—by Lois Chazen

Why did an Anglo-American student, born in Ohio and raised in Scarsdale, New York in the 1950s, select African History as the focus of a distinguished 40-year career as an historian? Richard Ford, Professor of History for 34 years at prestigious Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts said that his awakening came with his first exposure to the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Moreover, until then, little work had been done in the field. “It was uncharted territory. I realized that American History was an over-crowded discipline. To make a mark one needs to specialize in an area as narrow as 1827,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

Richard Ford

The ebullient Dr. Ford is co-founder of Clark’s Program for International Development. Although he no longer teaches officially and is free of university administrative responsibilities, he remains Director of the Program since 1982. Thus far his research has brought him to more than 20 African countries. Although he said he was enjoying his retirement and is now able to spend more time with his family, it appears that he is almost as engaged as when he was “working.” During his teaching years, Dr. Ford made nearly 80 trips to Africa and plans two visits to the continent this summer.

The Program for International Development investigates nearly all facets of African life including, community governance, bio-diversity and health matters, resource management, race relations and education. After years of study, Dr. Ford concludes that many issues such as poverty, drought and rampant disease must be resolved on the local level. “Government at a distance whether it be national or worse yet, by a foreign power, cannot work in Africa since the continent is so varied. Within Africa 900 languages and thousands of dialect are spoken. In Kenya there are 35 languages and countless dialects.”

As a result, the Program recently has been renamed the Center for Community Based Development. In addition to extensive fieldwork, the research group publishes numerous papers and books on its findings and recommendations. The Program trains graduate students who Ford indicates are highly motivated, some of them former Peace Corps volunteers. “In the course of their scholarly pursuits, there are outstanding field work opportunities,” Ford said. He is the author of many books and articles and has lectured widely throughout the world. He is a consultant to many U.S. and African government agencies. Ford applied his community-based governance and research theories to projects in Asia and the South Pacific, the Caucasus, Israel (where he was Visiting Professor at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva) and Armenia. Ford’s philosophy of strong local governance was applied to his longtime hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. He and two colleagues conducted a study entitled, “Neighborhood Networks in Worcester: Partnerships that Work,” part of a book entitled, Getting Results Through Collaboration: Networks and Network Structures for Public Policy and Management.

Professor Ford’s work has taken him into disciplines other than history, such as economics, sociology, government and politics, resource management, forestry and education. A distillation of Ford’s views was delivered in a sermon he has written for the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, which met at the end of June in Boston. The persuasive, elegant document, entitled, “Lessons from Africa: Using Loaves and Fishes for African Communities to Help Themselves,” was the winning entry for the annual Dana McLean Greeley Annual Address

Award competition.In it, Ford discusses the pervasive, destructive influence of European Colonialism on Africa in the nineteenth century. Two very different cultures clashed. “The Europeans were directed towards maximizing profit, whereas the African sensibility was towards minimizing risk,” he states. The following is a precis of a charming story Richard Ford recounts at the beginning of his winning UUAGA sermon. A young, European development official arrives at a Maasai

Dick Ford counselling a Somali women's group

compound in Tanzania where he finds a warrior dozing in the midday heat under a tree. The volunteer tells the Maasai he has come to help him increase his income and provide better for his family: how to increase his crops and cattle and therefore, to maximize his profit. The warrior shows no interest. Undaunted, the official continues and promises the warrior more leisure time. The Maasai answers “If I work hard and sell more cattle, then I will be able to sit under a tree on a hot afternoon, just like I am doing now.”

Ford said, “By eliminating local governments and community involvement, the Europeans have undercut the continent’s stability and that led to poverty, rampant disease and social destabilization.” In his sermon, Ford discusses putting Unitarian-Universalist spiritual and ethical values into practice to overcome these problems.

In May, Dick Ford was moderator of a highly acclaimed panel discussion at All Souls: “The Changing Role of Muslim Women.” Since, he has traveled and worked in many Islamic countries and has studied the religion’s precepts, he conducted the discourse deftly. The symposium was sponsored by the UU-United Nations Office. Ford said that other projects in collaboration with the UUUNO’s Executive Administrator, the Rev. Fran Mercer, are in the works.

When we met, Dick was on his way to a Board meeting of another organization, Aid to Artisans. The organization teaches traditional handcraft artisans world-wide production and business skills.

Another strong interest is conservation. He has been a member of the IUCN Commission for Environmental Education since 1986 and has testified before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives. Ford has been president of the International Film Foundation since 1978. In 1969, one project was a film on ancient Africans produced for public television. He has been a consultant to US-AID, African Development Foundation, Save the Children and the Bureau of Science and Technology as well as numerous other governmental committees and agencies. He also reviews funding proposals presented to NEH. Following boyhood summers spent fishing in Long Island Sound, his college studies began at Denison College in Ohio.

Village well in Ghana

This was a well-traveled route for him since 17 members of his mother’s family attended that school. He majored in Economics and met and married Nancy, his wife of 46 years. They have five children and six grandchildren. Each of the children have chosen a different career. One of his daughters lives in New York City and is an attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

After graduating from Denison, Ford went on to Yale where he earned an M.A. in History. Armed with one graduate degree, Ford taught one year in the Bronxville, New York public schools. It was soon clear that a teacher’s salary would go further to support his growing family in Denver than in the New York Metropolitan area, He continued to teach high school history and for three years headed the History Department at a private school. The urge to be more research-oriented, and a growing fascination with the African continent, led Ford to further study. Within two years, in 1966, he earned a doctorate in African History at the University of Denver. Before joining the Clark faculty, Ford was Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.