Biography
Born Antonio McDaniel to Willie and Annie McDaniel, and raised in the housing projects of Oakland, California in the 1970s, he changed his name to Tukufu Zuberi, which is Swahili for "beyond praise" and "strength". Zuberi says that he "took the name because of a desire to make and have a connection with an important period where people were challenging what it means to be a human being."
Zuberi received a bachelor's degree from San Jose State in 1981, a master's degree from Sacramento State in 1985, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1989. In 1988, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, the Chair of the Sociology Department, and the Director of the Center for Africana Studies. He has also been a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Zuberi's research focuses on race and African and African diaspora populations. He has conducted research in the fields of social statistics and population studies (demography). He has been a guest lecturer at colleges and universities and on television programs.
In 2013, Zuberi produced his first documentary, African Independence. The film premiered at the San Diego Black Film Festival in January 2013. The film discusses the beginning of the independence movement and the problems faced by the movement to win independence in Africa.
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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