Model Marshal

On a bitter January evening in 2001, Shaka J. D. Bahadu, let his friends convince him to participate in Harvard’s celebrated stress reliever: primal scream.

Shortly after the nude sprint around the Yard began, Bahadu says, “I felt a shove behind me.” His friends had pushed him to the head of the pack and then dropped behind, leaving young Bahadu at the mercy of the spectators. “I was by myself,” he says. “All by myself. And the worst part was that I could hear, 50 yards down the line: ‘There’s Shaka! Shaka’s coming!’” He sighs, leaning back in his chair in the Dunster House Grille. “Everyone saw my goods.”

Bahadu’s friend, Charles M. Moore ’04, recalls that night with awe. “Even though he was running naked, he had perfect running form, as though he was in a track meet.”

But Bahadu, who hails from Detroit, Mich., is well known around Harvard for more than his impressive running form. In the past three and a half years he has reopened the Dunster Grille, resurrected crazy happy hours in Dunster’s Junior Common Room, strutted his stuff for Eleganza, served as a Dunster House Committee co-chair, and intrepidly led Dunster from 12th place in the IM race to its current first place status. On top of this already-packed schedule, Bahadu has juggled various jobs (sometimes as many as five at a time), a pre-med course schedule and perfecting his crème brulée with the Dunster culinary team (for practical reasons—he claims his gastronomic skills are the “way to a girl’s heart”). Through all of these activities, Bahadu has met what might seem like most of the school. This campus familiarity resulted in his classmates bestowing on him the honor and responsibility of first senior class marshal. Bahadu plans to continue his work with service next year with AIDS relief organizations in South Africa, after which he will attend medical school “someplace warm” and study to be a cardiothoracic surgeon.

While Bahadu has become a major contributor to Harvard student life, his transition to college wasn’t so smooth. “Freshman year, I think I should have figured out where the libraries were—I didn’t set foot in a library until April,” he says. Bahadu opted instead to study in his room in Thayer—one of the most social dorms that year. “I lived on the first floor right next to the elevator,” he says. “Everybody and their mama swung by everyday.”

David L. Stahl ’04 shared that Thayer room with Bahadu, and he says he spotted Bahadu’s star quality early on. “He told me he was a dork in high school,” Stahl says, “but he got a lot cooler when he got to college.”

His self-described dork status may be behind him, but Bahadu has remained close to his roots, rooming with Kofi A. Kumi ’04, with whom he has been friends since he was four. Kumi says Bahadu “is probably the same as he was when he was six years old—very serious, very involved in his school” and always putting forth “100 percent effort in everything.”

“I have made myself available to help people, and I think that’s all I really could do,” he says. “I mean I don’t think that I have some sort of special talent that sets me apart from anyone. I’m really just an average kid. I really am.”

“A comment somebody made last week put it well,” Stahl says as he struggled to describe Bahadu’s appeal. “He is the kind of person who makes everyone he meets feel special.”“The people here make it worth it,” Bahadu says. “The people I have met here are pretty damn phenomenal.” That’s exactly what people say about him.