Carleton Convo with Chérif Keïta | September 26, 2025

Chérif Keïta, William H. Laird Professor of French and the Liberal Arts at Carleton, delivered the annual A&I Convocation on Friday, September 26, from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. For first-year students, the A&I Convocation is an opportunity to actively engage in the convo tradition at Carleton while incorporating the address into their Argument and Inquiry (A&I) seminars. Moreover, it is an opportunity for some of Carleton’s most senior and beloved professors to share their perspectives on liberal arts education and offer advice on the process of learning. As a celebrated language and literature professor at Carleton since 1985, Keïta has a unique perspective to share. His address, “Northfield and/in South Africa in the 19th century,” will focus on how his being “found and chosen” by a Northfield-based story led to his past 26 years of research and filmmaking in South Africa.

Keïta’s parents’ belief in his education resulted in Keïta attending a Catholic school in Bamako, Mali, near where he was born. Raised Muslim, Keïta credits his time at the Catholic school with widening the scope of his spiritualism and enriching his intellectual journey from a young age. While Keïta’s academic interest initially inspired a desire to study archaeology at the university level, the Malian government gave him an opportunity to travel to Brussels, Belgium, to study English and Russian translation instead. As his senior thesis, Keïta translated Paul Lewinson’s Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South, a book that played a role in Keïta’s intellectual journey to the United States.

In 1978, Keïta came to the U.S. to pursue his PhD in romance languages and literatures, with a minor in African history and politics and a certificate in global policy studies. Studying at the University of Georgia–Athens allowed him to experience the southern U.S. and sparked his discovery of literature written in French by Africans and West Indians subject to French colonial domination.

Many Septembers ago (40 Septembers, in fact), Keïta began his career at Carleton, with special interests including the novel and social change in Mali; oral tradition; and the relationship between music (traditional and modern), literature, and culture in Africa. He has since published multiple books and dozens of articles on Malian and African literature, music, and film, as well as on social and literary problems in contemporary Africa.

Keïta is also an award-winning filmmaker, whose works have been shown on television and at film festivals across multiple continents. His latest documentary film, Namballa Keita: A Soldier and His Village, tells the story of his late father, a nurse and veteran of the French colonial army, who never had formal education but whose commitment to public education gave him national prominence in a newly independent Mali.

Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations