AFRISPORA

Dr. Dontraneil Clayborne (Ph.D., Urban Planning, 2012)

Doctoral Dissertation Owner-Drivers in the Tro-Tro Industry: A Look at Jitney Service Provision in Accra, Ghana

“Dontraneil “Don Dada Kwame Tumi” Clayborne is the founder and creator of Afrispora™ and Afrispora Worldwide™and AFRISPORA.com, organizer of a wide range of socio-cultural and politico-economic endeavors, and an Urban Planning doctoral candidate at UCLA (graduation date 2011)[I EARNED my doctorate in Urban Planning in 2012].

[Dr. Clayborne] Dontraneil is a History professor has taught African, World, African-American and American histories at Santa Monica College (since 2003), Western Civilizations and African-American histories at  Los Angeles Southwest College (since 2011).

Dontraneil was born in ‘South Central’ L.A., near 54th Street and Central Avenue (Wikipedia content). Much of his family has lived in this area dating from 1942 until the present. As a youth, he attended eight elementary schools from South Central L.A. to Watts to Inglewood and elsewhere, then in Orange County and San Diego counties before returning to L.A. During his time in high school, first the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul, then A Tribe Called Quest changed how he looked at music and popular culture in general. He discovered music that allowed him to tap into a cultural network that fit into his world views.

Dontraneil is particularly proud of an essay he wrote in high school about the life and accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois. The experience of writing the essay and winning a second place prize, along with an awareness of his family history, sparked Dontraneil’s quest for knowledge of self. Du Bois would become one of the main catalysts for his intellectual development as a teenager and throughout his life.

After high school, Dontraneil went on to obtain a double major B.A. in Third World Studies and History at University of California, San Diego. During his junior year, he studied abroad for eight months at the University of Ghana, Legon in West Africa. While in college, Dontraneil listened to a lot of music, ranging from the Artifacts, Boogiemonsters, the Roots, Freestyle Fellowship, Gin Blossoms, Alice and Chains, Porno for Pyros, Craig Mack, Cypress Hill, the Nonce, Anita Baker, and more. Since high school and college, his personal and academic life have been shaped and inspired by the literary likes of Mariama Ba, Oscar Wilde, Albert Camus, W.E.B. Du Bois and musical likes of the KRS-One, Fela Kuti, Souls of Mischief, Incognito, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Omar Lye Fook, J Davey, Dibiase, J. Bizness, N/A, GB, Phonte, Open Mike Eagle and Dr. Who Dat up to today.

Following a summer of service as an AFL-CIO Union activist, Dontraneil moved to Washington, DC to attend graduate school at a Howard University. Once in the nation’s capital, he worked a plethora of odd jobs ranging from a youth hostel to web development and database management. In 1998 he obtained a Masters of Arts degree in History (major field: African history-minor field: Public history). That same year, Dontraneil had developed the basic concepts of what would later become Afrispora™. The vision was to use online tools to make real-world cultural events more widely known.

In 1999 Dontraneil began his academic career teaching World history and African history in Baltimore.
In 2000, he came back home to Los Angeles, and in 2002 began attending UCLA to obtain a Ph.D. in Urban Planning. During this time, he also connected with ‘good’ folks in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles at small gatherings and large parties like Juju. Finally, in 2005, the concept of Afrispora™ was formalized and Dontraneil began conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing, designing and re-designing how the concept would be brought into the business format and networking model of the company, Afrispora Worldwide, LLC, the parent company of Afrispora.com.

Dontraneil’s lifetime enthusiasm for knowledge lead to later academic interest in the lives, ideas and instructions of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Samora Machel, Steve Biko, Walter Rodney, Albert Camus, Ngugi wa Thoing’o, Arthur Ashe, Kwame Ture, Thomas Sankara, Carter G. Woodson, Angela Davis, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Ali Mazrui, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Basil Davidson, Frantz Fanon, Joseph E. Harris, Jeanne Maddox Toungara, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi, Vinit Mukhija, Edward Soja, Lois Takahashi, Aziz Batran, Paul Robeson among many others.

Since 2008, Dontraneil gradually came to be known as Kwame Tumi. This nickname means born on Saturday because Kwame is an Akan ethnic group day name, while Tumi means to be able, capable.

[Edited]

Check out more of the site: Afrispora.com  Direct contact for Dr. Dontraneil D. Clayborne at afrispora@gmail.com – Thanks again UBAA for this valuable ‘encapsulation’ of aspects of my existence! Indebted.