Former College lecturer Tulinabo Mushingi has begun his role as the U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso, making him the first African-born naturalized American to return to Africa as an ambassador.
The appointment marks the culmination of Mushingi's lifelong diplomatic work, which began in the Peace Corps, where he served as a language and cultural trainer. He has worked in countries across Africa through the State Department and its embassies. Before his appointment in the spring, he served as executive director of the Executive of the Secretary of State.
Mushingi said in a State Department podcast that he became interested in the United States at a young age because of its educational opportunities and the potential for advancement in a diplomatic career.
"Representing the United States of America to Africa is special to me personally because I can show back home that if we open opportunities to people there can be hope to get somewhere," he said.
After earning a bachelor's and master's from L'Institut Superieur Pedagogique in Bukavu, Mushingi left the Democratic Republic of Congo to pursue postgraduate degrees in the States. He received a master's from Howard University, where he later taught, and a PhD from Georgetown University. His doctoral dissertation in linguistics, completed in 1989, focused on the vehicular use of Swahili as a medium of instruction.
"Forget his foreign service, just his education from the Congo, to his master's in the U.S. and his PhD at Georgetown is enough," said assistant undergraduate dean Teoby Gomez, who advised Mushingi's daughter Furaha Mushingi '09.
Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mushingi was invited to the College in 1983 to help launch the environmental sciences foreign studies program in Kenya, and taught as a visiting lecturer throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
"He made the FSP possible," said Jim Hornig, a former chemistry and environmental sciences professor who brought Mushingi to campus to teach Swahili. "It wouldn't have been the same if we hadn't had such a charming guy teaching it. There's no match to Mushingi."
Hornig, Gomez and environmental studies professor Jack Shepherd cited his charisma and capacity to adapt as traits that make him a distinguished diplomat.
"He has an uncanny way of understanding people that he's dealing with no matter what culture they're coming from," Hornig said.
Gomez, who attended Mushingi's swearing-in ceremony, said that Secretary of State John Kerry commented on the diversity of people who came to support Mushingi.
Mushingi joined the College's environmental sciences department at a watershed moment in the field, when global problems such as population and food supply were beginning to be recognized as environmental science issues, Hornig said. Those issues are at the forefront of his work today.
"There are opportunities in all of these countries," Mushingi said in the podcast. "Young Africans have to get over the idea that we cannot do anything in our countries because we are poor."
Mushingi has taken up his post in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and plans to prioritize economic growth and development, security in the Sahel region, capacity building and good governance.
"The bottom line is we have to make a difference," he said. "We have to, the U.S. has to make a difference."
