1970–1972: early career in Uganda As a postgraduate, Tanna was offered two
fellowships: one involved undertaking a
master's degree at the
University of California, Los Angeles, where she was invited to work on the
African Arts journal; the other involved a three-year
doctorate in African Literature at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. She chose the latter institution and studied
Kiswahili under
Harold Scheub. During this time, Tanna also lived for six months between 1970 and 1971 in Makerere with her husband while researching the
Luganda language. She was scheduled to leave the country on January 25, 1971, the night of
Idi Amin's
coup d'état, but failed to reach her
chartered flight due to the incident. Tanna managed to flee the country five days later, returning to
Wisconsin to complete her integrated master's degree. She wrote her thesis on
East African poetry, with a focus on
Okot p'Bitek's
epic poem Song of Lawino (1966) and the poetry of
Okello Oculi. While still in the United States,
M. G. Smith, an
anthropologist and advisor to
Michael Manley, had given Tanna a list of Jamaican contacts including
Olive Lewin and
Adam Kuper, another of the
prime minister's advisors. Lewin mentored Tanna; and the two would later work at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica / Jamaica Memory Bank (ACIJ/JMB), founded by Lewin under the auspices of
Edward Seaga's government and partially funded by
UNESCO. In 1974, while gathering material for the ACIJ/JMB on the figure of
Marcus Garvey in Jamaica's oral tradition in
Kingston, Tanna and her
Rastafarian interviewee were apprehended and held at gunpoint by two
plainclothes policemen, one of whom was drunk. The men suspected Tanna was either involved in the
narcotics trade or a foreign
intelligence agent, both seeming a reasonable assumption for why a white person would be in a garrison community at the height of the
Jamaican political conflict. Tanna was able to explain the nature of her work to the men and was subsequently released. The incident prompted
Rex Nettleford to give Tanna a formal letter explaining her work, she later used this document when confronted by a
Jamaican Defence Force patrol in a similar situation. Tanna served on the board of the
Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) from 1983 to 1995, during which time the IOJ published her
Ph.D. in the form of her first book,
Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories (1984). She also sat on the advisory board of the
African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica between 1985–1997 and was director of the King's House Foundation from 2000 to 2012. == Honors ==