After a 9-year journey through Tanzania, Yahya Jongintaba—formerly known as Jon Michael Spencer in a past life— has returned for a pit stop at Duke.
In 2005, Jongintaba decided to leave behind everything he owned in order to lead a nomadic life in Africa.
“I had a very nice home, a very nice car. I had a lot of art I had collected in my world travels and a library of a couple thousand books—a significant portion of which I had gotten abroad—books I could never get here,” he explained.
In fact, some of those books like Blues and Evil, Theological Music, and Protest and Praise were his own publications. From 1986 to 1987, Dr. Spencer settled at Duke as a post-doctoral scholar then spent 3 additional years as a visiting professor in the Divinity School. In his 23 years as a professor, he held positions at North Carolina Central University, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Richmond, Bowling Green State and the University of South Carolina teaching topics that include but are not limited to theology, American studies, the blues and African-American studies.
“A real hodgepodge of academic experience,” he said with a laugh. “It’s the same way of thinking that led me ultimately on this journey after I took early retirement in 2005 to wander—that is—just following leads, living life spontaneously. One book leads to another book; one subject leads to another subject. I have never been bound by discipline…It just kind of flowed one from the other.”
After immersing himself in the works of Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, he decided to manifest his philosophy of learning into his life. In the same wandering spirit that led him through various subjects and schools, he flew off in an airplane with nothing but a shoulder bag containing the bare necessities.
“And that’s the way I journeyed also—most of the time not quite knowing where I‘m going, or if I have a sense of where I’m going, not knowing if I’ll get there because a path has decided to take me some other direction that I had not anticipated,” he explained. “I had no itinerary. I was completely on my own.”
His wandering eventually led him to Mt. Kilimanjaro where he made the decision to leave the name Jon Michael Spencer to become Yahya Jongintaba.
“I built a small house in Marangu lower in the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I had water I had piped in from the mountain. I had no electricity, no glass windows but only screens and shutters,” he noted.
He furnished his new home with a half-acre organic garden, all of which directly faced Mt. Kilimanjaro, the giant, snow-capped gem of Tanzania.
“Mountains are always memorable to me, and I see life as a mountain to climb. I imbibed the mountain. And so my name, which went from Jon Michael Spencer to Yahye Jongintaba means ‘one who looks at the mountain’,” he declared. “It’s a South African name of the Khosa people of which Nelson Mandela was one.”
Meanwhile, tension rose among the native villagers causing unsafe living conditions, and Jongintaba set out the next leg of his journey.
“I would go out at night and look at the stars. If you know what it’s like when there’s no light in the vicinity because no one in the village had any…” he said. "I’d walk around and rename constellations—that’s Kilimanjaro, that’s Serengeti! And so forth” he added.
But one night, something caught his eye.
“I remember seeing a star that was so bright…I had never seen a star that bright before, and I said to myself, ‘Now if I were a wise man, I’d follow that star,” he said. “And maybe that was an excuse or something, but I’m going to wander. I’m going to follow stars.”
The next day, he took a bus to the capital city. From there Yahye Jongintaba stepped onto a boat and headed to Zanzibar, an island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania. As his boat chugged through the striking turquoise waters, he continued his journey.
Though his direction was always open to change, he remained on the path of learning. He said It was this thirst for learning that pushed him to wherever he went.
“The best of pedagogies is to allow learning to lead the way. Learning is—it’s finding. It’s discovering. It’s, in the end, knowing, which is distinct from knowledge. Knowledge is that which is given to me. I may write it down. I may memorize it. Learning is that which I’ve come to know because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it. I’ve imbibed it,” he explained. “Learning is imbibed. Knowledge is memorized. And most knowledge is easily forgotten but learning never so. Educating and learning are two different things, and probably most learning occurs outside the classroom. I think that is what the future of education needs to be.”
Yahye Jongintaba is currently situated in Durham, conducting research with Professor Turner at the Divinity School. He plans to continue his travels.
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