Oluwaseun Daramola traveled from Nigeria to the United States two years ago on a quest for higher education in a country with a healthy economy.

But when she arrived, she encountered much more than she had expected.

I had a very negative experience, said Daramola, a freshman in accounting from Oak Park. The African-Americans told me that I didn’t belong to this country because I wasn’t an African-American.

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In an attempt to address similar disconnections between Africans and African-Americans, the Black Affairs Council and the African Student Council met for a workshop titled Africans and African-Americans:United In Name Only? Monday at the Student Center.

The Mississippi Room was filled with more than 60 students, faculty and staff as a panel of five led a discussion on the diffused relations between Africans-Americans and their brothers and sisters of Africa.

Delmarcus Collins, a senior in education from Chicago, believes a fear of the unknown hinders the cohesion of the two groups.

There are a lot of stereotypes and myths that both Africans and African-Americans buy into, he said. We put up an invisible barrier between us and there is very little dialogue. This leads to us not understanding their lifestyle, and in turn, they don’t understand ours.

This misunderstanding leads blacks to pit themselves against each other when, according to those at the workshop, they should be interacting and learning from each other.

This is inner discrimination, Collins said. This self-hatred goes on throughout the campus and we need to look at our differences instead of just looking at personal experiences.

Though few solutions for the differences were introduced at the workshop, the discussion emphasized the need for self-education in learning the African heritage to change current relations.

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But Collins believes that there is hope for such a bridge through classroom instruction as well. He has taken Black American Studies courses at SIUC and said course instructors actively investigate the connection between the groups.

This effort is rare, Collins said, because there is little discussion of African and African-American disunity.

They are the trailblazers that are helping us learn about each other, he said, and they are the only ones that will bring it up because it’s such a taboo topic.

Like Daramola and Collins, Darius Robinson attended Monday’s workshop in order to bridge the gap between his African-American peers and distant African relatives.

Through self-education and interaction with Africans, Robinson, a graduate student in manufacturing systems from East St. Louis, has learned to avoid judging all Africans as a whole. He believes this tactic is one of the best ways to avoid creating a vast barrier between Africans and African-Americans.

Ninety-nine percent of my interactions with Africans have been good, he said. But that one percent was not a great experience. I have enough sense, because I am educated, not to judge that situation and model it as a stereotype for all my brothers and sisters from Africa.