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Professor Catherine Acholonu
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Professor Catherine Acholonu |
Former Special Adviser on Arts and
Culture to the Ex-President of the Federal Republic of
Nigeria, Professor Acholonu is a writer, researcher and former
lecturer on African Cultural and Gender Studies. She is the
author of over 15 books, most of which are used in secondary
schools and universities in
Nigeria, and in African
Studies Departments in USA
and Europe, the most notable of which are The
Gram Code of African Adam: Stone Books and Cave Libraries,
Reconstructing 450,000 Years of Africa's Lost Civilizations
which earned her the award of Professor
of African History and Philosophy from Pilgrim's University
and Theological Seminary, North Carolina;
The Earth Unchained - A Quantum Leap in Consciousness,
A Reply to Al Gore; Motherism - The Afrocentric
Alternative to Feminism and The Igbo Roots of Olaudah
Equiano. Prof. Acholonu's works and projects
have enjoyed the collaboration and the support of United
States Information Service (USIA), the British Council, the
Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft World and the World
Monument Fund.
In 1989, as an upcoming
scholar, Acholonu toured universities in
USA and United Kingdom, lecturing on her
research findings and discovery of the Nigerian origin of 17th Century slave
author Olaudah Equiano under the United States International Visitor's
Program and the British Council sponsorship Program. In 1986 she was the
only Nigerian, and one of only 2 Africans to participate in the United
Nations Expert Group Meeting on Women, Population and Sustainable
Development: the Road to Rio, Cairo and Beijing, which took place in
Dominican Republic, focusing on the mainstreaming of gender into the Plans
of Action of the UN world conferences of
Rio, Beijing and Cairo. Prof Acholonu holds several international awards
and honours. She is the founder of Afa Publications, a Fellow of the
Nigerian Institute of Corporate Administration, a Fellow of
the Nigerian Institute of Chartered Administrators and a
Fellow of the Whelan Research
Institute, Owerri to name a few. She is the founder of
the Let's Help Humanitarian Project, a charity-based NGO and the Head of the Catherine Acholonu Research Center for
African Cultural Sciences based in Abuja, Nigeria.
In 1990 she was honoured with the Fulbright Scholar-Writer-in-Residency award by
the US
government, during which she lectured as Visiting Professor at 4 colleges of
the Westchester Consortium for International Studies, NY,
USA.
She is listed in the International
Who is Who of world Leadership, USA; the African Women Writers, Who's Who of
the Top 500 Women in Nigeria; Who s Who in Nigeria; and the International Authors and Writers Who's Who, published in
Cambridge, UK. She was recently appointed African Renaissance Ambassador by
the African Renaissance Conference with head quarters in
Benin
Republic.
Prof Catherine Acholonu is
Nigeria's Country Ambassador for the UN Forum
of Arts and Culture (UNFAC) instituted by the global Secretariat of the UN
Convention to Combat Desertification based at the UN Building, Bonn, Germany.
Before this new assignment, she was the Special Adviser on Arts and Culture to
the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria from 1999-2002. Under the
leadership of Prof. Acholonu, UNFAC a number of ambitious programs aimed at
creating an interface between cultural development in local communities of
Nigeria and sustainable environmental development. Under this program, UNFAC has
been partnering with Microsoft to give basic IT Training to under-served
community dwellers in Nigeria under the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Program.
The UNFAC team of culture researchers-
linguists, anthropologists, historians, IT specialists,
folklorists - led by Prof. Acholonu, are conducting research
aimed at unearthing the hidden meanings of ancient Nigerian
rock art/inscriptions known as Ikom Monoliths of Cross River
State, which thanks to Acholonu's research findings and
nomination application, have now been listed by the World
Monument Fund in its 2008 list of 100 Most Endangered
Sites as "a ancient form of writing and visual
communication ... dating before 2000 B.C." Acholonu is
seeking international support and funding for her monoliths
research by which she has proved that Sub-Saharan African
Blacks possessed an organized system of writing before 2000
B.C. (more than 4000 years ago) and a Pre-History recorded
on 350 stones which she and her team of researchers are now
transcribing and translating. (See The Gram Code of
African Adam, the first in a series on the monoliths
research.) She believes that the contents of these stone
records will prove that Black Africans were the midwives of
human civilization, and will change human history as we know
it.
Acholonu is an incurable idealist and a
frontline political activist. She contested for the post of
President of Federal Republic of Nigeria 1992. Acholonu
is one of the
founding member of the Peoples Democratic Party, a
member of its National Women Mobilization Committee and the
Imo State Woman Leader of PDP in the formative years of the
party. She is the National Spokesperson of the Movement for
Gender Parity, a gender-advocacy group that was in the
frontline for the demand for and attainment of the post of
the First Woman Speaker of the Nigerian House of
Representatives. As a leading Nigerian political activist
Prof. Catherine Acholonu is an advocate for human
rights and women's rights and often expresses burning
opinions in the national media on the need for government to
put the people first. |
