Being an African Student: Stories of Opportunity and Determination

Omotosho, S. A. (2005). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. $22.24, ISBN 978-076182991Being an African Student is a writeup of a study that investigated acculturative experiences of African international students at one university in the United States. The study also investigated different strategies by which African students adjusted to their new social and academic environments. The author examined pre-acculturative orientations of the participants portraying the mixed feelings associated with their sojourning experiences to the United States. As depicted from the stories of the participants, the period of departure from their respective home countries is characterized by a mixture of euphoric feelings of realizing the American dream and feelings of anxiety and fear of the unknown. However, upon arrival to the United States, the American dream begins to fade away and feelings of disillusionment are experienced. Contributing to these feelings of disillusionment are experiences of race and racism, negative stereotypes, and stigmatization.The book proceeds to discuss areas of the academic and social life that African students strive to adjust to in the United States. These include communication styles (e.g. eye contact and physical distance), advanced technology, understanding of American jokes, etc. The book also investigated the strategies that African international students employ as they navigated into the social and academic fabrics of their host environment. One such strategy pertains to the mindset that they reportedly adopted to deal with issues of racial prejudice and negative stereotypes. As depicted from the stories of the participants, these personal strategies are complemented by various support structures such as the family, peers, and institutional resources.Chapter 5 highlights the conclusions that the author drew from the stories of the participants while the last chapter discusses implications for practice for Africa international students themselves, professors, and counselors who deal with African students on a daily basis. The book concludes by discussing recommendations, purportedly drawn from the findings, on how to formulate culturally appropriate support programs for African international students.Most conclusions that Omotosho drew from this study are quite applicable and usable in dealing with African international students at institutions of higher learning. Most of such conclusions were well corroborated with findings from the study. However, there were few sections where conclusions were purportedly drawn from the findings but without necessarily highlighting the result sections from where the conclusions were drawn. It would be more substantial if the author occasionally referred back to the findings in order to substantiate the conclusions. Failure to directly link the conclusions to the empirical findings has the danger of making the conclusions sound like they have been drawn from other sources such as commentaries, personal experience, or even common-sense opinions.In a similar fashion, the author comes up with invaluable implications for African students, teachers, counselors, and other stake holders of particular interest to the welfare of African international students in US institutions of higher learning. For example, Omotosho recommends that university professors take extra effort into understanding the cultural background of African international students and how their cultural background influences their learning. In a similar fashion, Omotosho recommends African students to "reflect carefully on memories of their home families and consider which ones are nurturing and which ones are limiting in their present experiences" (p. 67). There were, however, some sections where the link between recommendations and research findings was rather weak and it became hard to tell where from the findings the recommendations were drawn. For example, the author discusses at length the need for university institutions to "make the recruitment and retention of minority and foreign students part of their goals and priorities" (p. …