goree Island, just outside of Dakar, they visited the slave-station where many of the ancestors of African-Americans went out the infamous “Door of No Return” to be put on Middle Passage slave ships, seeing their last view of their native Africa before embarking in chains to North American plantations.  

The 2003 trip generated much positive talk around Oakland’s Afrocentric African-American community, eventually reaching Williams. 

“I saw this as a chance for a 22-year-old African-American single parent to go to Africa,” Williams told Peralta College trustees last month, referring to herself. “That doesn’t happen very often for low income, community college students.” 

But Gueye was not so well known in the Laney College and Peralta College District hierarchy, and that’s when the controversy began. 

“There were originally eight students who were interested in going,” Williams said. “But eventually, we determined that only four of them were attending Laney.” 

Williams and Gueye approached the Associated Students of Laney College for assistance in funding the trip. Eventually, the ASLC allotted $4,500 on a divided vote to assist the Laney College students participating in the trip , with ASLC President and Peralta Student Trustee Lisa Watkins-Tanner voting against the allocation. 

With $1,125 going to each of the four Laney students, Gueye said that the allotment did not even cover the $1,680 San Francisco to Dakar round trip air fare that the trip will eventually cost. And that also did not cover the guaranteed room and board once the students got to West Africa. 

Gueye said that she began organizing fund-raising activities among the students to pay the balance. She said that none of the money will go towards her share of the trip or that of her husband; they are paying for that out of their own funds. 

Gueye also says that the delay in the release of the Laney funding—it took the ASLC two meetings to eventually vote for approval—caused two of the Laney students to have to drop out of the trip. That caused a further complication. 

When Laney Vice President of Student Services Carlos McLean released the ASLC travel money this month, he said that the $4,500 stipend had been based on the eight students that had originally intended to go on the trip. Since only two students were now going, McLean told Williams, he was only going to cut a check for $1,124—$562 apiece. 

That left Williams discouraged and almost in tears. 

“We thought the trip was going to be off,” she said. 

Their salvation came from an unexpected source.  

“When I told [Laney College] President [Odell] Johnson how much we’d been given, he told me that wasn’t right,” Williams said. “He went into his pocket and wrote us a check for $3,000. Without that, we wouldn’t have been able to go.” 

The trip also faced expressions of concern and skepticism from Laney College trustees and administrative staff members at the board’s June 28 meeting, even though trustees admitted that they had no sayso over how the ASLC spent their funds. 

She said that after the group returns in mid-August, they will prepare a presentation for Laney College students, faculty and administrators and any other group within the Peralta colleges that is interested. 

“I think the students will have a lot to share, and I want them to share it,” she said. “They’ll be immersed in language and culture and customs. They’re going to experience African life. That’s something they’re going to want to talk about. That’s the whole purpose.”