Committed To Community -- Immigrant From Africa Is Fully Involved

Femi Akin-Adeyemi is an American who started life in a small city in the middle of Nigeria.

In Egbe, Nigeria, population 20,000, "people were very close," he says. "They looked after one another. There the community is an extension of the family."

Adeyemi brought his commitment to community with him to this country.

A county environmental planner, Adeyemi works on neighborhood projects in the Lake City area where he lives, helps the Seattle Art Museum with its African art exhibit, and is taking part in a global effort to reform the way the United Nations finances itself.

Adeyemi is also a Rotarian, a member of the board of Washington Refugee Resettlement and now a newspaper publisher.

Last spring, Adeyemi started the African Forum News (AFN), dipping into his savings to provide what the paper's yellow and green flag proclaims: News, Business, Arts, Entertainment and Self-empowerment for People of African Descent and Our Diverse Communities.

"I have been a part of this community for 20 years, and I have noticed certain things are underreported," he says. There is too little news from Africa, immigrants don't have a voice, and people of African descent need a way to exchange information.

Beyond filling those gaps, he wants to "provide a forum to bring together people who don't normally talk to or see each other. It is not just for people of African descent. We cannot talk among ourselves alone; we need to talk with all diverse communities."

Friends and family do most of the work. Florence Adeyemi, his wife, is the editor and runs the paper day to day. Their 14-year-old daughter Toyin draws a comic strip, their 13-year-old son Wale puts together a crossword puzzle, and 8-year-old daughter Joy gets to stamp complimentary copies.

AFN's first edition, last May, featured a front-page report on Nelson Mandela, written by a friend of Adeyemi's in Johannesburg. It was accompanied by a report on the visit to Seattle of a South African official and included a photo of the official, Seattle Mayor Norm Rice and Adeyemi, who is noted for his contacts.

Subsequent editions have carried articles on health, travel, technology, religion, immigration, theater, home finance, the environment and food.

Adeyemi says that if he'd known anything at all about newspaper publishing ("mind-boggling . . . very scary"), he would have considered starting from scratch impossible. But he treated it like any other project. He used his engineering and research skills to figure out logically what needed to be done and how.

Colin Tong is one of many volunteers who help put out the paper. "The thing that draws me is that Larry (he prefers Femi, but people often mispronounce it) and Florence came up with an idea, a way of serving a real need, not only among Africans who have recently come to this country, but I think it really serves as a bridge because it aims at being multicultural."

Contributors to the newspaper are African, African American, Caribbean, Asian, Hispanic and white, and the people they write about often cross cultural and ethnic boundaries. They send stories from across the country and around the world.

The newspaper's correspondent at the UN World Conference on Women was a white woman from Seattle. Her report, unlike reports that might be expected in a mainstream newspaper, included a discussion of the difficulty she had getting the confidence of the African delegation.

Her story was a lesson in overcoming cultural differences. She learned and her readers learned, an approach typical of the AFN, where educating the audience is a central goal.

People volunteer to help Adeyemi because they share his vision of a community pulling together regardless of ethnicity, and because they just like him. Tong and others paint Adeyemi with a palette of good characteristics: ethical, highly principled, sensitive, hard working, respected and kind.

Adeyemi notes that Americans have taken to repeating the African proverb that says it takes an entire village to raise a child, and he suggests another proverb worth quoting: "The left hand has to wash the right hand before it can be clean."

This proverb means all people are connected to each other and one cannot truly succeed unless all succeed.

"It is about inclusiveness. We need one another.

"Life in school was a reflection of those values," Adeyemi says. "We would say to each other that it is very important that we succeed. If one of us fails, the family fails, the community fails. Our teachers would tell us we are the future leaders."

These reinforcing messages were a kind of inoculation against life's difficulties.

"I want to bring those values to this community." Adeyemi says black children in this country often feel they don't have a place because what they hear about themselves so often amounts to bad stereotypes.

It is natural for him to get involved. Adeyemi says his mother used to wake him at 4 in the morning and take him for a walk "while talking about the lessons of life, what it means to be strong, what it means to be kind." She would point out people who were doing things that helped the entire community.

Adeyemi's world was neither the bustle of Lagos nor the pace of a traditional village. It was neither wealth nor CARE-package poverty.

Adeyemi's family was middle-class. His father was a government bureaucrat who turned his savings into a vegetable farm; his mother, a seamstress who saw it as a mission to teach girls her trade so that they could provide for themselves.

He is bothered by negative stereotypes of Nigeria - that it is a land of corruption, full of con artists - but not deterred by them. "When you are in a different community, you have to prove yourself," he says, and you do that by "making a living and contributing to the community."

His newspaper tries to showcase immigrants who also are doing that.

Adeyemi, who is Yoruba, chose to attend college at Ahmadu Bello University in Islamic northern Nigeria, where the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups are dominant, to experience something different.

And when he applied to graduate school and was accepted at both Cornell and the University of Washington, he chose the UW because lots of African immigrants stop on the East Coast and he wanted to experience something different.