Herbert F. Weiss Collection

Content Description

Collection of b/w photographs by Richard Weiss and historic postcards from Nigeria, Sudan, and Sierra Leone; portrait photographs from Sudan by Lisa Weiss; and 35mm b/w negatives and color slides from the Congo, 1960 by Herbert Weiss.

Biographical / Historical

Herbert F. Weiss is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at City University of New York and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY. His research has revolved around nationalism, independence struggles, mass mobilization, protest, democratization, elections, decentralization, and the role of militia. He has also made contributions to African studies with his analysis of "rural radicalism," the radical protest of rurally based populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo as illustrated by the independence struggle (1959-1960), the Congo Rebellions (1963-1968), and from the 1990s to the present, by various rurally based militia groups. Weiss has also consulted with the World Bank, the UN, the US Government, the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum of the Social Science Research Council and other vaious US and international NGOs. He is a member of the African Studies Association since 1961 and a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Richard and Lisa Weiss were Jewish refugees to Ango-Egypt and Sudan during World War II. Along with their son, Herbert, they fled Vienna, Austria on July 25, 1938, following the arrival of the Nazis. They lived in a house in Khartoum, next to the Palace of the Mahdi. Lisa was a photographer and worked as a manicurist for English women, which allowed her to get customers for portraits. She took many photographs during her time in Sudan.

After immigrating with his family to the United States, in 1950, Richard Weiss returned to Africa as a New York-based businessman to buy rubber, gum Arabic, spices, and other imports from Nigeria.