SEEKING BETTER PATHS
Charting a Course Toward Activism Abraham Keita ’20 believes in leaving the world a better place than he found it. B Y W E N DY C A R L S O N
PH OTO: WENDY C A R L S O N
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for Abraham Keita to discover his favorite place on campus. It wasn’t the snack bar or the lounge; it was the quiet spaces of the library. Growing up in Liberia where public libraries were non-existent, he was astounded by the sheer number of volumes in the Edsel Ford Memorial Library. Keita arrived at Hotchkiss as a postgraduate student last fall as part of a scholarship program sponsored by Leighton Longhi ’63, which provides an additional year of academic preparation for exceptional high school students accepted at Yale. With his wide smile and humble demeanor, Keita fit in easily at Hotchkiss, even though the campus’s undulating green landscape and Georgian buildings stood in sharp contrast to the place where he grew up. Abraham, who goes by his last name, Keita, was born in a slum neighborhood of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, during the country’s second civil war. When he was five years old, his father — who was a driver for a humanitarian relief organization for refugees — was killed during an ambush. Since he stayed home to help his mother support the family, Keita didn’t start school until he was nine years old. T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
By then, he had already become an advocate for children’s rights. Outraged by the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl in his community, he took part in a peaceful protest, demanding that the perpetrators — her foster parents — be brought to trial. Soon after, he was invited to join the Liberian Children’s Parliament, which inspired in him a passion for advocacy. When a boy in his neighborhood was killed by armed forces while protesting against the blockades set up to contain the Ebola virus, Keita, then 14, organized a march to compel the Liberian government to take responsibility for the boy’s death. The march sparked a national debate and eventually forced the government to acknowledge its culpability. For his work to end violence and injustice against children, Keita received the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2015, joining the ranks of youth activists Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg. He became a member of The KidsRights Youngsters, a youth-led advocacy and awareness coalition composed of recipients of the International Children’s Peace Prize, and went on to address the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on the refugee
SUMMER 2020
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