2008 Recipient - Muna Kangsen
When Muna Kangsen, the class of 2008’s winner of the John F. Kennedy Award for Academic Excellence, walks into the university cafeteria the day before commencement, everybody seems to know his name.
“He’s like a celebrity,” says Assistant Professor of Political Science Heike Schotten, who has taught Kangsen and recommended him for the award. “I was talking with his wife, and she said that coming to campus with Muna was like going to Boston with
the mayor. People say ‘Muna, Muna!’”
In the cafeteria, Kangsen’s quest to get a cup of coffee is interrupted several times by well-wishers and friends. When he finally tears himself away to sit down for an interview, he is all smiles.
“I’m humbled by winning the award,” he explains. “It’s affirmation for the work I’ve done inside and outside the school. UMass Boston has been very good to me. I feel that I am obligated to keep an open mind, to bridge camps between communities and nations. I would like to give back to this community.”
Kangsen, a native of Cameroon, was born into a family that was active in politics. His father was both a member of parliament as
well as the traditional leader of a village, and from an early age Kangsen observed his style of leadership.
“I felt like it was almost my birthright to be involved [in thepolitical scene],” he says.
In 1991, Kangsen enrolled in the University of Cameroon, just as the country was engulfed in political turmoil. Before finishing
school, Kangsen was sent to the United States for his own safety.
He arrived at UMass Boston in 1993, attracted to the school’s reputation for diversity. But then he took time off, distracted, he
says, by “the question of why I came to the States.”
“I felt like I had left Cameroon at a crucial time when I could have stayed and made a difference,” he says. “It took me a while to say, ‘OK, I’m in America, let me make the best of it.’”
Gradually, as Kangsen embraced his American identity, he looked around for ways he could make a difference from abroad.
Eventually, he came to view his arrival in the U.S. as integral to his understanding of his homeland.
“I had to come here to appreciate Cameroon,” he says. “The quality of the air, the closeness of the family bonds, these things are
all different than they are here.”
Kangsen came back to UMass Boston in 2003, and with the help of scholarships and the support of his wife, he began his education in social change. He chose to major in political science and to study English and writing, a combination that he says strikes many as odd, but that he views as crucial to his mission.
“Of all the methods I want to use to effect social change, writing would be it,” he says.
Kangsen gained his high profile at UMass Boston not only through his work as the president of the African Students Union and as a member of the Undergradute Student Senate, but also through the thoughtful way he combines intellectual inquiry with passion for the causes he champions.
“Not only did I learn about theory,” he says, “but the campus also gave me a platform to exercise what I learned in class. I literally left class and went to panel discussions or to meetings that grappled with the social issues we had learned about.”
Struck by how images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reminded him of villages in his native Cameroon, Kangsen led two trips of UMass Boston students to New Orleans to aid in the cleanup effort. Kangsen says that this year’s trip, on which students
took a 30-hour bus ride to New Orleans, was “like the Freedom Ride.” Sociology professor Estelle Disch, who taught Kangsen in her class on gender, was there, and was struck by Kangsen’s calm authority throughout the trip.
“At one point,” she remembers, “someone just wrote ‘We love Muna’ in the dirt on the bus.”
“To me,” Disch continues, “this award is the combination of a fabulously serious scholar who’s dedicating his mind and heart to
improving the world. And that’s what Muna is. I think his purpose is to help people be aware of the crises of the world’s peoples. To try and help people realize that they can make a difference. That’s what JFK was about.”
Kangsen’s other extracurricular projects at UMass Boston included spearheading the effort to rescind Zimbabwean president
Robert Mugabe’s honorary UMass degree and leading the successful campaign for the UMass system’s divestment from Sudan in protest of the genocide in Darfur. All of these efforts, his professors say, were appreciated by his peers.
“It’s not just that he’s just well known, but substantively appreciated by masses of students,” Schotten says. “It’s a testament to
his real commitment to justice.”
“I think he’s a charismatic leader, frankly,” Disch says. “That combination of warmth and caring and ability to get things gone. He’s both the instrumental leader and the effective leader combined.”
“Simply put, Mr. Muna Kangsen is a hybrid of the best of Cameroon and the United States, and I believe that his epistemic modesty places him in a position to make a shift in the frontiers of his field in the near future,” says Associate Professor of Philosophy Ajume Wingo, who wrote one of Kangsen’s recommendations. “He is a bearer of intellectual good news to those with the ears to listen.”
Now that he has graduated, Kangsen plans to go to law school, and says he would like to work at the United Nations, possibly at
the International Criminal Court, where he would continue to advocate for Africa and Africans.
As always, he has other projects as well. This summer, while studying for the LSAT, he’ll be working with Ethiopian jazz legend
Mulatu Astatke to launch a music magazine called Ethio-Jazz, and will continue working with the Somali Bantu community in
Chelsea, where he lives and has recently helped establish a community center.
“I cannot sit idle when I know that people in Africa are being decimated by HIV/AIDS, or people in New Orleans are living in trailers from FEMA,” he says. “I’m always doing something.”