Allen Buansi - On his family and moving to Chapel Hill (clip)
Interviewed by Kathryn Wall on September 24, 2024
Allen Buansi: My mom moved us here when I was about 10 years old. I was actually born in Chicago, or near Chicago, I should say. I was born in Evanston technically, but spent about the first 7 years of my life in the Chicago area. We moved around a lot when I was a kid before the age of 10, but we ended up here in Chapel Hill about when I was 10, 11 years old. And so I got here just in time to start 6th grade and my mom, she had gotten into the Phd program at UNC in the anthropology department. And I can’t tell my story without saying a little bit about her and my family on that side of the family. So my mom is from Richmond, Virginia. Most of my family, the vast majority of my family on my mom’s side, is still in Virginia, in Richmond. And our family goes back many many generations in that area and they actually came down from just north of Richmond, back in the early 1900’s. We can trace them back to an area north of Richmond where they were enslaved, you know back in the antebellum period but when they came down to Richmond they were looking for a new chance. A chance to provide for themselves and their families, and so they’ve been in Richmond probably since that point in time. And my mom, you know when my mom left Richmond to go to college in Chicago, that's where she had me. She was really one of the first ones in her family to leave the state, to leave the city. And you know she had always had a mind for adventure and to try new things, to meet new people. And it was in the Chicago areas as well where she met my dad, who hails from a small democracy in Africa called Ghana. So my dad is from Ghana. And one thing she raised me with that I’ve always kept at the core is that I’m an American but I have one foot in both continents: Africa and here in the US. So, just really proud to have that heritage and so when we moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I knew at the time I was really tired of moving around a lot. And so I was hoping that you know, we’d settle down for good here and we did.
