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Geography is the art of distance. From pole to pole, ice to desert, culture to culture, the Earth is various and vast. In Africa, the distance in time and history from Morocco to Mozambique is enormous, just as the distance from a city in Tanzania to Athens spans more than several thousand miles.

So imagine the journey of Lioba Moshi. She grew up in a town almost in the shadow of storied Mt. Kilimanjaro, in a place where her great-grandfather had been village chief. South of Kenya and east of the Congo, Tanzania stood at a cultural crossroads that cast Africans, Germans, and British against each other for decades and left a culture of great diversity and richness. The town of Kirua, where she lived, was 16 kilometers northeast, in fact, of the town of Moshi—the Swahili word for smoke. In its original meaning, moshi indicated a chief’s house, where food was always cooking for villagers and smoke could be seen streaming into the equatorial air.

Moshi’s voice is soft and lulling, full of smiles and patience. She sits at a conference table in UGA’s Holmes-Hunter Academic Building as a morning sun streams through the windows on to images of Africa. In fact, the African Studies Institute, of which Moshi is director, stretches through several offices here, not long ago moved from Candler Hall, which had been emptied for renovations.

Also a professor of linguistics in the department of comparative literature, Moshi has been in Athens for 15 years now, but in a sense, she has never left Africa, and when she speaks of that continent, it is with quiet pride and wonder. For despite poverty and wars, despite disease and colonial tragedies, Africa remains a place that stirs the imagination of Westerners, from its magnificent landscapes and animals, to its central role in all human history.

Interest in Africa is not new for students in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. For more than two decades, they have studied the continent’s history, and in 1987, an African Studies Program began on campus—changed in 2001 to the African Studies Institute. In 1988, the Swahili language became a popular favorite, followed in 1996 by Yoruba and 1998 by Zulu. With study abroad trips to Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana, the program has taken on a deeper significance, especially under the emphasis of President Michael Adams on international studies. Lioba Moshi has been at the heart of these changes, though numerous others have been involved, especially Dr. Darl Snyder, former associate vice president for public service and outreach at UGA, who helped establish several UGA programs in Africa and was from the beginning deeply involved in the African Studies Program.

Tanzania is, in many ways, recapitulates the entire history of the African continent. For centuries, it was a multi-tribal area in which many ethnic groups lived side by side. Early in the 20th century, the land was a German colony, then a British-administered mandate by the League of Nations, a United Nations Trust under U.N. supervision, and finally, since 1961, an independent nation created by combining Tanganyika and the island state of Zanzibar.

“It was only after independence that the chiefdoms were really dismantled,” says Moshi. The nation’s first elected president, Julius Nyerere, probably saw tribes as a threat, and so the social structure that had held groups together for several hundred years vanished in a relatively short time.

A member of the Chaga tribe, Moshi grew up in an educated family where hard work and attention to learning never ceased. Kirua is in the far northern part of Tanzania near Kilimanjaro and the border with Kenya, but it also adjoins the Masai Steppe, a land of open plains and rich indigenous wildlife. The Chaga are known for their education and wealth, much of it from a climate and geography that made coffee-growing successful and lucrative. But the annual tribal Chaga Day in 1961 was the last, as independence and a new social structure swept over the country.

Moshi’s father was a teacher in Kirua, and early on he made it clear he expected much of her. The third-born of eleven children—nine boys and two girls—Lioba Moshi knew early that her father would settle for nothing less than a rigorous education for her.

“He was really the first feminist I ever met,” she says, “because he was determined that women should be treated right.”

From the beginning, the varied cultural tapestry that is Africa was part of Moshi’s world. Her father, who taught first and second grades, had Masai heritage through his mother, and Moshi’s mother’s family ancestry was Ethiopian. A self-described “very active child,” Moshi once ran away from her father’s class in school, where she was a student, to another class run by a local nun. She laughs now when she says she was outspoken and even sometimes “obnoxious” in her father’s class, but he understood and allowed her to stay. Chores after school were long and sometimes difficult, but she grew up with better clothes and shoes than many of her playmates, aware early of class differences in Kirua.

