First-year Medicine student Aaliyah Arab-Smith remembers her interest in health care beginning at age five, when her grandmother passed away.
“I didn't understand disease at the time, but I understood loss,” said Arab-Smith, speaking at Dalhousie’s African Heritage Month flagship event this Wednesday (Feb. 4).
“As I grew older, I learned that the type of cancer my grandmother had was largely preventable. I came to realize that medicine is not just about treating disease, but early detection, holistic wellness, and understanding the social circumstances that shape our health long before someone ever becomes a patient. I turned that realization into purpose.”
Aaliyah Arab-Smith co-delivers the keynote address.
Members of the Dal community and beyond filled seats on the floor and in the rafters of the Dalhousie Arts Centre’s Sculpture Court to mark the start of African Heritage Month with food, music, reflection, and jubilation. In speaking to her own experiences, Arab-Smith helped illuminate the theme of this year’s Dalhousie celebrations: Creative Advocacy: Uplifting Black Health, Art, and Community Action.
“It reminds us that advocacy is not [just] about policy,” said Said Msabaha, co-director of the Office of Community Engagement for the Faculty of Medicine and who joined Arab-Smith as a fellow keynote speaker at the event. “It's about imagination, culture and connection. Creativity has always been the root of survival and progress — from the vibrant storytelling traditions of our elders to the powerful murals, music, the echoes within our hallways and our living rooms.”
He said the power of presence and visibility is abundantly clear to him in his role as manager for Dalhousie’s Promoting Leadership in Health for African Nova Scotians (PLANS) Program, which works to increase the representation of African Nova Scotians in the health professions. “Every time a Black physician mentors a Black student, every time a researcher centers African Nova Scotian experiences in their work, we are practicing creating advocacy.”
Said Msabaha co-delivers the keynote address.
A celebratory program
The event was hosted by Barb Hamilton-Hinch (assistant vice-provost equity and inclusion and professor in the Faculty of Health) and Bahaiyyih Pride (President’s Office). It featured infectious drumming from drum group Drummers From Home, a stirring libation ceremony from Wayn Hamilton, an inspiring performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (the “Black national anthem”) by King’s student and former youth poet laureate for Halifax Dáminí Awóyígà, and the presentation of Dalhousie’s African Heritage Month Awards — honouring exceptional individuals of African descent who’ve made significant contributions to Dalhousie and to their communities.
Read also: Meet the amazing recipients of this year’s Dalhousie African Heritage Month Awards
The event also spotlighted the new Dalhousie Art Gallery exhibition, It's About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now, with gallery director Pamela Edmonds speaking about the exhibit’s unique collaboration between archival material and contemporary Nova Scotian artists.
Wanda Costen, Dalhousie provost and vice-president academic, spoke of African Heritage Month as a special time of the year, and in the life of the university: “where we take a moment to recognize the contributions of people from the motherland, from the continent — because that's where we all came from. And to create space for us, to bring our pain and our joy.”
She added that it reflects the important values universities like Dalhousie bring to the world.
“I talk often about what it means to be a civic university. To me, that means to bring all of who we are, inviting people from all backgrounds in all cultures, to come and learn here, to learn what it means to have a democracy... about honouring the whole person and creating space for people to be fully who they are.”
