February 2017
Page 6
African Doctor Buys A Former Tennessee Slave Plantation And Turns It Into A Cultural Sanctuary With The Goal Of Revolutionizing Health Care In African Countries a big house,” she explained.
She left home late that morning and figured the auction might even be over when she got there. But to her surprise, it wasn’t. Not only was it not over, she later learned that the auctioneer held up the auction because they were told, “the African Queen was coming.”
She was astonished. As fate would have it, she outbid everyone at the foreclosure auction, wrote a check to buy the place and by that afternoon, to her own initial dismay, she was owner of a sprawling plantation. She estimates she got the house, an adjacent barn, and 30 acres of land for a third of what it was worth. She had to tell her husband what she’d done.
H.E Arikana Chihombori MD, FAAFP Ambassador of the African Union to the United States BY DAPHNE TAYLOR SPECIAL TO THE FLORIDA COURIER
We can all say that we’ve seen some amazing ironies in life, but few have experienced one like Dr. Arikana Chihombori, a Zimbabwe (Africa)-born physician and frequent Florida visitor and landowner who lives in the heart of Tennessee. She and her husband, Dr. Nii Saban Quao, are both highly touted physicians. After completing her undergraduate education at Fisk University, she matriculated at Meharry Medical College and earned degrees in general chemistry, a master’s degree in organic chemistry and a Doctor of Medicine degree.
Dr. Quao, a native of Ghana, is a graduate of Yale University, where he earned three degrees: an undergraduate degree in molecular biology and biophysics, then a master’s degree in public health and a Doctor of Medicine degree. He also has a law degree from Vanderbilt University. They are now the owners of Africa House, an expansive, plantationstyle mansion where dignitaries, beauty queens, ambassadors and other luminaries have stayed as their special guests. It is also the couple’s occasional weekend home.
But it’s how Chihombori acquired the sprawling home – and what is taking place there now – that presents one of the greatest ironies ever known.
Quao, her spouse – who is himself a longtime collector of African antiquities – just shook his head when he got the news. He’s used to her buying real estate “on a whim.”
Nowhere to go But it was what was to come that blew her and everybody away.
The couple that had owned the home was once extremely prosperous.
They had just lost their beloved mansion and were forced to sell what remained of their family’s legacy, and they were not prepared either psychologically or physically to leave when their property was sold to a wealthy African woman.
They had nowhere to go. Chihombori could force them to move out of the house immediately, or she could give them a grace period and allow them to stay a while longer.
She didn’t force them out. But it was then that she learned the rather startling news.
Not just any house She had purchased Chapman Clearing, parts of which had been in the same family since the year 1799. (“Chapman Clearing” was a name given to it by the locals because the landowner was known to tell everyone to “clear the land!”)
The Chapman family history is the history of America. The family patriarch was an officer in America’s Revolutionary War. In 1799, he bought 200 acres of land in Gallatin, Almost didn’t happen Tenn., then moved there from Virginia with his family. The Africa House might not have been if it hadn’t been for a casual busiChapman family was to buy, sell, and pass parcels of land ness associate, a young man who insisted that the locally welldown to subsequent generations for the next 200 years. known doctor check out a foreclosure auction for a house that he said would go for cheap. Chapman men fought in the Revolutionary War, the Battle Chihombori was not in the market for another house. She already of New Orleans during the War of 1812, and the Civil War. owns properties in Tennessee, Florida, Ghana, Zimbabwe and South Enslaved Africans and their descendants worked the land Africa, and is a shareholder in a major resort property in the Orlando for decades, including a few that decided to stay on the area. property after the South lost the Civil War.
But the young man, who actually came to one of her four medical clinics to get some papers signed, insisted that she go to the auction and bid on the large house. She still didn’t take it too seriously.
The sprawling property Chihombori now owned had once been a part of 300 acres that belonged to the former owner’s great-grandfather – who had been a slave owner.
Going to look The place now known as Africa House had once been the “I had no intentions of going there to buy. I was just going to look at part of a massive slave plantation.
Dr. Arikana Chihombori (center) is flanked by Dr. Glenn Cherry, left, and her husband, Dr. Nii Saban Quao. ‘An insult’ “He just felt it was an insult losing his home, then losing it to a Black woman, but in the end, he was glad he did because we let him stay there. He said that if a White person had bought it, they would have wanted him out by 5 p.m. that very day. He said that ironically, it took two Africans to help him out! We changed his entire mindset about Black people,” said Chihombori.
She and her husband eventually allowed them to stay in the home for three months free of charge, and it didn’t matter to her that he had initially been upset that a Black family bought his mansion.
She said he even grew fond of her entire family and looked forward to their visits there during his extended stay. It didn’t matter that the history of the property included a time during which it was a slave plantation.
“The man completely changed the way he sees Black people, and that’s what it’s all about. “Their preconceived notions of Black people are wrong,” she remarked.
But she’s quick to point out that allowing him to stay there for free was just part of her upbringing in Africa.
‘The African way’ “To us, it didn’t matter that he was White. We did that based on our African upbringing. That’s an African way. I’m not sure that’s an American way. Everything we do, we draw back from our African values,” she said of herself and her husband.
130405_metro01eToday, Africa House – a former slave plantation – has been turned into an oasis of African culture in Tennessee, and the hub of thought, strategic thinking, and activity where great work is taking place on behalf of Africa.
Health-care initiative As a medical doctor, Chihombori is chairwoman of the African Union African Diaspora Health Initiative (AUADHI). (The African Union is a confederation of 54 African states.)