At the age of 11, she left for a Catholic boarding school in Mandaka, 16 kilometers to the east, walking with her suitcase on her head as women had carried their burdens in African for generations. (While her surname is allied to her land through its Swahili meaning of smoke, “Lioba” is the name of a Catholic saint, indicating how pervasive the church was in Africa.) The change at boarding school from the warmth of home was striking. Afflicted almost at once with a fearsome combination of malaria and homesickness, faced with Mass at 6 a.m. and cold showers before breakfast, assembly, and classes, the school was difficult for her.

After classes, the students had mandatory farming activities, tilling the land and growing corn, as well as growing most of what they ate, including wheat, oats, cows, chickens, and pigs. Already used to hard work, though, Moshi began to flourish at boarding school, and when she finished its last grade—the eighth—she could say it was a godsend to her and a privilege. The most important thing she learned was time management—the development of a productive routine. The nuns at the school became role models—the only males she ever saw in those years were priests who came to say Mass. By this time, the world of many cultures was spreading rapidly across Africa, and at boarding school, Moshi and her friends followed such singers as Jim Reeves and Skeeter Davis while making their own guitars and learning to dance.

She next went to another convent for high school, Assumpta Secondary School, only a few miles away. Here, a sense of national pride was strengthened, since the daughter of President Nyerere was a student. After two years at another school to gain pre-college courses, Moshi went to the University of Dar Es Salaam on the coast at age 19 where she, at first, wanted to become an architect. But since the state was paying for her schooling, she was placed in the area where the country’s needs were greatest—teacher training.

By then, Moshi had developed a deep and growing interest in language. She’d first studied English in the third grade, and all her classes were in English by Middle School. At home, her family spoke Swahili, Chaga, and English, but she was more and more fascinated by English. In fact, when she would return home to visit from boarding school, giggling neighborhood children would ask her to speak English just to hear its odd sounding consonants and vowels.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in education, she left for her first professional job in the town of Marangu—in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, not far from her hometown of Kirua--where she helped train teachers. After spending a year there, she traveled to her second job at Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika to the west, where she helped students prepare for oral efficiency exams and lived in a “huge house” once owned by wealthy Germans overlooking the lake.

After a stint back in Dar Es Salaam where she completed a master’s degree in linguistics, her life changed dramatically in 1978 when she was invited to the School of International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she would stay eight weeks training Peace Corps volunteers in Swahili.

“It wasn’t only the first time I’d been in the United States, it was the first time I’d ever flown,” she says. With her elaborate hair-do and flowing African gown, she got into trouble almost immediately after landing when she encountered something with which she had no experience—an escalator. “My gown got stuck in it, and so I wrote home to everybody and told them to be careful if they got near one. I was afraid of escalators for a long time.”

Her greatest surprise, however, was that America wasn’t, as she had expected, a land of nothing but tall buildings and highways. Vermont was, she found, was a land of flowers and trees and grass, though the pace of life was stunningly faster than in Tanzania and the traffic moved, for her, alarmingly fast. (One incident she never forgot was not knowing that doors on public bathroom stalls open the opposite way in America than her homeland and thinking, for a long time, that she was hopelessly trapped before pushing on the door rather than pulling.)

While the white teachers were located in a motel, the black teachers were housed with black students in a dormitory, something Moshi and others found unacceptable, and she, who once as a small girl had run away from her father’s class, protested until the black teachers were moved to the better accommodations of the motel, too.

Her time in American was interesting, but it came to an end soon, and she flew back to Tanzania, believing she was home to stay. It came as a shock, therefore, when she found out she had a chance to study at York University in England. So she left and flew there, only to discover that York wouldn’t accept the master’s degree she’d earned in Tanzania. Undeterred, she simply started over, earning a master’s in linguistics from York. After graduation, and believing now that her future lay in America, she began a doctoral program at UCLA, where she earned her degree, also in linguistics, in 1985.

