Troy literature professor returns after months-long Fulbright trip

Nokes looks through different books in his office. Ty Davidson photo

A Troy literature professor returned from a 10-month-long research trip in Uganda last week after months of delays.

On Jan. 7 of this year, Dr. Richard Scott Nokes arrived in Kampala, Uganda, to begin his Fulbright Scholarship research trip. His mission in the country was to travel through all the different kingdoms and cultures to find stories only told by old books and word of mouth.

Uganda doesn’t have much written history, and almost none of what they have is published online. The Fulbright program – the United States' international educational exchange program that sends people abroad to study and build cultural understanding – allowed Nokes to gather those stories and is now working to publish them digitally.

In Uganda, researchers are required to have permits to access certain parts of the country, and shortly after he arrived, Uganda’s election season caused a delay in his research permit process. The Tropolitan spoke to him about it at the beginning of the semester.

“Unfortunately, many researchers simply choose to research illegally – I’ve been surprised by how common that is, especially among European and other African universities,” Nokes said. “Of course, Troy University and the Fulbright program operate within proper ethical guidelines, so I went through the permitting process, which took nearly nine months in total, three of which were when I was already in Uganda.

“Although I used that time to do teaching and seminars at my host school, Kyambogo University, my research really didn’t begin until my time was halfway through.”

The delay prompted Fulbright to extend his grant from the end of June to the beginning of October. He officially returned to Troy’s campus on Oct 5. Now that he’s back, Nokes said he has finally got to have some of the things he missed while he was gone.

“I definitely missed American food,” Nokes said. “I missed a lot of American customs and being back just as we enter the holiday season – so we aren’t going to miss those – that's nice.

“There are certainly lots of things about Troy University that I missed: I missed my students, and I missed my colleagues as well.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing after the three-month delay, though. There was an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that affected Nokes' travel during his time in Uganda and on his journey home.

“Uganda is very, very good at treating Ebola – there's no cure, but they're good at treating it – and so the Congolese would come across the border into Uganda,” Nokes said. “Our movement was restricted outside of Uganda, and we had originally planned to take trips out into Rwanda and the surrounding countries, but we weren't able to do that.

“When we returned [to America,] we had to go through CDC Ebola screening, leading to all kinds of mishaps and delays, so getting back was surprisingly difficult.”

Luckily for him and his research, Nokes was still able to travel wherever he needed to go within the country – he just couldn’t go anywhere outside of it. He finally got his permit to research after three months in the country and was able to spend six of his nine months collecting stories.

He said some of the coolest people he talkedto belonged to a group called “The Lost Tribe” or “The Invisible Tribe” – a group of people that he said even most Ugandans are not aware of.

“When you say ‘lost tribe’ sometimes people think they’re living out a stone age existence in the jungle; but on my phone, I have the WhatsApp number of the King […] and the Queen has a master’s degree,” Nokes said. “While they’re very remote, they aren’t completely cut off in any kind of way.”

The reason meeting these people left such an impact on him was the realization that without him, one day they may truly be lost, forgotten or invisible forever.

“They’re very eager to make sure that their culture isn’t lost because they’re so small and so marginalized,” Nokes said. “It was really fascinating to be able to do that and to be a part of something that wouldn’t have happened without Fulbright and Troy University’s support, and their stories probably would have been lost forever.”

Now that he returned, it is time for him to begin to officially record and publish those stories he gathered in his six months of research. However, what he originally predicted would be a one-to-two-year process is proving to be much more detailed than he once thought.

“We collected two terabytes of data in 30 different languages, so the work that comes next is going to be a lot of translation and a lot of building the website,” Nokes said. “In addition, when I went there, I discovered that the Ugandans didn’t have the research to do digital publishing, so they did carboard and paper only, if they published at all.”

Now, his goal is to get the proper grants to be able to fully translate all the stories out of 30 different languages into English and publish them digitally. That way, the process of keeping, recording and accessing these stories is easy and free for not only the Ugandans, but anyone in the world curious about the history of a country so full of the unknown.