Weatherhead fellow continues to pay it forward
Wendell Adjetey is paying it forward. One of two incoming William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellows at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and its Canada Program, Adjetey, a historian, overcame extreme poverty and its many attendant social ills in his journey from Ghana to Yale and now to Harvard. This fall, as he begins his program in 20th-century history, writing and teaching a course on African North Americans and citizenship from the Revolutionary War to the present, the foundation Adjetey co-founded will see a member of its first cohort join Harvard’s undergraduate Class of 2022. Education wasn’t always a given for Adjetey, whose own parents lacked a formal high school education. “School was a site of trauma for me,” he recalls. Not only was his family poor, but his father, then a laborer, was forced to flee Ghana shortly after his youngest son’s birth, his life threatened for criticizing the West African...