President Teacher?

by Lory Hough

Eyenga Bokamba, Ed.M.’07, remembers her “ah ha” moment, that instant when she knew she needed to become involved in politics some day. It was June 21, 1993, and Bokamba, then Minnesota’s ambassador for Youth Engaged in Service, was at Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco. It was hot and the crowd was huge, nearly 1,500 volunteers ready to begin training for the Clinton administration’s much-touted Summer of Service, the
precursor to the AmeriCorps program. Bokamba was at the front of the crowd, talking to the media. She had also been chosen to introduce Vice President Al Gore and was waiting for his plane to land.

That’s when it happened, something seemingly so minor that most people in the crowd didn’t even notice.

“Right before I met Vice President Gore, one of the participants fainted in front of me,” Bokamba says. “It rocked my world because they didn’t have bottled water for her. I realized that we can’t get anywhere if we don’t know what people need on a local level.”

At first Bokamba worked at the local level by going to Minnesota to teach high school, which she loved. (“It feeds me so much,” she says of the profession.) But other ideas were always swirling around in her head, and her experience at Treasure Island was never far away. She considered starting a leadership school for girls or a nonprofit that would help people develop their visions. And then Harvard happened and with it, the chance to think about politics again, this time learning from other women.

In September, just as she was starting at the Ed School, she was accepted to the Kennedy School’s Harvard Square to Oval Office program, a political boot camp for female graduate students at Harvard. She learned the nuts and bolts of fundraising and securing endorsements, how to organize a campaign, and how to approach the media.

“A lot of people have said to me, ‘You’d be good in politics.’ Growing up, members of my family always said the same thing. For the longest time, I always said, ‘No, no, no, I’m a teacher. That’s my calling,’” she says. Today she’s realizing that the two can go hand in hand.

“Teachers are deeply political. No one is more concerned with communities and families than teachers,” she says. “The more I thought about it, the more it started to seep in.”

In many ways, politics is in her blood. Her activist father, a university professor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, filled their house in Illinois with fellow political dissidents and taught Bokamba not to subjugate herself to anyone.

“All of this led to a disposition to deep political concerns without calling it such,” she says.

Today, as she prepares to graduate, she hasn’t decided what her next step will be, but she says she could see herself in the Oval Office one day.

“Me or someone like me,” she says, smiling. “Someone who has the attributes of a teacher. Someone who does more listening than talking.”

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Related Story:

Eyenga Bokamba, Ed.M’07, is Opening the Door (June 6, 2007)

photo by Mark Morelli