Moshi spent three years then as a lecturer at Stanford before she met two UGA professors whose work in Africa was drawing international notice—Drs. Ben Blount and Carolyn Ehardt from the department of anthropology. From them, she learned of UGA’s growing African Studies Program and of a potential faculty opening.

“The only things I knew about Georgia were probably Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young,” she says, laughing. “When I came to interview for the job, it was in the spring, and when I saw all those dogwoods in bloom, I said, I don’t care what the job is, I’m coming.”

The reaction of her colleagues on the West Coast about moving to Georgia was almost uniformly negative, warning her of everything from southern belles to the Klan. But she reasoned there was racism everywhere, and in a way it was better to go to a place that had been dealing with the problem openly for years than go somewhere that pretended it didn’t exist. Arriving in Athens in 1988, she was surprised at how rapidly she was accepted, and the slower pace of life reminded her pleasantly of Tanzania. The hardest thing for her, in fact, was not racism but a lack of friends and the need to develop a new network of support.

Blount and Ehardt were especially helpful she says, and she started a series of Saturday dinners and began to attend services at the Catholic Center on campus. Soon, she found that Athens had become home, and she’s lived here since then.

African studies at the University of Georgia have expanded vastly since the late 1980s, partially due to the more global nature of the world, but also because students have a deep and abiding curiosity about the continent, its countries, languages, and cultures. The current printing of the Africanist Faculty Directory for UGA runs an amazing 40 pages, and crosses virtually all college and disciplinary lines. The University offers a Certificate in African studies, and a minor has also recently been added. In the summer of 2002, more than 100 UGA students went to Africa to study.

“Some faculty members were in Africa for study abroad programs or research,” wrote Moshi in The Africanist, the newsletter of the African Studies Institute. “[Our students] went to Africa, some on directed programs or service learning outreach activities (Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa/Bostwana), some on intensive language (Tanzania—Swahili and South Africa—Zulu), and others had unsupervised research and study tours in different parts of the continent.”

UGA student Shauna Intelisano said in The Africanist that her Maymester trip in 2002 to Tanzania was “a life-changing experience.” After landing at the Kilimanjaro airport, the students went to the city of Moshi, and by 6 the next morning, they were already seeing women walking down the road with “large baskets on their heads full of food and supplies.” Shauna and the other students thus had their first exposure to the diverse population of the country, which, she notes, is comprised of about 120 ethnic groups.

“A local of Moshi explained to me that everyone was a Tanzanian first and their ethnic group second,” wrote Intelisano. “Tanzania is a melting pot of hundreds of ethnic groups that maintain a social cohesion.”

Not only can Maymester students in Tanzania study language and culture, for an additional $800, they can even opt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

While hundreds of students at UGA have enjoyed studies abroad opportunities in Africa, by far the most-popular African area is the Swahili language program. Three advancing levels of the language are available, and it has become so popular that a new section of the beginning Swahili course was added beginning this fall. Interest in the Yoruba language has also been growing, while Zulu is still finding its way as a program on campus.

“When you get down to it, my interest in really in students,” says Moshi, who has written or edited numerous books, book chapters, and scholarly articles on everything from the pedagogy of African languages—especially the growing use of computers—to gender and women’s studies relating to African society. She also published an article in Columns, the UGA faculty-staff newspaper, in 2002 on the importance of teaching and learning language.

Moshi goes back home every May during the Maymester study abroad program, but she remains positioned between two worlds, just as the Tanzania of her childhood straddled numerous societies, both indigenous and colonial. Though her mother died in 1995, her father is now 83 and living with Moshi in Athens with his second wife and their young children, so her ties to the past are living things.

When asked if she ever climbed Kilimanjaro herself, she smiles, and shakes her head.

“Kilimanjaro means house of God,” she says quietly. “We always believed that when you see that mountain, you are seeing heaven. What if God didn’t want you climbing up there? But I can say that when I am there, I use my eyes to climb it every morning.”